Direct mail and email marketing communications are great vehicles for reaching out to your customers and providing them with information about your company or brand. But rather than just talking at your customers, listen to them, actively seek their opinions about your brand, and understand how to service them better.
By implementing a system for dialogue management, you can measure customer satisfaction and use the findings to provide a better customer experience. You can even use this opportunity to turn your customers into your most loyal and strongest advocates.
Ongoing customer dialogue, managed appropriately, can improve a customer’s satisfaction with a company, leading to increased loyalty and future buying. 1
Gartner, a leading IT research and consulting firm, has found that ongoing customer dialogue can improve a customer’s satisfaction with a company, boosting loyalty and increasing company profits through future buying. The dialogue should begin at the onset of customer acquisition and be maintained throughout various phases of the customer’s life cycle with your brand.
Engage with your customers in a timely and relevant fashion, carefully planning your points of contact with them. Implement follow up processes and a contact management system to capture customer feedback, track queries and alert you when issues arise, quickly addressing any problems that come up.
There are numerous opportunities to streamline, simplify and track your dialogue with customers using technology, for example personalized emails, online surveys and web forms that give you a direct view of your customers’ online interactions with your company.
Understand the customer experience through their various journeys with you and the data trail they leave behind. 2
To better relate with your customers, you need to understand their journey with your brand, product or service. “The longer the journey, the deeper the customer’s feelings toward the brand” 2 so the feedback and data gained throughout the life cycle is even more crucial for gauging the customer’s satisfaction with your service.
These turning points can be when a mortgage is up for renewal, when a customer is about to end their contract, or when it is time for a customer to move up a service level.
When you discover key retention/churn points in a customer’s life-cycle contact your customers to ensure they are satisfied with your company’s level of service. If you discover an issue, implement a plan for immediate service recovery to ensure that you win back dissatisfied customers, and depending how effectively this is done, turn them into your most loyal customers.
Because customer loyalty is the best gauge of Customer Retention Management success, researchers need reliable and valid methods to measure it. 3
Sending a customer satisfaction survey can be an easy and useful tool for collecting customer feedback and insights about your customer’s perception of your brand. Measure satisfaction using loyalty indexes and track referral scores to assess the likelihood of your customers referring your product to others. “Customer driven referrals are the valuable new currency in a company’s success.” 4
The purpose and goal of customer retention are clearly central. The key is in understanding the nature of the relationship and anticipating its potential. 5
Effective customer dialogue management can streamline your processes for customer service and contribute to overall company profitability. Through effective two-way communication, you can retain valuable customers and increase loyalty, all through the simple process of asking for customer feedback.
References
- 1. Gartner Research – Top 10 Marketing Processes for 2008 to 2013
- 2. Admap Magazine – Customer Retention – Dreams and Reality
- 3. Advertising Research Foundation Creating a Loyalty Metric That Is the True Measure of CRM Success
- 4. Creating Customer Evangelists – Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba
- 5. Admap Magazine – Beyond Customer Satisfaction
