It’s no secret that it costs businesses less to retain a customer than it does to obtain a new one (Advantage Communication).
No matter how much you invest in hiring the right people training them and giving them the latest tools to succeed if you operate a small business then you’ve had upset customers. But do you know why they are upset and to what extent they might consider not returning? You may be scratching your head right now and wondering how you can learn that.
You must first try to identify why your customer was upset. It could be any number of factors: unaligned expectations with the experience they had; speed of service; interactions with your managers and associates; atmosphere and cleanliness of your location? The possibilities are endless. But only by specifically identifying where those opportunities are can you begin to develop and implement improvement to prevent (or at least minimize) their recurrence.
Today rather than spreading news of a bad experience via word of mouth people go straight to social media and ratings sites like Yelp Angie etc. to voice their displeasure – and the whole world can see it immediately. Scary!
CX programs such as customer satisfaction surveys and mystery shopping identify these stress points in the customer experience and lead you to exactly how to make sure they don’t happen in the future. And when used on an ongoing basis they are an “early warning system” that can alert you to potential problems in the CX journey before they even occur.
Mystery shopping programs or CX evaluations bring you detailed objective facts about what your customers’ experience is really like – whether onsite digitally or via the phone (or all of these). Using a pre-designed list of questions to evaluate and following your typical customer journey you’ll know whether your teams are following your processes policies and directives for taking care of customers and if not exactly where that has broken down. Story-like detailed comments from the evaluator provide you the actionable information needed to both reward a job well done or provide re-coaching and taking corrective action if the experience was not a good one.
Customer satisfaction surveys provide a subjective report from actual customers on how they felt and thought about your business and their most recent experience. Again using a pre-scripted set of questions they submit responses using their smartphones and these are tabulated into scored reports often on a scale of 100. You can even receive critical alerts immediately when they report important deficiencies.
Used together these CX programs let you know both the thoughts and feelings of customers in near-real time and the objective facts and details about what really happens when customers call click or visit your physical locations.
If you would like to learn more about how CustomerOptix can help you improve your customers’ experience leading to higher satisfaction improved retention and increased sales please contact us.
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