Member Article

Why customer satisfaction makes business sense

Ask most people in business if customer satisfaction is important to them, and the answer will be ’yes?. However, if asked to explain ’why?, most people struggle to immediately quantify the benefits that providing good service brings.

One of the reasons for this disconnect is the fact that there’s often a degree of separation from the point in the business where service is delivered (for example, by front-of-house, or ‘fee earning’ staff) and the point where the financial benefits are seen (for example by a sales team or account manager). However, delivering great service brings three key benefits:

Retention

When addressing sales growth, the first problem a business needs to address is attrition: 10% growth is meaningless if accompanied by a 10% loss of customer base. Great service starts with listening to people and finding out what they think of you. Sometimes the feedback may be bad, but it’s far better to find this out early and deal with it, rather than finding out when the customer switches to your competitor.

Referrals

Once you’re listening to customers systematically, acting in line with their needs and delivering great service, they become happy to do repeat business with you. When you’ve shown that you can keep up high service levels over a period of time, you build trust with your customers and they’ll be confident to recommend you to their friends and colleagues.

Customer Acquisition

When your customer service is so good that you’ve addressed the issue of attrition, and customers trust your brand enough to recommend it to their associates, your reputation can be used as a unique selling point. By showing how genuinely happy you make your existing customers, potential new customers can see that you stand out from your competitors, and choose you with the confidence that you’ll always act in their interests.

Our customer feedback software, CustomerSure is used by companies at every stage of the customer service improvement journey. It provides easy-to-use ways for your customers to let you know what they think (good or bad), along with tools which make your entire team aware of this feedback, and enable them to act on it and learn from it. Getting into the habit of listening, sharing and acting is the first step in improving your retention and referrals.

CustomerSure helps businesses acquire new customers by allowing them to display their feedback online alongside our trusted and independent brand. This gives potential new buyers an insight into both the praise that existing loyal customers give to the business and, equally importantly, how the business deals with problems when they happen.

If you’re interested in improving your retention, referrals and acquisition by shaping up how your business looks after its customers, sign up to CustomerSure now. Getting started takes 5 minutes, and all plans come with a 30-day free trial. We look forward to helping you grow your business in 2012!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Chris Stainthorpe .