Business Growth Tied to Customer Experience

Collecting reviews about customer experience is an excellent method of staying in touch with how your company is doing, both the good and bad. It also plays a large role in new customer acquisition. Martin Zwilling writes about Customer Experience in a column on Forbes.com:

“Many startups and mature businesses have not yet adapted to the fact that customer satisfaction in this “always connected” age is more than product and service quality. It’s more about which customers broadcast their pleasure or unhappiness to others. With incredible ease, they can influence thousands or millions of potential new customers, or say nothing.”

Customer Experience: Basics of Loyalty

Zwilling quotes Larry Freed’s book “Innovating Analytics” in discussing four basics of business loyality:

1. Customer retention is priority number one. Keeping your current customers is one of the most important keys to revenue growth. According to Inc. magazine, acquiring a new customer costs about five to nine times more than it does to sell to an existing one, and on average, current customers spend 67% more than new ones.
2. Customer upsell, selling more to existing customers. Selling more to loyal customers is a great success strategy. But to engender loyalty, you have to be delivering a good experience and keep satisfaction high. Existing customers today are fickle and will leave you quickly, if they get word-of-mouth negative messages from their connected sources.
3. Marketing-driven customer acquisition. Traditional marketing efforts (advertising and promotions) are still important. In this context, the palette of channels for reaching customers has greatly expanded, to now include social media, digital to mobile, and new Internet options. The challenge is to measure resources spent against return.
4. Word-of-mouth driven customer acquisition. The new dominant method of acquisition is engagement of potential customers through social media and key influencers, and converting these prospects into customers with a satisfying experience. Here the satisfaction experience does double duty, as it is messaged down-line to other prospects.

Social Sharing and Customer Experience

He then goes on to discuss how the customer experience impacts companies in the era of social sharing:

“Today, true loyalty, earned by incredible experiences and satisfaction, also does that double duty of bringing in multiple additional customers through broadcast and interaction with the huge connected community.[…]

Another reality is that today’s consumers are multichannel, sometimes termed “omnichannel.” This simply means that they may start a product search on a computer at work, continue on their home computer, visit a store for touch and feel activity, then close the transaction on their smartphone. That really complicates the measuring process.

Others are walking the aisles in one store, while scanning for better deals on their smartphone in other stores or online. Concurrently, they are asking for the experiences of the community through FourSquare or Yelp, and broadcasting their own experiences on Facebook and Twitter.

The common thread here is quality of the customer experience, more so than the quality of customer service, and the impact of that experience on other current and potential customers. Simple customer satisfaction surveys and analytics miss several of these dimensions, and simply are not adequate any more.”

Online customer reviews offer a great channel to market your business. If you are not actively requesting feedback, your business is missing opportunities to grow its base. Learn more about the benefits of a customer review strategy.

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