Happy customers are the greatest accomplishment of any business, but you may never have happy customers unless, and you won’t know until, you take the trouble to ask them.
Wikipedia defines customer satisfaction as “a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation” which is “a key performance indicator.”
Last week we were defining customer analysis so you might be wondering what makes customer satisfaction different. Essentially, you undertake customer analysis to improve your understanding of your customers and customer satisfaction to understand your customers perception of their relationship with you. This feedback is incredibly useful and you will probably be surprised at how different your customers perception of you can be. This knowledge is marketing gold dust because once you understand who your customers are, where they are, what they buy, when they buy and their motivation for buying it becomes incredibly easy to communicate that to your prospective customers.
You can draw other benefits from well executed customer satisfaction including increasing your understanding of your customers demographics, increasing their awareness of products and services that they may not have been aware of previously and garnering testimonials and referrals. Of course if your customers are incredibly happy already the data that you get back will make fantastic content for your website and brochures.
People are often worried about being too demanding and putting their customers out by asking them to complete surveys but our experience is that customers appreciate the opportunity to give feedback especially if it leads to an improvement in the service they receive from you, and there is some incentive.
Everyone knows that the more often you engage your customers the better and customer satisfaction is a great way of engaging your customers whilst communicating how important they are to you and reminding them of the value they get from their relationship with you.
If you have a small number of customers you can do your customer satisfaction face to face or on the telephone, if you have a large numbers of customers you can do it through email using fantastic, and often free, survey tools like Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo.
So go on, be brave, ask your customers how satisfied they are, the results are likely to astound you but the outcomes are always really, really useful.
So hopefully that will give you a better blogging clue about customer satisfaction, next week we will be defining competitor analysis.
So come back next week if you haven’t got a blogging clue about competitor analysis.
