Customer Experience drives Business Growth
. Zervicio Team . 12th August 2016 .
Many matured businesses and startups have not yet adapted to the fact that customer satisfaction in this “24x7" connected world is more than product and service quality. It’s all about which customers broadcast their satisfaction or unhappiness to others. With so much of digital options available to them, they can influence thousands or millions of potential new customers, or say nothing with incredible ease.
The popular Net Promoter Score (NPS) and other popular metrics and analytics for measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty, don’t differentiate between appreciative word-of-mouth messages, negative feedback, or no message.
In his book, “The Loyalty Effect” authors Frederick F Reichchheld and Thomas Teal, the customer experience and analytics expert, makes a convincing points on the drivers for business loyalty and success - "The business world seems to have given up on loyalty: many major corporations now lose - and have to replace - half their customers in five years, half their employees in four, and half their investors in less than one". In spite of passing through a good 15 years in the pacing time and improvement in communication techniques and delivery mediums, their points are so much relevant even today.
With time tested methods like traditional purchased loyalty, convenience loyalty and restricted loyalty programmes only work for single customer retention mostly. These operate like competitive retention, which means as a company, you must win every transaction over your competitors.
In the past, loyalty and retention were often used interchangeably. But now, true loyalty, earned by great level of satisfaction and experience, also greatly increases the chance of bringing in multiple new customers through interaction with the large community.
Today's customers have grown way ahead in terms of acquiring knowledge about their choice of product or its quality through multiple channels, sometimes termed “Omni-Channel”. This simply means that they may start a product search on a computer at work, continue on their home computer, visit a store for touch and feel activity, read review about the products online, validate the available service quality through word-of-mouth interactions then close the transaction on their smartphone. That really complicates the measuring process.
Others choose to walk the aisles in one store, while scanning for better deals on their smartphone in other stores or online. Concurrently, they are asking for the experiences of the community through Zomato or MouthShut, and broadcasting their own experiences on Facebook and Twitter.
The common thread here is quality of the customer experience, more so than the quality of customer service, and the impact of that experience on other current and potential customers. Simple customer satisfaction surveys and analytics miss several of these dimensions, and simply are not adequate any more.
You need to take advantage of innovative new tools, like the Word of Mouth Index (WoMI), and the analytic power of Big Data to gain a competitive advantage today, and predict customer behavior for tomorrow.
Nobody said it would be easy. How much do you really know about the customer experience with your company?
Get busy, get focused and get aggressive in learning what you don't know and most importantly unlearn what you already know about your customers. Take a fresh look every time, with every transaction - move your entire organization to get more analytics on what your customer feel, how they feel and how strong they want to communicate.