Alexis Kestler
If you're running a sustainable business having satisfied customers is something you cannot overlook. It can make or break a business. Getting a continuous feedback will provide you with a lot of insight that you didn't know you needed. The important part is the negative feedback which if improved could help boost your sales quite a bit.
Quick Preview & Background
Customer satisfaction is the linchpin for small e-business success, being beneficial for generating repeat business and acting as a crucial marketing tool. Collecting feedback and testimonials assists in refining marketing strategies and building trust. Addressing customer dissatisfaction effectively can turn negative situations into positives, and providing value beyond products via diverse content can enhance customer loyalty.
- 🎯 Customer Satisfaction: Small e-business owners rely heavily on customer satisfaction, which plays a vital role in their continued success. This satisfaction can generate repeat business, referrals, and word-of-mouth advertising. Thus, it serves as a key marketing tool.
- 🗣️ Feedback: Both positive and negative feedback from customers serves as an essential resource for refining the marketing strategy. Feedback reveals the effectiveness of different marketing efforts and areas that need improvement. It can be collected through various methods such as email, surveys, social networks, forums, and blog comments.
- 📜 Testimonials: Detailed praise, or testimonials from customers, act as a powerful marketing tool. These testimonials serve as credible referrals, instilling trust in potential customers, retaining current ones, and enhancing the business's reputation.
- 😟 Addressing Dissatisfaction: While customer dissatisfaction can harm a business's reputation, it also presents an opportunity. Addressing complaints and negative experiences effectively can transform them into positive outcomes, thus improving the business image and practices.
- 🌐 Value Beyond Products: Providing value beyond the immediate product offerings can enhance customer satisfaction. Valuable content, such as information, guides, or tips, positively influences buying decisions, strengthens customer loyalty, and can lead to positive advertising.
- 🔄 Active Resolution: Small e-business owners address dissatisfaction promptly, aiming to resolve issues and seek further feedback. This proactive approach can further improve customer opinions and promote positive advertising.
- 🎥 Content Distribution: E-business owners distribute valuable content through multiple channels including e-newsletters, articles, videos, webinars, chats, live online events, social networks, and forums.
Creating A Customer Base That's Loyal To Your Brand
There have been many studies such as brandspite which prove that clients and customers who tend to buy products and services often from a particular source develop a loyalty to that source. This leads them to spread the information and recommendations about the products and services originating from that source.
One way to achieve this is by being up close and personal with each customer if they have any negative impression. You could do many things to retain a customer and even convert a negative impression into a positive one simply by showing you and your brand does care and aren't a soulless machine. A good example would be offering a discount or a freebie during a consecutive purchase.
This also means the customer feedback that you get from them is truly valuable which in turn also helps you to tweak the things that help you gain more loyal customers.
Increasing The Efficiency Of Your Website
Knowing your website usability and efficiency is a crucial information data point. Even if you yourself feel like your website is very smooth and easy to operate to a outside person looking in things may not be so easy. Questions that you could ask on this topic include but are not limited to loading time, navigation, ease of access. Once you integrate these questions you could go back and ask the same questions again to know if there was a increase in the satisfaction levels.
Improving your product or service
In the end no matter how good your marketing and persuasion skills are if the product or service that you promote is itself deficient in anyway all the effort will never materialize in real long term growth. Surveying your customers to know what exactly would they like to see improved will often even lead you to new product and service opportunities that you never knew you had.
Customer Surveys That You Should Look Into
Customer Effort Score (CES)
A Customer Effort Score shows how much work a customer had to do to use a product or service, get the information that they were looking for, or to get something resolved.
CES data is collected by surveying the customer in real time after a particular action. Typically customers are asked to rate how much effort was needed to perform the target action that they performed. On a scale of 1-5 you should always aim for a 5. A score of 3-4 tells us that there is a room for improvement and the customer is hopeful.
History of CES
In 2010, Corporate Executive Board Company (CEB) researchers found that the lesser effort that the user has to go through to get their problem solved is a higher indicator of customer loyalty than delight. By simply remove the obstacles that the customers face businesses can reduce the service and churn rates. Disloyal customers are a net negative for any business because they spread negative word about the business and eventually stop being repeat customers.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS® is widely regarded as the gold standard customer experience metric because it is calculated with a single question survey.
Start with the question: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” Then grade the answers on a scale of one to ten.
The percentage of customers who are promoters (those who scored 9 or 10) minus the percentage of customers who are Detractors is your Net Promoter Score (those who scored 0 to 6).
Lets say 30% of respondents are Detractors, 20% are Passives and 70% are Promoters, your NPS score would be (50-30) = 20. This is a number you can track regularly.
