Please don’t let your marketing insights languish in a separate silo away from your core processes. This information is often underutilized, but some technologies can help you generate value for your business. Take advantage of this opportunity to connect the valuable asset of knowing about customers to the rest of your company.
By embracing the customer feedback program in full, you will gain transparency about customer attitudes. You will also learn important truths regarding today’s purchasing behavior and changing attitudes that may influence future buying behaviors.
You can build processes that prevent customer churn and increase cross-selling by gaining a comprehensive understanding of the attitudes of your customers. The marketing department can use a customer feedback program to create tailored marketing campaigns and strengthen your relationship with your customers.
The programs can be used to generate real commercial value as well as make the customers happy.
Engage in communication
Implementing a customer feedback program allows you to start a dialogue with your customers and help them become more involved in your brand, from product development to problem-solving.
This increased engagement creates stronger purchasing relationships and boosts brand value. Constant, relevant communication is also a great platform for creating personalized, relevant promotional offers, which further strengthens the relationship. You will also be able to make more informed business decisions if you embed customer experience into your business.
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All of this seems perfect, but very few companies have the tight integration framework needed to maximize the value across the organization. Feedback data is often stored in silos. If you keep it separate from all other customer data, its value is reduced to “slightly interesting.”
Marketing is unable to see customer data, so despite investments in CRM and MRM, its interaction with the company remains, at best, sporadic, providing leads to sales.
Time is of the essence.
The timing is critical to getting the most out of the feedback that you collect. It is of little use to contact a customer who has left your company because they had a bad experience. It’s too late. The opportunity is gone. If you had alerted the customer complaint team to this customer’s attitude at the time of the incident, it would have been possible to resolve the problem immediately and prevent the defection.
There is a lot of evidence that shows increased customer loyalty when issues are resolved. What’s not like about improved customer retention and increased loyalties?
Marketing harnesses customer insight.
Focused surveys conducted at the right time can improve product development campaigns, increase their relevance and effectiveness, and encourage unprecedented levels of customer loyalty. Surveys are a great way to get the most out of your customers’ attitudes.
Take this example of loyal customers sharing their experiences in a very effective way. Egg, the largest online-only banking company in the world (now part of Citigroup), developed a new innovative product using its feedback program within five weeks. This was compared to an industry standard timeframe of 12 months.
Egg surveyed 30,000 Egg customers to determine the best customer proposition. Egg’s customers were familiar with personalized online contact, and this was a key factor in the success of their project. The company has used online surveying to improve customer satisfaction for five years. These surveys were more effective because they were customized to include the names of customers and their recent activities.
It is important to align your business with the attitudes of your customers by creating a program that allows you to continuously take their pulse and create a dialogue when things get tough. This “pulse check” should be done in conjunction with important customer interactions to avoid generic feedback you cannot act on. A retailer’s feedback request could be paired with a return, purchase, or contact center query. A system of alerts can be used to take immediate action in order to prevent customer defections and address customer dissatisfaction.
Only by combining real-time customer attitudes with business processes can you fully reap the benefits of a customer dialog. Share feedback with your entire organization and banish silos.
