Understanding your user base is one of the most important aspects of your business. Knowing how your customers are reacting to your interface, products, customer support system, and ads across the net is how you gain a foothold on your customers to sustain and increase customer retention.
Analytics are conquering the internet nowadays, with stats on every single thing you are doing while being online. This data is collected, analyzed, and marketed through many funnels to bring the right products to the customers.
However, there are many factors related to the customer base that are not simply just putting the right product in the front of the client at the most appropriate time.
Time is Everything
Instant gratification should be the new motto for 2019. The average human’s attention span is supposedly getting shorter every year with 4 out of 10 people reporting that they have trouble with focusing and problems with their attention spans.
It is quite difficult for most people to watch TV, go to the bathroom in peace, or even one of the bigger problems is driving while holding onto that damn smart phone. It has become a global problem of mass proportions affecting all parts of society.
Once a customer has landed on your web page, if there are any problems causing loss in time then they will be off to the next site. This can happen with load time, problems with servers, or even a confusing layout can cause the customer to be on their way.
Additionally, take into consideration any customer support problems along the way that cause delays in a customer’s time. Time is money to everyone. If there are delays then there will be significant problems to your customer retention.
Some companies offer a free ticketing system that can automate, manage, collect data, and reroute customer queries to enable a faster response time to solve problems. This can have significant impact on customer satisfaction and increase customer retention.
Communication Builds Confidence and Relationships
Customer loyalty is built through open dialogue and engagement. Retaining your customer base is a lot easier than gaining new customers. According to recent data, acquiring a new customer costs as much as 5 times more than keeping an existing one.
Understanding how important positive and negative feedback is will make your business sail through the muddy waters of business.
It is great to document and listen to reviews and complaints. However, the best companies are proactively engaging their customers with surveys and having open dialogues to better understand how they can positively impact and retain customers.
Showing your customers that they are important and you are listening to their concerns is how you increase customer satisfaction.
Best Ways to Get Customer Feedback
Understanding your customers problems is crucial in order to stop a major issue before it happens. It has been noted, that negative experiences or an upset customer usually shares their negativity with 8 to 10 people. Sometimes even up to around 18 – 20.
Also, with the ever growing popularity of social media, negative reviews can go viral and destroy a business within days or even minutes to hours. Everyone knows how the public feeds off of negative information. Some different ways to gather feedback are noted below:
- Live chat support
- Surveys
- Poll and forms on your site
- Email or call to follow up and to ask for any issues
- Create a social community to learn about your customers
- Document issues and show how and why they were fixed
The importance of customer satisfaction cannot be emphasized more in our ever growing social world. When customers have a negative experience they usually will not give any feedback but decide to write off the company.
It is important to know what happened and be proactive to figure out how to fix the issue to retain customers for solid growth.
