Want to grow your business?
Who doesn’t!
But to do it, you need to delight, retain, and increase your customer base. In other words, you’ll need to boost customer satisfaction. Do that, and you’ll expand your business.
Increasing customer satisfaction does several things—all of them good:
“Satisfied customer is the best source of advertisement”
― G.S. Alag
These benefits can directly impact the growth of your business.
But increasing customer satisfaction isn’t as easy as it sounds.
To do it, you’ll first need to measure existing customer satisfaction, then create a program designed to boost support to a higher level. Do that, and your business will thrive.
Measuring customer satisfaction first creates a baseline record of how well you’re meeting customer expectations. Measuring satisfaction also helps you:
The last benefit tells you where to make changes to customer support to boost satisfaction levels. That, in turn, builds customer loyalty, improves customer retention, and increases profitability—critical steps in growing your business.
A critical step in measuring customer support (check out this free customer support worksheet for measuring success) is determining key performance indicators (KPI)s. They provide targets for your workers to shoot for and direction for your improvement effort. The trick is finding the right KPIs. You want KPIs that fit your needs.
Below are seven KPIs you might consider using when measuring your customer satisfaction:
These KPIs are just some of the metrics you’ll want to consider in your effort to measure customer support success. Additional KPIs to consider include employee turnover rate, brand attributes, complaint escalation rate, and cash flow.
Once you’ve determined your KPIs and measured customer satisfaction, you’ll want to take one more step to grow your business. You’ll want to compare your ratings to those of your competitors.
The question is: How do you stack up against your competitors’ numbers.
Unfortunately, this information is rarely public information.
What options are there?
Here are a few ideas you can use to gather competitive data:
When measuring support, you need to generate customer feedback. Surveys can help do that. Of course, numerous ways exist to execute surveys—from how you design the instrument to how you analyze the data.
But you need to execute your surveys correctly to get the most out of them. Below is a six-step process for doing that:
Following these six steps when executing customer surveys and they’ll provide the data you need to determine customer satisfaction.
Survey results may show your customers think highly of your company’s customer support, which is great. Keep doing whatever you’re doing.
But what if the surveys show the opposite—that your customer satisfaction level is low? You’ll need to remedy that if you want to keep making a profit. A great place to start is your call center.
Your call center is the ‘face” of your business. So, if it isn’t doing the job, you lose customers and business. When today’s customers don’t get the service they expect, they bolt. That won’t help your business grow.
Below are five basic principles on which to base your call center improvement efforts:
Use these five principals as the foundation for your remedial program. They’ll help you boost customer support where it’s needed.
Customer satisfaction is critical to growing your business. If customers aren’t happy with your support, they’ll go elsewhere. Make no mistake about that. Customer defections, however, can shrink your profitability.
To remedy that, you’ll need to improve customer support success. Measuring satisfaction is the first step in doing that. It will pinpoint where customer support is lacking and where to make changes. Improving customer service not only boosts profitability, but it also sets the stage for you to grow your business.