By Steve Baxter
March 3, 2011
In this day and age, technology is literally in the palm of your hands. A customer can review your business online the minute a job is completed. Even if the review isn’t very complimentary, this instant access to technology can work in your favor. With the right tools, even an unhappy customer can be transformed into a brand promoter.
But even if a customer becomes your best brand advocate, you must provide them with the means to do so. The trick to turning customers into your own, personal digital sales team is to identify where you create moments of extreme satisfaction, foster loyalty, and provide a platform where your promoter customers can spread the word and convert friends, family and associates into customers. By building great word-of-mouth, you develop a strong sales force that generates leads, boosts sales and leverages marketing dollars.
Creating Moments of Extreme Satisfaction
Long after the problem was created, a customer remembers how you sought to resolve the issue. Providing your product or service in an unexceptional way leads to satisfaction but not necessarily loyalty. To foster loyalty one has to be seen to be exceptional. Be extreme in both how you resolve problems and how you deliver your product and you will be remembered. But how do we become extreme at both ends of this satisfaction spectrum? Identifying the experience your customer had with you can be more difficult than it sounds and how you measure that can often be misleading. Traditional measurements, such as how much a customer spends or how often they frequent your business, don’t always provide an accurate picture. These measurements might help determine who repeat customers are but don’t necessarily reveal who—and more importantly—why, they are loyal.
Implementing digital customer satisfaction surveys is a great way to identify what happened and what your customers think, giving you the opportunity to be extreme in the way you resolve a problem or get feedback to do more of what is resonating with your most satisfied customers. What is even more critical is the timeliness of the request and the resolution process. These surveys are sent directly to the customer and have been a successful method in identifying the feedback from customers for many businesses. Some survey solutions have the ability to capture recommendations and referrals from loyal customers (promoters); identify dissatisfied customers (detractors) and fix problems before they leave; and find out what’s keeping ‘middle-of-the-road’ customers (passives) from becoming loyal fans. Integrating all of this into a social media platform such as Facebook is also important.