The customer is always right… right?
Customer satisfaction is the ultimate success in business. A happy customer is a returning customer.
The customer is always right… right?
By Louise Botha – Recruitment Specialist Customer satisfaction is the ultimate success in business. A happy customer is a returning customer. You will get repeat business, good reviews, and recommendations which all grow your reputation and brand your company to the world. Is the customer always right? To them, they need to feel that they are – or treated with respect when not. That means that they need your guidance and opinion on the expertise within the field of what they hired you to do. So, how do we keep them happy if or when they are not always right in our professional opinion? You need to adapt your style and approach that you use to communicate with each of your customers as they are all different. You need to nurture and build on your customer relationships in order for them to last. Apart from building long-lasting relationships, there are many other benefits: Ways to keep your clients happy Listen – To build any strong relationship -personal, business, social – you need to listen. Give the other party the time to share their thoughts and needs. You need to listen carefully to understand them. Avoid being overpowering with words and use your listening skills to identify where and how you need to respond to make an impression. Regular updates and communication – Just because you have established the relationship with your customer now, does not mean that you just leave them and wait for them to approach you when they need you. They might need you, even when they don’t know it yet. Maintain your relationship with regular updates and checking in by communicating effectively. Be an expert – Always do your homework! Research! You don’t want to be left with no words or answers when you approach or communicate with a client. You will save time for you and your client if you already know their background and idea of their requirements as well as what is happening in their sector. Leave them impressed. It will show your expertise and make them feel that they are in good hands. Do not rely on the client to provide you with all the info, ask questions and cover what you were not able to find. Manage expectations – Never overpromise and underdeliver. Be open to your client on what are reasonable expectations. Many clients can be demanding, and you can be tempted to give in to that and promise results before you know you can attain them. Explain to the client why it will take longer, if so, and that it will ultimately improve the service you offer to them to make them feel secure that you can commit to the deadline. Personalise your approach – Not all clients are the same, so you will have to personalise the needs of each one. Where you identify the way you work with one, can help you to handle the next. This will make the client feel worthy and that you are not just offering a service, but a partnership and interest in their business. Feedback – Do not underestimate the need for you to get a client’s feedback. You might be moving forward. But when you have the relationship, it opens a door where there can be transparency and feedback on your performance and service can be shared with ease. Knowing where you can identify and work on areas will improve your service and allow you to be better than the best! In the end, it’s all about regular communication – the long term benefits will surprise you.
Your customers need to feel valued and recognised: How to give them the best experience
By Leigh Whiting On customer service and customer experience I believe the two are perfectly interwoven and separate at the same time. Customer Experience encompasses the entire journey, from initial discovery through to after the service is delivered. Every interaction is included and there’s a strong focus on how customers perceive those interactions, and how they feel about the sum of all the interactions. Customer service is just one aspect that contributes to the overall experience. It can be defined as the act of assisting and advocating for your customers before, during, and after the purchase of a product or service. The goal is to make sure that this is done while going above and beyond in solving customer problems and providing buyers with the best option possible. How you can improve customer service Consistently high levels of customer service are essential to making sure that customers become advocates for your business, so this should be a major focus for companies. As a starting point, customer needs must be understood, which means that having comprehensive data on each customer is crucial to being able to determine their key drivers and motivators. Secondly, feedback is crucial, and companies should actively seek and promote customer feedback. I think that in addition, any customer service delivery needs to be underpinned with a set of standards that helps keep an experience consistent. How you can know your customers are having a good experience “Delivering a great customer experience” has become a top strategic objective, a survey by Bloomberg Businessweek found. If a focus is placed on understanding your customers, and there is clear vision for CX in place, I believe that companies are setting themselves up for success, if they don’t lose sight of the entire journey. I think having a method in place for continuous feedback and by implementing metrics is a fair measure of improved customer experience. Reduced support requests are a better indicator of improved experience than Net Promoter Scores for me, personally, just because I believe that people will always seek help to resolve issues, but may not always reach out to share feedback. How to retain customers Companies that build the best customer experiences, by truly understanding customer needs and requirements and being able to respond to these in a rapid way, can see the benefits of that work reflected in the retention rate. There has never been as many options available to consumers as there is now in the subscription economy, so really listening is so important. According to SuperOffice, companies spend six to seven times more on acquisition than retention. The experience you create for your customers—both good and bad—may be the single largest determinant of your retention rate. Customer experience represents a summation of how customers feel about your brand, their interactions with your company at each point in the customer journey. By understanding the overall customer experience, teams can identify what changes should be made to improve that experience in the customer journey, and consequently the retention rate. 57% of respondents in the Zendesk 2020 Customer Experience Trends Report, said that customer service influences their loyalty to a brand. The importance of sustainable consumption Sustainable consumers are often confused with consumers that care about the environment and being eco-friendly. Beyond that though, sustainable consumers hold brands accountable across multiple practices, like respecting human rights and ethical workplace practices. Sustainable consumers matter as they support brands who are open about their values, and this encourages brands to operate sustainably. Putting the customer first “Customer first” is a method for companies to make sure that the customer is at the heart of every decision a company makes, more than products or internal business structures. It can be achieved by proactively seeking ways to deliver a positive experience, and consistently designing and delivering with the customer in mind. This may be an unpopular opinion, especially for someone who advocates client-centricity, but I don’t think the customer always comes first. I think that customers need to be held to account for their actions, interactions, and consumer behaviour. If any of these conflict with a company’s values, a company may want to question whether aligning themselves with that consumer is in their long-term best interest. I’m not saying that a customer first lens of always listening and responding to needs should be discarded, as I strongly believe that this level of customer care makes people feel valued, which results in loyalty to a company. It also means that a journey is designed with the customer in mind, meaning that their overall experience is positive. When we focus on understanding our customers, we can focus on delivering experiences that make them feel valued and recognised, which reduces churn, increases revenue and ultimately leads to higher profits. Single Customer View My foremost experience is that the lack of this single view of the customer and their journey is a major impediment to being able to ensure a positive customer experience. I think that an aggregated view across legacy systems is the best way for companies to overcome this challenge in the short term. That being said, as an experienced design professional AND customer myself, I think that when leveraged correctly, there are massive benefits for the company and the customer. As an example, a customer receiving a relevant offer with a discount voucher – at the right time means they feel understood and rewarded. Simultaneously the company increases sales, loyalty, and advocacy. It should always be mutually beneficial.
How to grow your turnover to over a billion rand
By Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake How can your company scale and break through the competition to get to US$100-million (R1.8-billion) in revenue? This has been the biggest challenge at every startup I’ve marketed for and taken public over the past 25 years, including Snowflake. It’s no small feat. Back when Snowflake was founded in 2012, an extremely small percentage of companies made it. According to a 2013 study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, only about 0.02 to 0.05 percent of companies founded in the United States reached US$100-million in revenues in a reasonable timeframe. There’s also no magic formula, and what’s most important is how well you execute. But there are a few strategies or pillars that I believe marketing teams should follow as they scale. These pillars were the cornerstones of our marketing success at Snowflake during our journey to US$100-million. Create strong positioning Positioning is actually more than a pillar of marketing—it’s the entire foundation. And just as with a house, if the foundation isn’t strong, the walls will crack. With strong positioning, you can avoid cracks in your marketing, and your program investments will be more effective. Author Al Reis describes positioning as the battle for your prospects’ minds. Winning the battle is about how well you differentiate yourself in their minds. The first thing you need to do is define the category you wish to own. In 2016 at Snowflake, the category we were determined to own was “The Data Warehouse Built for the Cloud.” Our positioning has evolved since then, and today, Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud. But for our journey to $100-million, that was our positioning. We ran extensive focus groups with real prospects to make sure that our positioning worked with people who didn’t know Snowflake. Most often, companies do a few interviews with current prospects or customers, but that isn’t really enough. The category that you’re creating needs to be relevant to companies you will sell to at the next stage of growth. You also get a lot of data and insight back from prospects, and this data-driven process makes it easier to get buy-in internally, which is vital to create consistency in your positioning. Your employees, partners, and customers all need to describe you the same way. So for more than three years, our Data Warehouse Built for the Cloud positioning was everywhere, and if anyone described us differently, we asked them to change it. You can’t win the battle for your prospects’ minds if you are changing who you are every six months. The more consistent you are, the more impactful your marketing will be. Be the most customer-centric When you look at what the most admired brands in the world have in common, you’ll see that they all own their categories, they’re extremely consistent with their brand experience, and they have incredible customer loyalty. Within Snowflake’s marketing team, our number-one priority from the beginning has been to put the customer first. That means that we think from the outside-in, all the time. What do customers need from us? We did a few things to make sure we always kept our focus on customers. Our marketing team ran almost daily meetings with our sales engineers who were out in the field with our customers. That helped us learn which questions and concerns we needed to address. To scale our content development in those early days, we got almost every employee involved with writing content and creating videos that were laser-focused on what our customers wanted to learn. This helped us create trust and credibility, which startups often lack. Whenever possible, we put actual customers at the forefront of our marketing programs. We have thousands of brand ambassadors among our customers today, and they are our most effective marketing. To get customers involved in our marketing efforts, we worked on building direct relationships with them and made sure there was value for them to participate. We also started customer advisory board meetings, where we gave our customers fake dollar bills and asked them to invest them in different parts of our roadmap. This helped us prioritise the things that mattered most to them. Finally, I recommend companies start an annual customer engagement survey as early as possible. This also helps you establish your Net Promoter Score (NPS) score. Every year, we measure every single component of our customers’ experience with Snowflake, and the survey provides us with invaluable insights. Build for scale Many startups get to US$20-million and experience a slowdown in growth. This often happens because they rely on manual work, and because they don’t build their marketing technology stack and processes to scale. In 2017, the big topic at every all-hands meeting at Snowflake was around automating more work so we could get rid of the “hamsters.” The hamsters were all of the resources doing work that should be automated. In the beginning, they were very important in doing things such as setting up accounts for our customers. But it wasn’t really until we had a fully automated provisioning system that our free-trial sign-ups took off. We also built our marketing technology stack to scale with our growth from the beginning. If you don’t, you’ll have to slow down and start replacing parts, hindering your momentum. In addition, we scaled every component of our demand process. For example, we introduced live product demos to cut down on one-to-one meetings. We instituted a weekly Office Hours session where prospects can talk live to a reference customer and get all their questions answered. This eliminates the one-to-one reference call request and helps us respect our customers’ time. For startups looking to scale to US$100-million quickly, get rid of the hamsters as soon as you can, make sure your technology can grow with you, and find ways to improve every component of your buyers’ journey that is time-consuming. Be bold To break through in today’s competitive market and compete with large, well-known brands, you have to get noticed. The