A failure to listen to unhappy customers can play into the hands of your competitors. So how can you prevent them from abandoning ship? It’s an opportunity not to miss…

It’s an obvious thing to say but happy customers normally stay longer and spend more during their relationship with a business. However, most organisations communicate many times a day with different customers at all levels. So it’s often difficult to track how customers feel, and often until it’s too late and they have left for a competitor. It’s also another perhaps an often forgotten fact that whilst customers often don’t tell you if you are doing a great job, they really want you know it if they feel you are not. They want you to do something about it fast. Ignore them at your peril! Customers continually seek a listening ear that will respond quickly.

Businesses appear not to listen

Unfortunately many businesses appear not to listen unwittingly and for different reasons; ineffective communication systems, poor processes, unaligned goals or poor training of staff on the front line just to name a few. It can also be very labour intensive and costly to capture feedback continuously so often businesses resort to periodic surveys conducted by third party agents tracking performance over months or even years and always retrospectively.  Regardless of industry, if customers have an issue and the business is able to resolve this quickly and effectively, they are likely to be far more loyal and trust the brand, improving retention rates and the opportunity to increase lifetime value.

Capture customer experience

So what can a business do to enable this cost effectively? Well, for those businesses that communicate with their customers via email, one simple way is to use this medium to survey customers at the point of customer experience - the very time and place you need to capture feedback and respond quickly.  So imagine a customer calls in with a problem, your staff member handles the call, opens a case log and follows up with an email to close the case at a later stage. The customer reads the email but is not very happy. He or she tries to call in again and may have to go via IVR then try to pick up where they left off. Giving up unhappy and frustrated, the customer decides to go elsewhere next time.
 
Surveys: A simpler idea

Here is a simpler idea. The customer receives the email from your member of staff. Within that email is a simple automatically embedded customer satisfaction survey that can be clicked to ‘rate’ the service experience. The customer flags he or she is unhappy. The email response then triggers an automated alert straight to the nominated person for escalation in the business which might be to the account manager or director and the problem addressed quickly and effectively.

Benefits of this approach:

• Feedback is captured at the point of customer experience enabling swift action to be taken to correct any issues before it is too late and the customer deserts.

• Using email, no integration with call-handling systems is required. Only outbound email is impacted making this simple implement.

• Feedback performance by each email sender (i.e. each customer facing staff member) can be tracked allowing issues such as insufficient training to be addressed quickly.

• All clicks are tracked, enabling SLA performance of the team and individuals to be measured over time.

Integrated capture

Capturing and dealing with customer issues at the point of experience is clearly only part of the picture in improving customer loyalty. Capture needs to be integrated within a broader framework of measurement, best practice and organisational performance improvement.  What is needed is simple set of metrics that can rank an organisation’s performance in different areas and track its improvement or otherwise over time.

One such framework that is gaining in widespread adoption is Net Promoter. This asks a simple question; would you recommend us to a friend or colleague on a simple 0-10 ranking scale? This allows businesses to track promoters (advocates, scoring 9-10) and detractors (switchers, scoring 0-6) and produces a clear measure of an organisation's performance through its customers' eyes that can be compared to best in class performers in different industry sectors.

Satisfied customers: the marketing department

Satisfied customers become, in effect, part of the company's marketing department, not only increasing their own purchases but also providing enthusiastic referrals. They become promoters. The goal for a company that wants to break the addiction of short term profit building is to build relationships of such high quality that those relationships create promoters, which fuels increased customer lifetime value and new customer referrals and so more sustainable business growth.

The simplicity of approaches such as Net Promoter is appealing enabling simple measurement and communication of ‘how we are doing’ to all staff continuously. Tie that in with email to provide actionable information and triggered escalations and you have a new set of simple tools at your disposal to benchmark and improve your total marketing performance.

 
By Phil Williams,
Managing Director

Email: Phil.Williams@rocketseed.com
Email 2: pwilliams@rocketseed.com 
Mobile: +44 (0) 793 201 9284
Tel: +44 (0) 870 890 2221