Does this describe your company? Most emerging middle market companies excel at doing their homework to understand their customers’ needs and expectations when they first win their business. But too many seem to assume that "getting it right" with customers at the start of the relationship guarantees it will stay "right." The fact is, however, customer needs and expectations change over time, sometimes suddenly.
Their business processes change, making it harder to do business with you. Or changes in your organization might reduce the contact they get with you, the CEO. They start to feel like "just another customer" instead of one whose business is particularly important to you.
Stay in Contact With Your Customers
How do you stay on top of - or even a step ahead of - what your customer sees as "right?"
The best way is to regularly ask your customers how they see the relationship working, in light of their changing expectations for what you should be doing for them. Many business people think this can be done through surveys. They are only partly correct. Surveys can give you a taste of how customers see you. But surveys cannot tell you what it is that causes customers to see you that way. It is hard to get customers to complete surveys. And when they do few respondents fill in the comments sections to really communicate what is driving their loyalty to you (or lack thereof).
The right approach to getting feedback from your customers can help you identify both:
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What actions you can take to enhance your customers’ positive impressions of your company.
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What you can do to correct problems customers see in doing business with you.
By asking in-depth, situation-focused questions that come across as personal, you can discover their current expectations and what is happening under the surface to drive changes in their satisfaction with you.
What Customer Feedback Can Tell You
Case in point: what happened recently with one of our clients, a technology support company, when we probed into the experience of one of their key customers. The customer told us they used to be satisfied getting just technical help from our client. But now they thought our client was doing less than they could. Besides getting technical help when they asked for it, the customer wanted pro-active suggestions about how they could make technical improvements.
Clearly the customer’s expectations had changed, but he had never communicated them to our client and our client never asked about them. The customer expected our client to "know" simply by "getting the feel" of what they wanted. Our client (mistakenly) expected the customer to ask for help without being prompted. Once we communicated our findings to our client, they changed how they worked with this customer, resulting not only in retaining them but in a substantial increase in new business.
Continually Gauge Customer Satisfaction
Accurate identification of your customers’ needs and expectations on an ongoing basis sounds simple. Yet we find fewer companies doing so than one might think. Too many companies are complacent about "customer satisfaction". They ignore the fact that a customer that is satisfied with buying from you today might abandon you tomorrow for a competitor that is more innovative or offers a lower price. A hallowed business saying is that "only the paranoid survive." Worrying about current and potential competitors and not taking your customers’ business for granted is the best way to retain customers and increase your business from your existing customer base.
Does this story hit close to home? Has your company experienced something similar?
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