How many times have you written a review on Yelp, G2 Crowd, Amazon.com or Facebook? Customer feedback is an important method to measuring customer satisfaction. Many businesses gauge client success by the satisfaction levels of their customers. While a passing grade of four out of five stars may help an organization better prioritize upcoming projects and focus on potentially different areas of the business, it doesn’t translate into customer loyalty.
Win. Keep. Grow. It’s what Right On Interactive does with its partners. We help businesses in various industries win new clients, keep those clients, and then grow those very same client relationships. Low churn. It’s the keeping of current customers that is key here. If organizations can’t keep customers, especially the ones who write awesome reviews, then there’s never the opportunity to grow relationships. The business model turns into “win new business” strategy where customers are one-time buyers. Who wants that?
In order to measure customer satisfaction, companies rely on customers (whether they’ve made one purchase or 100) to fill out a survey that can be time consuming and boring.
Slightly off topic comment: I made around $100 a month in college by taking surveys for companies doing market research. That was the last time I filled out a survey.
But surveys aren’t worthless. Getting feedback from customers is crucial in providing better customer care. A friend of mine recently filled out a survey from a restaurant after she hosted a dinner there for clients. She was honest and shared that one of the entrees was cold and their server disappeared for over 30 minutes so they never had the opportunity to have it taken back to the kitchen. Within an hour of submitting her comments, the manager called her to personally apologize and offered her a gift card to come back and have a better experience. See, survey success… and, if she uses the card, the manager may be on the way to building customer loyalty.
By gaining a better understanding of a customer’s perception or attitudes towards a brand, marketers can take the necessary steps to either improve or strengthen the relationship to the point at which the customer is no longer a one-time buyer but a repeat buyer and customer advocate.
Lifecycle marketing provides visibility into customer engagement. This isn’t activity like purchases, website visits, downloads, etc. Engagement is when the customer responds to a call to action. Engagement builds relationships. It is founded on trust. It’s what builds relationships and customer loyalty. Customers want to feel connected to a brand.
To learn more about keeping customers and growing them into the right relationships, read our ebook Lifecycle Marketing 101.
