Category Archives: Customer Management

Customer Experience, Customer Management

10 First Steps to Improve Customer Experience

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A business cannot grow without their customers; therefore, companies work hard to win new customers as well as keep their existing customers. Customer experience is the complete perception of a brand for the customers through several interactions with the company during the journey. It is more feeling orientated than problem orientated. Providing overall good customer experience by a company can lead to building long term relationship with its customers while being good only in one area but struggling in other areas can result in an overall poor experience.

Customer experience is different from customer service as customer service is only one aspect of the whole customer experience. It can often be about one single point, specific department or individual. A company provides support to customers who are having problems while purchasing its products or services. It plays a significant role because the whole customer experience can be strongly affected by customer service interaction. So, businesses should improve their customer experience if they want to scale.

Build a customer-focused Culture:

Building a customer-focused culture purely means making the customer experience a central part of the company’s goals and values. According to seohosting, it is 5 times costlier to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. So, the main goal of the company should be customer satisfaction rather than growth and profits. They should be in constant interaction with their customers at every phase of the journey. Without a customer-focused culture, companies can not really reach strong customer satisfaction levels.

Every employee has an impact on customers not only the customer-facing employees who interact with the customers so often. The key to a culture change is to Involve all employees. Each person in the company needs to understand how their role can influence customers.

For example, Zappos uses a customer-centric approach which has been established into their culture to deliver the best customer service and improve customer experience.

Know who your customers are:

It is obvious that if you don’t know who your customers are, you will never know what they want, and how you can help them achieve it. All customers do not have the same needs and you can discover several different types of customers with different requirements and expectations.

To know who your customers are, employees should recognize the targeted customers and think of the services from their viewpoint. Having a complete understanding of the customers through customer engagement data plays a great role in achieving fundamental business goals. It also empowers delivering improved customer experiences across the board. As said by Teradata, only 41% of companies use customer engagement data to update their marketing strategy.

Mobile customer support:

As an average user spends more than three hours daily, browsing and using their smartphone. So, the biggest brands offer mobile apps and mobile-friendly websites for their users to capture their attention and engage them. Customers can get their queries resolved on their smartphones that really improve customer satisfaction level. Some of the companies don’t focus on their mobile support so resulting in poor customer experience.

In the U.S, 63% of people use their smartphones to search for products and customer support every month.

Live chat support:

Customers had to wait in a long queue while contacting the company through phone calls so, live chat is now the fastest way for customers to contact a company directly from its website in real time. In the beginning, it was available only in retail websites online but nowadays, this is not limited to eCommerce websites. All well-known brands offer live chat support to improve customer experience.

Gartner predicts that about 85 percent of businesses will provide a live chat facility on their websites by 2022.

Social media support:

Social media support can be an influential communication way for a company to develop strong relationships with the customers, earn trust and build brand awareness. It is not only used for finding more followers or increasing sales, but it is also used for customer experience improvement.

Younger customers, who normally do not check emails will particularly expect social messaging to be their way to get in touch with companies, brands, and artists. So, it is important for companies to focus deeply on social media support and manage it well. Facebook has more than 2 billion users and Twitter has more than 330 million users. It shows how people are involved in social media.

An understanding of what other channels are suitable for your customer base:

Earlier, there used to be only one way to contact a company but now the businesses must provide the most suitable communication channels to make it easy for the customers to get in touch. Customers can use text, message, email, forums and any other way easier for them to contact. Some old age people prefer phone calls to contact while younger people use social media. It is believed that no single communication medium fits for all and depends on the customers.

Self serve tools:

Self-service helps the customers to get answers to their questions without the assistance of a representative from the customer service team. The commonly used self-serve tools include FAQs and online discussion forums. Self-serve tools are faster, hence ideal for saving customers’ time. It allows customers to take control of the way they use the service. Self-serve tools are no more a “nice to have” in the website. It is required to provide a positive customer experience.

Customer self-serve tools also help in reducing the load on customer support representatives and earn enhanced customer loyalty and experience. The study conducted by Dimension Data shows that 73 percent of the customers choose to use self-serve tools provided in the company’s website, instead of using phone calls, live chat, and social media for support.

Someone to be responsible for customer experience:

Nearly all the departments of a company do really influence the customer experience. It is not the job of one individual or department. therefore, everyone uses their efforts and enhance things in their own area.

In most companies, the marketing department helps in improving customer experience as a whole. In some cases, the top management work for it. But there is a customer experience manager that makes a connection between the company and the customer. And this person helps in managing customer experience job across all different departments.

The ability to research and gather data:

A survey conducted by Salesforce shows that 57% of the total customers share their personal data with companies to get special offers and discounts. Businesses collect a huge amount of data through many activities. It is important to analyze this data and utilize it for providing personalized services to customers and enhancing the customer experience. This helps a company keep a loyal customer base.

A report published by ICMI said that 69% of customers pay additional money if they are getting great customer service.

Ability to benchmark and evaluate:

The company should be able to collect and gather data trying out different things. Which support service is effective and which one is not. To know answers to all these questions there must be feedback giving the option for the customers. This will help the company to measure the effectiveness of each customer support method.

Conclusion:

In today’s technological world and constant access to the internet, every customer wants 24/7 exemplary customer services from a company. So, every company must now try to make better customer service their top priority. It helps the company to take an edge over its competitors.

Customer Management

Some Simple Steps to Improve Customer Experience

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Let’s take a simple example that everyone is familiar with – Email. Email is a fact of life now and many organizations have switched to email as the only way in which they provide support to their customers.  However humans are social animals and we are built to make judgments based on visual clues – this is called Body Language – and when these clues are removed from a conversation, the most innocuous and innocent topic can quickly escalate out of control.

With email, it’s impossible to understand body language, so what can you do to ensure you are getting your point across? How can you improve customer experience when you do not get a chance to meet your customers? Some things that you can do to improve this though are as follows:

Personalize

If your company uses templates or something similar to respond to customers, take the opportunity of personalizing them.  It is not just a matter of adding a name to the top of the email, but rather sprinkle their name throughout the discourse you are having with them.  Think about it as if you were having a normal, face-to-face conversation with that person.

Add a bit of personalized text to your email and you can make the customer feel that you care about him; his needs and that you are there for him. Everyone in this world wants to feel special, keep that in mind when writing emails.

Empathize

If a customer tells you about something in the body of their email, make sure you have actually read it and understand what he is saying.  For example, if you are informed that the reason the internet is so important is due to a disability, you can use the words “sorry” in the body of your response without it being offensive.

A few words showing empathy and well wishes do not take long for you to type but might make all the difference – keep in mind, if they are contacting your support department, it is because a service they are paying for is not working to their expectations and at this point, customer service is where you need to put your focus.  The golden rule definitely applies here and you should treat them the way you would like to be treated in similar circumstances.

It’s important with customer experience to focus on removing roadblocks. The more barriers there are, the more difficult your customers will find it to work with you.

Tone

What is your customer actually telling you?  Does he sound happy/sad/angry?  Is this his first email about this issue or has he sent many others?  How many emails has he sent to your company on other similar issues?  Here’s where a decent CRM comes into play as the more information you have about a customer the better.

All of these are clues to help you in determining the type of response you should send to your customer.  While you might be restricted in the message due to the circumstances and the response you can give, HOW you tell the customer something is completely different WHAT you tell the customer.

K.I.S.S.

An old, old acronym is KISS – Keep It Simple (Stupid) – and this definitely applies here.  Remember who your target is and what their skills are.  If you are supporting a technical product, it should be fairly obvious that your skills in this area are going to be higher than someone not working in that field and without access to your tools and resources.  There are a lot people with no or very little experience with computers. They may not use computer daily, are elderly, technophobic… when a person like this contacts us, they might have already exhausted everything they were able to do and are already feeling frustrated with the lack of a resolution.

Your response to this person should be aimed at not only resolving their reported issue (in a KISS way!!), but based on your experience what their NEXT question would be also.  In addition, you should take this as an opportunity to educate your customer also on where they can find this information in the future.  You will not stop receiving emails from everyone by doing this, but gradually education is the best tool to ensure that your issues are resolved.

The Terminator

A fairly famous film that you will have probably heard of is The Terminator with Arnold Schwarzenegger.  In that film, machines have taken over the Earth and are currently at war with Humanity.  This is NOT the case here. 

While AI implementations are increasing around the world, you are dealing with real people and NOT machines so the way in which you speak to them should be appropriate to that.

Customer Management, People Management

How Positive Feedback Influences The Bottom Line

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Positive feedback matters. It makes a difference in employee morale and motivation. As someone in the support and operations area of business, I cannot emphasize this enough.

Let’s be honest, it’s easy to complain online if and when services that you expect do not get provided correctly or on time. To be completely frank, with tools like Twitter and Facebook at our beck and call, this has become even simpler than it ever was before. Not only can you complain about a company, but you can shout it from the rooftops and you’ll have hundreds if not thousands of people joining in the conversation.

The Power of Positive Feedback

Don’t ever underestimate the power of positive feedback. We are quick to point out to someone when they make a mistake. Sometimes we forget to acknowledge them when they do something right. As a leader, I have to often deal with the negative complaints about the service my team provides. While part of solving that problem is an additional process through things like post-mortems and RCAs, the flip side is acknowledging that there are some rare customers out there that take the time to recognize good work also!

Don’t ever underestimate the power of positive feedback. We are quick to point out to someone when they make a mistake. Sometimes we forget to acknowledge them when they do something right. As a leader, I have to often deal with the negative complaints about the service my team provides. While part of solving that problem is an additional process through things like post-mortems and RCAs, the flip side is acknowledging that there are some rare customers out there that take the time to recognize good work also!

To those rare customers – THANK YOU!! Giving positive feedback can be a powerful tool for employee motivation and your time is sincerely appreciated. For the managers and leaders lucky enough to have received such feedback, here’s how to use it most effectively:

  • Do it now. Positive feedback is too important to let slide. Say something right away.
  • Make it public. While negative feedback should be given privately, positive feedback should be given publicly. Do it in front of as large a group as appropriate.
  • Be specific. Don’t just say “Good job, Sally.” Instead say something like “Hakim, that new procedure you developed for routing service calls has really improved our customer satisfaction. Thanks for coming up with it.”
  • Make a big deal out of it. You don’t want to assemble the entire company every time you give positive feedback, but do as much ceremony as the action warrants.
  • Consider the receiver. It is important to consider the feeling of the person receiving recognition. For a very shy person, thanking him in front of his workgroup is probably most appropriate. For another person, you might hang a banner, balloons, and streamers in the department area.
  • Do it often. Don’t wait for the big successes. Celebrate the small ones too.
  • Do it evenly. Big successes need big recognition; small successes need smaller recognition. If you throw a party for every small success, you diminish its effect for a big success.
  • Be sincere. Don’t praise someone for coming in on time. Don’t congratulate someone for just doing their job. People will see right through you. Really mean it when you give positive feedback.

The Importance of Surveys

If you’re not getting positive feedback, are you sure that you’re asking for it? This is where surveying your customers comes in really handy. Many companies wrongly make the assumption that the Customer Service Team is completely disparate to the rest of the company and has no bearing on new business or in serving their existing customers aside from when they have a problem or an issue. In reality they are the face of your business and often know about new problems in the field before anyone else.

Customer Surveys allow you to collect valuable data from your customer base while simultaneously reinforcing perceptions that your organization genuinely cares about their opinions and welcomes their feedback.  If your organization does not have a process in place to gather this invaluable information, it should do so quickly with the help of a customer survey.  By listening to the voice of your clientele, you are ideally situating your organization to develop or maintain a competitive advantage.

Why Customer Experience Matters

Historically having siloed departments perhaps made sense in some industries. While this might have been historically true (and even then, not so much) customer experience has taken on a renewed focus in the industry. Many companies actually acknowledge that it is a key differentiator for them so anything that a business can do to improve this should be emphasized.

The impact of employee experience on customer experience has been explored in great detail. In fact, “happy employees equal happy customers” has become a motto for some of the world’s biggest brands.  While this might be an old argument, it has validity and is a mantra worth remembering.

The same companies invest in employee happiness year after year. The rest continue to not invest. There’s a clear line between companies that get it and companies that don’t and there’s not a lot of .

CRM, Customer Experience, Customer Management, Helpdesk, Tools

How Help Desk Software Increases Your Customer Support ROI

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If you want to invest in customer support software such as Freshdesk, you may be wondering if the cost of the software will pay off. It can be tricky to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your new tools.

One of the things you need to consider is if it will bring in revenue. Most help desks are cost centers, but if the software reduces the cost of doing business it is still a benefit. This is one of the most important questions that you must get answers before you start using the software. The software can be effective in measuring the impact of your actions on the business metrics. It is possible to make customer support into a revenue generator and not just a cost center.

Nowadays, things are changing, and more customer support teams are focusing on driving growth in businesses and proving their worth to the business. Using the right software can make your customer care more effective in generating revenue. Freshdesk, for example, can help you streamline your customer conversations, automate your repetitive work and collaborate with other teams to solve problems faster. Software for help desks should save money and bring money into the business in order to create a return on investment.

How to Measure Your Investment in Software

If you are at the stage of putting processes into place to support your business’ customer of if you want to fix some gaps in your system, the right help desk package will ensure that you get back to all clients in a timely manner.

This is an important baseline to meet. If you miss one email just once, you can cause your customers to stop doing business with you. 86% of customers quit doing business with companies because of poor customer service. 51% of customers quit doing business with a company for one poor customer experience. All the lost customers lead to lost revenue. Read on to understand different ways of investing in help desk software, save revenue in your business, and increase your customer service team’s ROI.

Move to a Streamlined Queue

Help desks were originally made around the idea of tickets. This can still be seen at the butcher. You take a ticket number and get services in the order that you came in. Nowadays; your businesses shouldn’t treat customers like tickets anymore.

It is important to adopt a nuanced approach to organizing questions from customers. You can become adept at managing messages from customers by using modern help desks. You can achieve this by prioritizing customers who seem to be more upset or customers who have a high opportunity of converting to paid customers. Businesses should invest in help desks that offer better management of queue. This will make customer support teams to more effective.

Self-service Should be Part of Your Customer Service

Businesses should have the ability to offer content in the form of FAQs and knowledge base articles to help customers be able to help themselves. Businesses should understand that self-service is another form of customer service. Self-service carries the highest ROI for different reasons.

Customers like being able to help themselves. 70% of customers like to see an option on your website where they can help themselves. If you don’t offer this service, your customers will be frustrated and will need to contact you. On the other hand, 73% of customers prefer researching for answers on their own instead of talking to a human over social media and live chat. 81% of customers also try to help themselves before contacting human support.

Investing in software that allows self-service keeps the customers happy. Customers will keep coming back when they find it easy and convenient to do business with you. Apart from customers helping themselves, self-service also benefit you as a business owner or manager. Self-service is a cost-effective way of helping customers to resolve issues versus other business help channels. When you get self-service right, it is a cost-effective way of making your customers happy.

Personalize Each Transaction

You can build your customer loyalty by investing in your customers. You can focus on building good relationships with your customers beyond transactions. We should form holistic relationships with customers instead of treating the problems of our customers as a series of events that don’t relate to each other.

You should, first of all, know who your customers are before you think beyond the transaction. If all your customer service team can see is the question at hand, they won’t have a nuanced and personalized conversation about their customers’ needs.

Your help desk can provide additional context with different conversations. For instance, they might show you the last four conversations the customer initiated. If you have integrated your help desk with your CRM, you can see when the renewal date is coming up. You will also see how many users they are paying for. When the context revolves around the history of the customers, you can tailor your approach. You can easily see what your customers need and offer it.

Provision of valuable data

The return of investment of customer support is not always tied to sales . Businesses can also use customer support for research on users. This includes knowing what customers think of your product and how they use the product. You can also know what your customers think of your competition. You need help desk reporting that will capture trends for you to get all the information you need from your conversations.

You can use important data from your customers to enhance the efficiency of service delivery and improve the quality of your products to suit your customers’ needs.

Investing in Helpdesk Software – Money Well spent

Calculating the customer experience return on investment is a critical requirement for frontline teams. It is important to know how our actions affect the business. When we connect our customer support goals to the business goals, we move from making our customers happy to the value we create.

A Help desk plays a crucial part in the journey of connecting customer interactions and making money. This can be through increasing the power of your support team, improving the loyalty of your customers or uncovering important data. With all these, a help desks can deliver a huge ROI.

Customer Management, Customer Satisfaction, Customer service, Management

Nine Commandments

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Customer service is an integral part of our job and should not be seen as an extension of it. A company’s most vital asset is its customers.

Without them, we would not and could not exist in business. 

When you satisfy our customers, they not only help us grow by continuing to do business with you but recommend you to friends and associates (remember, that while it seems only complaining customers tell others, this isn’t actually the case!).

The Key Commandments of Customer Service 

Know who is boss. 

You are in business to service customer needs, and you can only do that if you know what it is your customers want.
When you truly listen to your customers, they let you know what they want and how you can provide good service. Never forget that the customer pays our salary and makes your job possible. 

Be a good listener. 

Take the time to identify customer needs by asking questions and concentrating on what the customer is really saying. Listen to their words, tone of voice, body language, and most importantly, how they feel.

Beware of making assumptions – thinking you intuitively know what the customer wants. It’s key here to not only listen to the question itself but also what the questions “means”.  A key example is when a customer asks

What time is the 3pm parade?

At first glance, this seems like a stupid question, but when you realize that the customer actually means:

What time does the 3pm parade ARRIVE HERE (where I’m standing)

it makes a lot more sense! (nb. this example is taken from Lessons from the Mouse – a training course that teaches Disney customer service excellence).


Do you know what three things are most important to your customer?

Identify and anticipate needs. 

Customers don’t buy products or services.

They buy good feelings and solutions to problems. 

Most customer needs are emotional rather than logical. The more you know your customers, the better you become at anticipating their needs.

Communicate regularly so that you are aware of problems or upcoming needs. Make customers feel important and appreciated. Treat them as individuals. Always use their name and find ways to compliment them, but be sincere. People value sincerity. It creates good feeling and trust. Think about ways to generate good feelings about doing business with you. Customers are very sensitive and know whether or not you really care about them. Thank them every time you get a chance.

Help customers understand your systems & terms. 

Stay away from jargon and industry-specific “speak”.  While these terms are completely understandable to you with your years of experience – to an outsider they don’t make any sense at all!  Remember, you’re the expert in your field, but your customer is the expert in theirs and quite often the service you provide to them is not their core business!

Your organization may have the world’s best systems for getting things done, but if customers don’t understand them, they can get confused, impatient and angry. Take time to explain how your systems work and how they simplify transactions. Be careful that your systems don’t reduce the human element of your organization.

Appreciate the power of “Yes”. 

Always look for ways to help your customers. When they have a request (as long as it is reasonable) tell them that you can do it. Figure out how afterward. Look for ways to make doing business with you easy. Always do what you say you are going to do.

Know how to apologize. 

When something goes wrong, apologize. It’s easy and customers like it. The customer may not always be right, but the customer must always win EVEN WHEN THEY ARE WRONG! Deal with problems immediately and let customers know what you have done.  When a customer makes a mistake, don’t make them feel foolish, but rather treat them with dignity.  The key thing to remember here is the Golden Rule:

Treat Others, the way you Want to be Treated

Make it simple for customers to complain. 

Value their complaints. As much as we dislike it, it gives us an opportunity to improve. Even if customers are having a bad day, go out of your way to make them feel comfortable. Give more than expected. Since the future of all companies lies in keeping customers happy, think of ways to elevate yourself above the competition.

Consider the following:

  • What can you give customers that they cannot get elsewhere? 
  • What can you do to follow-up and thank people even when they don’t buy? 
  • What can you give customers that is totally unexpected? 

Get regular feedback. 

Encourage and welcome suggestions about how you could improve. There are several ways in which you can find out what customers think and feel about your services – I talk about this in a bit more detail here. Listen carefully to what they say. Check back regularly to see how things are going. Provide a method that invites constructive criticism, comments and suggestions.  Whatever issues are identified need to be addressed and not ignored!

Treat employees well. 

Employees are your internal customers and need a regular dose of appreciation. Thank them and find ways to let them know how important they are. Treat your employees with respect and chances are they will have a higher regard for customers. Appreciation stems from the top. Treating customers and employees well is equally important.

Customer Management, Management, Training

MANAGEMENT TRAINING AND SELF IMPROVEMENT

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As a manager, it is a key requirement to ensure that your team is appropriately trained on the minutiae of the job. How to find customer information, how to respond to customers, dealing with Irate customers and troubleshooting issues are obviously all things that you would ensure that your team receives. However, how important is it to you to ensure that YOU are receiving the appropriate training and improving your skills?
It almost goes without saying that the only constant in our world today is that “change is inevitable”. If you understand this fact then dealing with the constant pace of it is something that is fairly easy to take in stride.
The Importance of Training

From year to year, and inside each subject itself, what is taught at school and the way it is taught itself changes.  This is natural – new things are being researched all the time and what was considered FACT one day is quite often flipped on its head the next.  With the constant growth and change that we experience every day of our lives dealing with the pace is an issue in and of itself as more often than not, the greatest discovery of the day is just a piece in the puzzle to something much larger.
Now while you could afford to just “coast” along in school as you were being rated and graded against others being taught exactly the same material, in the “real world” this mentatility just doesn’t work.  Your competitors in business and in your own workplace are constantly advancing their skills in an effort to be more efficient and provide an even better product or service at a lower price all the time – after all we live in a capitalist society and thats the hallmark of it isn’t it?  The customers determine the leader and if you want to be part of that crowd you cannot afford to neglect your personal developement.
While its clear that this is a message that has been learned at the Senior Level, most employees don’t realize this and think that Senior Management just decide which way to steer the ship and then step back and let it go on its way.  If you really look at it though, the readjustments and refining of technique are something that Senior Managers do all the time and they base this new direction on what they are learning from other companies and even their competition!
The transition from an average Manager to a top tier Manager is gradual, but knowing the latest trends and information definitely play a factor in this. This is obviously NOT just a matter of being able to spout the latest and greatest “buzz word” that is currently in vogue. The only way to truly advance is to actually understand what you are talking about and to believe in its value and potential. Being ISO certified is easy – understanding that ISO is NOT just paper-pushing which is the common misconception is something else altogether.

For those at the starting point of their management career the focus should be on Soft Skills. Things like Team Work, Leadership, Dealing with Change, Time Management are all crucial skills that are useful for the young Manager and also show a demonstrable return for the company. 

 With this knowledge in place (and keep in mind, retraining is key as if you don’t use it … you lose it!) the focus should be shifted towards industry and technology specific disciplines. You should aim for courses that not only provide you with an improvement but that can demonstrate an obvious return on investment to your company. 
Things like Process Improvement and Cost Minimization are both emphasized in ITIL and Six Sigma certifications. Ensure that you are keeping abreast of the latest trends in your industry – read trade publications and technical journals, network with your peers in similar positions … SPEAK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS! … find out what they are interested in and what they would like to see your company provide to them. 
While Managers today have less time then in days past – if training if structured correctly it can be useful and relevant and should be able to show an immediate impact to the organization. It is key to remember to that training cannot be a single event and should be considered a constant – just like change – as that is the only way to stay in the race and eventually – WIN IT!!

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Customer Experience, Customer Management, Customer Satisfaction

The Voice of the Customer

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There are many ways of learning what is essential in your business.  However probably the most powerful and least practiced is that of Customer Feedback.  Having the greatest widget in the world is useless if your customers don’t want to buy it and if it doesn’t resolve a perceived need.  Getting that information from your customers can be accomplished in a variety of ways though and it pays to ensure that you are doing as many of them as possible.  (One point to note – conducting a survey is important, but if you don’t actually do anything with those results, then you shouldn’t have wasted the time or the money in gathering that information!)

Customer Feedback Is Critical

In order to drive continual customer service improvements, companies need to focus on obtaining the information from their clients, analyzing that information and acting on that information.  Remember, as stated earlier … if no action is taken – don’t bother!

Capturing Customer F

Capturing what your customers want can be done via a variety of different means now a days.  Web and surveys are common as are physical surveys that are mailed out to customers.  Depending on the size of your business and your customer base, there are many large organizations that can assist in gathering, collating and analyzing this information for you, but if you are just starting out a simple spreadsheet with the feedback that you’ve received from your customers is a great starting point! 

Listen to them NOT just in your surveys but also in your daily interactions with them via your support and customer service teams.

Another great way to get information from customers is via focus groups.  Often used at the beginning of a product stage to determine WHAT customers want, it is just as effective afterwards to determine HOW you are performing and if you are meeting or exceeding expectations.

Another point to note – DO NOT over survey your customers.  It is quite common for different parts of the same company to send out different surveys to the SAME customer.  While it is obviously important to that division, the information that is returned will not be as useful as the customer will NOT be providing an unbiased response. 

It is best if all survey’s are done via a centralized team or department and then the results of that survey shared among the company as a whole. Customer feedback collected through surveys, e-mails, phone calls, online chat and other channels can be combined into a single instance, integrating both structured and unstructured data into a central platform and enabling companies to extract maximum insight from the information collected in a cost-effective and timely manner.

Analyzing the Data

Customer feedback is subjective.  It always will be and this needs to be understood by the group running the survey and appropriate steps taken.  Another very significant point is that when survey’s are sent out it, it is essential that steps are taken to “tie” the response to a specific issue so that you are able to make the most use of this information.  In addition, decisions via survey should never be taken unless the sample size is large enough.

Solving the Issues

Once you’ve determined what your customers want, prioritize those issues based on the 80/20 rule (Pareto principle) and let your clients know what you are doing to resolve the issues.  What your plan is, how soon you expect to have the issue resolved and what the benefits to them would be.  There is no harm in sharing a commonly perceived error with your existing users … THEY ALREADY KNOW IT’S THERE! … and if they see that you are going to take steps to resolve the problems they will understand that their best interests are in remaining with you.  Remember that these are already your customers – you just want to treat them the right way and sharing information with them is a simple and effective way of doing this.