If you’re dependent on customer satisfaction for success—and any business is—then you’ll want to know that your efforts to provide great customer experiences are effective. Here’s your cheat sheet with three key steps to pleasing your #1 stakeholder: your customers.
1. Know the Customer Loyalty Loop
Pick up a copy of Noah Fleming’s Loyalty Loop: The Science Behind Creating Great Experiences and Lasting Impressions and you’ll get intimately acquainted with that loyalty loop, a proven cycle that savvy business leaders aim to achieve:
Stage #1: Imagination and Persuasion
The first stage of creating a loyalty loop involves companies researching and influencing customers before they’re even in the door—e.g. via advertisements and press placements that grab their attention.
Stage #2: Conversion without Coercion
This stage involves sealing the deal, convincing even skeptical customers who aren’t believers in your product yet to make that first purchase. Whether you encourage them to convert using a money-back guarantee or a fantastic discount, this stage gets customers in the door (with the goal of convincing them to return again and again).
Stage #3: Experience Choreography
This stage involves creating what Fleming calls “remarkable moments” in product delivery. Make those interactions meaningful, memorable and purposeful. In a blog, Fleming talked about getting a credit card that had his name spelled incorrectly—this left a bad taste in his mouth. Find ways to amaze your customers when delivering a product, and they won’t forget you (in a good way).
Stage #4: Happily Ever After
This stage encompasses the period of prompt and adequate marketing that happens post-purchase. According to the principles of the loop: “no customer should go more than 90 days without at least a 15-minute phone call,” plus “the top 10% of customers shouldn’t go more than 45 days without some sort of follow up.”*
These principles are a swift and surefire way to keep the loyalty cycle going in a way that benefits both customers and the companies they buy from.
If the product is sold well, and you can deliver on a quality product and experience, it should be fairly easy to achieve customer satisfaction and bring them back for more.
2. Go Straight to the Source
When evaluating the effectiveness of your customer service and sales strategies, it’s best to ask the customer directly about how satisfied they are with their experience, instead of looking at sales numbers alone.
Making sure your customer is satisfied can ensure your next sale and the overall longevity of your organization. Surveys, when executed and analyzed well, can be a valuable source of intel both for building customer profiles and for innovating sales practices.
Your options vary with customer surveys, from delayed email surveys to immediate, in-person surveys. But no matter your survey strategy, you’ll want to make sure you choose experts to collate and interpret your data.
3. Adjust and Remeasure
Once your customers move into the loyalty loop and you receive your survey results in an easy-to-interpret form, it’s time to adjust and remeasure for maximum impact. Were sales representatives consistently too pushy? Retrain for more subtle social influence. Were lines too long? Streamline checkout staffing. Were marketing messages too vague or confusing? Dial in your messaging.
Remeasurement can come once again in the forms of surveys, or even audits, as you confirm that the new strategies you put in place are being executed consistently.
Need another way to bring your numbers up a level? By studying the work of your competitors, you’ll be able to find what works, emulate it and innovate from that starting point. Competitive intel can find customer service trends and also zero in on the needs of your customers.
Consider Partnering with Shoppers’ View to Achieve Your Customer Service Goals
Bring these strategies to the table this fiscal year: follow Fleming’s loyalty loop carefully as it plays out in your organization, always check in with your customer and then adjust accordingly and remeasure. These three transforming strategies will produce big returns for today and for the future of your corporation. Shoppers’ View can help make this all a little easier. Learn how we can help your business achieve and define your best by booking a free 1-on-1 consultation today.
*From Noah Fleming’s Customer Loyalty Loop, as paraphrased on readitfor.me
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