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Everyone wants to be successful in their business. To be successful we need satisfied customers. In this context, it is important to understand that a satisfied customer is not just a number in the statistics. So we asked service designer Adam Brock from GoodRequest, how to achieve customer satisfaction, how to keep their loyalty and many other interesting things that can help you on your way to a successful business.
08. August 2023 | 9 min.
In my opinion, there is no precise definition for that. The point is that a satisfied customer is a person whom we have helped solve their problem or delivered a service. In delivering this, we have focused on high standards and quality that is so good that the customer is happy to talk about our business and spread positive reviews.
Many times there are many barriers to creating happy customers. One of them is when we as a company forget the essence of why customers come to us. By doing so, we run into the fact that we don't and won't be able to address that satisfaction. In today's business environment, we often see customers as just numbers. If we looked at them more empathetically, more humanly, we would be able to help the customer more and make the purchase easier.
There are two scenarios. If we already have an existing service or product that we sell and we have certain satisfied customers, it is important for us to start talking to them at some regular intervals and collecting feedback. Through qualitative interviews, we invite customers for coffee and talk to them in more depth to understand how they feel about it, what they see as the biggest benefit, the biggest weakness and what they might expect.
The second scenario is when we go to launch a new product and that's when it's good to ask the question: Who are our customers, why did we choose them and understand their behaviour. This information will help us in the future to reduce the risk of failure and to better tailor the new product to the customers' needs.
It depends on what we provide. We can track this, for example, by the frequency of repeat purchases and the growth in the value of our services to individual customers. There are some services or companies where they first offer the customer something small. As they grow in maturity and realise that this is a topic - a product that they need to buy more of and use more of. Then their volume of services purchased starts to grow and that's when they see that they have gained a loyal customer.
The key is to deliver quality work that meets the customer's expectations and makes them happy. In this way, new opportunities open up and the demand for our services increases.
An important indicator is customer loyalty, which we can observe through referrals. When customers recommend us further and share their positive experiences, we know we are doing a good job. It's an important aspect that we should monitor and use more, because then we know that we are doing it well and a recommendation from happy customers has a big impact on any business, e-shop.
You need to be very empathetic and actively engage with customers. When we take an interest in customers and interact with them, they reveal a lot to us and we can work with those opportunities. This helps us open new doors and differentiate ourselves from the competition.
I worked on a project where a company that had been in business for a long time with a few hundred satisfied customers, but they wanted to move on and become a market leader, so they had to change something, start innovating. So we used a tool called a "customer journey map" to help us track how the customer experiences the whole process from awareness of the need to post-purchase care. We then went into the field, hunting for customer segmentation. We made a new segmentation, chose which group we wanted to serve and went to talk to them.
The most underrated tool that companies should use more often is empathy surveys. We listened to how customers experience the entire process - from finding a solution to communicating with the company. This has provided us with many opportunities to innovate and improve the service. We identified strengths and competitive advantages, but also weaknesses that we could work on.
It's important that we actively listen to our customers and let them know we care. If we can build a relationship where we feel interested and care about their needs, we will be able to retain them and prevent them from turning to the competition.
Studies and statistics confirm that companies that actively listen to their customers perform better. That's why it's worth investing time and energy into understanding your customers' needs and experiences.
If you don't have an in-house person to do it, you're definitely investing more money, as you need an outsourcer or agency, which can be quite expensive. But in the long run, it makes more sense to have at least one service designer on your team who can work on customer journey mapping, extract data from conversations and look for ways to improve. The more you dedicate yourself to this, the deeper and more successful you can go.
Many people don't realise that they can never have absolutely all customers as their main target group. Take for example the differences between millennials and seniors, who behave completely differently. Even in the B2B segment, we have to take into account the differences between small businesses and corporations and approach them in a completely different way. It is important that we are aware of these differences and adapt our strategy so that we reach each target group effectively and efficiently.
Absolutely. But many companies struggle to find a one-size-fits-all approach to this. In the case of B2C, it's important that we reach out to customers on social media, which makes them happy and motivates them to share and talk about it further. However, in a B2B context, this requires careful thought because customers are much more complicated.
New customers have limited awareness of us because they don't know us yet and don't have a relationship with us. Therefore, it is crucial to work on our credibility and attract their attention.
In the first phase, we need to clearly communicate who we are, what we do and what problems we solve for customers. We try to emphasise the quality of our service and add testimonials from satisfied customers. The goal is to be understandable and make ourselves visible to as many people as possible.
The second level of our business is satisfied customers. Here we strive to keep our promises and provide a quality service. As long as customers already have experience with us and understand what we have provided, we want to keep them. It is important that we are proactive and try to satisfy them so that they will be happy to come back to us in the future.
1. Answer the question, who are my customers and try to put together the data, what do you really know about them.
2. Map your own customer journey and customer integration moments (before, after, during purchase).
3. Once you have identified key moments, positives and negatives, go talk to your customers. Just do 4-5 interviews per customer segment and try to listen more, identify what they value more and what they are missing.
4. Based on that, pick one thing you want to improve and go work on it.
5. Such small activities need to be regular, they need to be revisited. If you want to have happy customers you need to take care of them, be interested in them, see them as partners and then they will make you feel it and appreciate you.
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