customer satisfaction survey Archives

Managing Customer Relationships With Business Management Software

Posted on December 6, 2021May 12, 2023 by Matt Bernot

Some types of businesses have customers, some have clients, and some have both. Maybe your business refers to its clientele as something else entirely. However you refer to the humans handing you a form of payment in return for your goods or services, it’s always crucial to build, maintain, and—when necessary—repair the relationships you have with them.

customer attraction and retention with business management software

One of the best ways to do that in our modern, largely-online world? Utilize business management software to enhance the overall sales pipeline, from lead generation to point of sale and beyond.

It’s not just CRM capabilities that play a role in this process. One of the advantages that business management software brings to the table in the world of cultivating customer relationships is that there is the opportunity to gather data beyond simple contact information and buyer intent.

By utilizing prior accounting metrics, productivity reports, and other types of data gathered both from customers and employees. You’ll be able to make more informed decisions throughout the entire lead generation, sales, and retention pipeline.

How To Enhance The Sales Process

Centralized Information

The key to attracting customers is all about having the right information at hand. It’s not just about having one lead’s email address and a record of what specific form they filled out, it’s about everything else.

Beyond this individual’s basic information, what data is available to you? Are you able to quickly see if this person had a prior interest? Are their interests in line with the current trends you’re seeing within your products/services? Are you able to take advantage of quote-to-order functionality to keep everyone in the loop about the status of the sales process?

Each company in every industry handles its sales processes differently, but regardless of the specifics, it pays to have accurate, timely information on hand.

In 2022, overall customer relationship technology usage increased from 56% to 74%. As businesses shifted to an online-first approach more rapidly than ever, having enhanced access to customer data was one key contributor to success.

customer relationship management. people sitting on a CRM cloud

Automated Email Campaigns

Small business owners are always pressed for time. There are never enough hours in the day to get everything done. (Spoiler alert: there never will be.)

On top of that, wasted time and inefficient planning are among the biggest issues plaguing the average small business owner. According to one study conducted by Inc. Magazine, small business owners waste an average of 21.8 hours per week. In addition, 49% of working professionals have never conducted a “time audit” to fully analyze, understand, and improve how they spend their time.

Though there are a vast number of ways that business owners and employees can increase their overall productivity and efficiency, automation stands front and center as the most helpful piece of the puzzle. In this case, automation is utilized to effectively reach prospects and customers while you are able to dedicate your time and energy elsewhere.

Easily crafting emails in a code-free interface, utilizing lead scoring capabilities, and creating drip campaigns for each specific revenue stream that your business manages will help alleviate the stress of manually tracking prospects and sending individual marketing emails.

Built-In Accounting Data

Data is at the heart of every good decision. When it comes to the value of managing customer relationships via an integrated business management system, it pays to have the best data available at all times. In this case, the most important data is often the financial data.

Not every fast decision is a great decision, but great decisions that are able to be made fast are always the best decisions.

Being able to provide customers with accelerated invoicing and payment channels, accurate price forecasts that are derived from up-to-date inventory and work orders, and a better understanding of overall buying trends will help empower your sales force to increase their closing rate and leave customers satisfied.

How To Stay Connected To Your Customers

Customer Portals

Yes, the initial sales process is important. However, customer retention, if managed properly, can be even more financially rewarding than any individual sale.

The probability of selling to a new customer usually falls between 5 and 20%, depending on the specific nature of the industry and the products or services offered. However, when it comes to existing customers, this number dramatically increases—selling to an existing customer usually carries a success rate of 60 to 70%.

Combined with the fact that 55% of millennials claim to be more brand loyal today than 39% of consumers aged 35 and up, a focus on customer retention has to be a long-term priority for every business.

One thing that the modern customer desires is a personalized experience with the ability to retrieve information anytime, anywhere, on any device. With advanced customer portal technology that’s built into the best business management software platforms, you’ll be able to achieve both of these goals.

Customer portals provide up-to-the-minute service updates, open up a line of communication for questions or concerns, show a detailed payment/shipping/order history, and provide an opportunity for customers to know their needs are being personally attended to.

Chat And Discussion Boards

Staying connected to others is important in all aspects of life. It helps us learn, grow, and achieve goals that we would have not been able to accomplish individually. It’s easy for a coffee shop to flourish as a catalyst for connection and community—it naturally brings people together, bonding over the sweet tastes and aromas of their favorite drink and acts as a natural societal meeting point for people that want to bond, vent, and commiserate.

Well, not every business has the luxury of having a product that is so universally ingrained into the cultural fabric of society. For other businesses, it takes a little more work, creativity, and technology to bring people together.

Self-service help is often the first choice of the modern customer. 91% of customers surveyed would use an online knowledge base if customized and tailored to their needs.

Though it can’t replace the coffee shop, the internet and its countless mediums of communication are effective at creating conversation around a central topic. Your customers will always have questions, and there will be some that have already found answers to these questions. While your business will always be prepared to field questions, it provides a benefit to establish a community chat board where people with common goals and inquiries can talk amongst each other. Two heads are always better than one.

Feedback And Surveys

We know that customer complaints run rampant in today’s digital age. Some lack context, some are unfair, some are simply vulgar, and some are brutally honest. (Yes, positive feedback exists on the internet, too.)

As much as positive feedback is appreciated, it’s equally—if not more—important that customers be able to give direct feedback on the negative experiences they have. It can help your business continue to learn and improve after each and every sale, shoring up the areas where service, quality, or communication may have been lacking.

Customer engagement tools both let the customer know that their relationship is valued and provide an opportunity for them to give you invaluable feedback. Your business should be able to automate surveys to be delivered at specific times (i.e. after a sale, after a refund, etc), and provide customizable form fields where customers can choose “1-10” style ratings or just enter their own text.

Wrapping Up

If it seems like customers are more demanding than ever, you wouldn’t be wrong. Nearly 59% of consumers worldwide say that they have higher demands and expectations in regard to customer service than they did just a year ago.

In an increasingly competitive environment, it’s important to utilize the tools that give you the biggest competitive advantage. By maximizing the capabilities of business management software, you’ll be able to attract more customers, retain more customers, and overall improve the products and experiences that help you maintain a healthy bottom line.

How to Master the Customer Satisfaction Survey

Posted on May 23, 2019April 25, 2023 by Scott Hammer

If you sell a product or service, your customers are the lifeblood of your business. Through experience, you’ve probably found that your happy customers are your best marketing tool. But how can you know that your customers are happy? And how can you get the insights that help keep them happy? Answer: the customer satisfaction survey.

Anjul Bhambhri, writing in CIO, notes: “A 2018 Forrester Consulting study of global enterprises found that experience-driven businesses grow revenues 1.4x the rate of other companies and enjoy significantly higher customer retention rates.”

In other words, it’s important to get a holistic understanding of your customers.

That doesn’t just mean what they like or dislike about your products and services. It means knowing what they feel and value. Having insight into not only what people need, but why they decide they need something, can help you make better decisions about your marketing, sales, and product or service development.

Why experience data matters

A maxim to follow: the ways your customers feel about your product or service is more important than the way you feel about it. After all, they’re the people who use it. A customer can tell you in five minutes what your team has been wondering for months.

Here’s the proof:

ABC Company offers services and they’ve focused their attention on response time. Their yearly goal was to get response time under 5 minutes, on average. They’ve spent all year measuring it down to the second and finally met the goal.

But does ABC Company’s internal measurement actually correspond to the way their customers perceive response time? What if, in a survey, their customers rate the response time poorly? They’ve spent all year achieving the goals they set, and it’s still not good enough.

There may be other factors that can prompt another look at the way Company ABC approaches response time. Perhaps their service employees always begin calls apologizing for not responding sooner, even if they do it within 3 minutes. Though well-intentioned, those apologies shape customers’ perceptions which, of course, become reality.

On the other hand, maybe customers are rating ABC Company’s response time as excellent. With this rating, they know their efforts to optimize response time have paid off.

Using customer satisfaction surveys to gather experience data

If you own or manage a business, you have probably formed your opinion on surveys. You’ve seen them work (or not). Maybe you’ve decided they’re a “necessary evil” but you don’t put much stock in them.

However, done correctly, a survey can be one of the best sources of customer experience data that you can’t get from any other source. The trick is to create a survey that people actually want to engage with and returns insightful experience data.

Mastering the customer survey

Surveying your customers is an art. It takes skill, practice, refinement, and intuition. If you stick to these best practices, you’ll be well on your way to capturing the experience data your business needs. Here are 6 tips to help you:

1. Decide what you want to know

Creating a good survey is kind of like all those tests you took in school. Your teacher crafted the questions to elicit certain types of responses. Likewise, you can craft your customer satisfaction survey questions to reveal exactly what you want to know about your customers.

That information will depend, of course, on your business. Let’s say you sell a product. Do you want to know how people feel about product quality? Shipping cost? Packaging? Think about all of the factors that make up a customer’s experience with your product. They are all possible touch-points you can target.

Let’s say your company provides a service. You might want customer data on your service quality or employees’ professionalism. You’ll rarely (if ever) get answers to questions you don’t ask, so make sure your team takes your most valuable data into consideration.

Similarly, not all customer data may be useful to you. If you’re unnecessarily asking too much, you’re going to overload your customer and they may bounce from your survey.

2. Experiment with question types

There are a million ways to ask questions poorly. But there are only a few ways to do it well. When writing your customer satisfaction survey questions, format matters. For example, asking open-ended questions won’t get you specific answers from most people.

You might find that a question like “What did you think about our service?” is too open to interpretation. If you’ve decided that you really want to know about your field-service employees’ punctuality, ask specifically about that.

Multiple-choice survey questions can help direct customers to the kind of feedback you’re looking for. Don’t make your questions too subjective. There should be some kind of measurement that resonates with your customer base and your internal team. In other words, everyone should agree on the definitions of the terms you’re using.

3. Phrase your questions carefully

Poorly-composed surveys can hurt you. If it feels like a robot created the survey, you won’t have the opportunity to forge an emotional connection with your customer.

This is the key point and the hidden power behind surveys. They give you an opportunity to step away from the faceless identity of a company. Properly done, surveys show that, like your customers, you’re just people trying to do the best job you can.

So use language that reflects your company. Write like a person. And think about what kinds of questions you would like to be asked. After all, companies probably send you customer satisfaction surveys all the time. Ask yourself which ones resonate with you, then analyze the way they’re constructed.

In the survey, you should also be honest about your goals. After all, you’re trying to create a better customer experience, not just gather data. Tell your customers about your intentions and assure them that their answers not only matter but can help improve their future experience.

Andrew Reid, writing in Entrepreneur, says that “surveys need to feel less like surveys and should feel more like conversations. Use tools that deliver shorter and more fun experiences to improve the quality of experience data you get from your customers.”

4. Consider the best time to send the survey

Knowing when you send your customers a survey is central to getting the kind of feedback you want. Sending out a feedback survey the minute they’ve received a product, for example, will not be helpful. They haven’t had the time to evaluate its use.

On the other hand, it might make sense to send a more timely survey about a service you’ve just provided, while it’s still top-of-mind for your customer.

Finding the best time to send a survey is a process of trial and error. Experiment with a few different times and test your response rates.

5. Don’t offer gift cards as compensation

This tip is controversial. Many companies will say that the only way they can get a good survey response rate is through offering a gift card. It makes sense to reward someone for completing a survey. But there are other forms of rewards you can offer.

Consider offering a discount on your customer’s next purchase. That will entice them to continue their engagement with you. Further, it will prove your effort to provide maximum value for what you’re offering them in the first place.

By contrast, gift cards (especially to other stores) can certainly be carrots that boost response rates. But is the person who responds for compensation really interested in answering your questions thoughtfully or honestly?

Remember that you don’t just want a good response rate. You want valuable customer experience data that you can actually use.

6. Choose your survey software carefully

You could have the best survey in the world. But without the right software to send, collect, and store the data from surveys, you’ll be lost.

Or, as Anjul Bhambhri says, “It must be hosted on the cloud and fit within [your] existing enterprise architecture. It must have capabilities to stitch a holistic view of the customer leveraging centralized and virtualized data.”

The more accessible your customer data is, the easier it will be for you to start making sense of it. Surveys that go unaddressed just result in a waste of your time and effort.

Make sure, in choosing your customer survey software, you find what works best for you, according to your needs.

Conclusion

Gathering experience data from customer satisfaction surveys can mean the difference between one-time and lifelong customers. Great surveys not only give your company insightful data, but they also allow you to forge a stronger personal connection with your customers.

While the process of crafting the perfect survey requires time and trial, it can be worthless if you don’t have the right software system to properly gather data and create action items from it. With the right considerations, you’ll find that it won’t take long to master the customer satisfaction survey.

Tag: customer satisfaction survey