Many companies say they ‘put the customer at the heart of everything they do’. Perhaps yours does too. If you’re a senior leader, there’s a good chance that taking this customer-focused approach forms a central part of your strategy. And of course, it makes good business sense to nurture these relationships.
But here’s the challenge. How do you know how happy (or otherwise) your customers actually are? Or how they really feel about working with you? And how do you gauge the strength and quality of your customer relationships?
Gathering quality customer feedback is crucial
Many businesses still don’t have any formal customer feedback programme in place. Which means that business leaders are reliant on what their teams tell them – which presents a problem.
Unconsciously (sometimes even consciously) that feedback is filtered by the time it reaches the highest levels of the business. Put a formal feedback system in place however, and you’ll get a direct, open and honest sense of what customers really feel about your business.
The point is that if you want to become more customer focused, you need to know what customers really think. And the only way to do this is by asking them directly.
Genuine feedback delivers genuine value
It’s why we’re firm believers in the benefits of getting regular and systematic feedback from your customers.
So, what are those benefits? In our experience, effective customer feedback gives you:
A tangible measure of customer satisfaction and sentiment that you can then track over time.
A clear understanding of what really matters to your customers – what we call ‘pivotal truths’ – and how you’re delivering against them.
A means of building a customer-centric culture throughout the business in order to drive improvements in both operational and behavioural performance.
Through our own customer feedback programme, ‘The Referral Rating’ (TRR), we’ve delivered high quality feedback for many clients, and seen these benefits in practice.
Great customer feedback creates an effective early warning system
In our experience, a customer feedback programme is only as good as the action you take as a result of it. But in order to be able to take practical, meaningful actions, you need high quality data to work with.
We believe that our clients should be getting feedback from a wide range of touch points across their customers' organisations – and not just from the people that their sales or account teams will be in regular contact with.
The idea is to build a 360 picture across each of your key accounts and flag up any emerging problems areas that you may not yet be aware of, so that you can take action, fast.
All of our clients have multiple KPIs in place to measure their operational performance. But none of these measure customer sentiment, and none of these describe the customer experience – what it is like to do business with your company. The Referral Rating will allow you to measure these intangibles – and to a business leader in today’s highly competitive environment, that can be invaluable.
Quality feedback leads to impactful actions
When it works well, a customer feedback programme becomes far more than just a key account management tool. Instead, it helps the whole company focus on those things that matter most to your customers. It helps set your agenda and acts as a direct input into your company's business strategy.
And because the outcomes of the survey will be based on hard data and quality analytics, it means that you can make decisions and take action with confidence.
Create a customer-centric culture
Finally, we’ve seen that customer sentiment is driven not just by what you do, but how you do it. We’ve posted before about how creating quality customer relationships is everything.
In that article, we spoke about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s crucial to build your business strategy on understanding customer needs, to meet them consistently and so build high levels of customer trust.
Having a completely customer-focused culture in your organisation is key to this. And high quality, regular feedback from customers - delivered by a formal feedback programme - is how you get there.
One of our clients once recently told us “Since we started working with The Referral Rating we, the leadership team, have become much more customer-focused. We talk about the customer more, and are more aware of customer issues than we used to be. In many ways it has helped change how we manage our business.”
In this way, a good customer feedback programme drives customer centricity right from the heart of your organisation.
Any formalised customer feedback approach is better than none at all. But they’re not all created equal, and our experience at the Customer Relationship Consultancy has shown how, done well, you can use it to gain a clear competitive advantage.
Email us or call us on 01753 201341 if you’d like to find out how we can use customer feedback to add value for your business today.
