At a time when customer choice and empowerment is at its peak, a company’s constant endeavor and focus on aligning its strategies in accordance with customer preferences has assumed utmost importance. The wealth of data in the form of customer feedback has the potential to decide businesses’ fates. However, it requires the application of appropriate steps to ensure the translation of feedback into overall customer satisfaction. We’ll be elaborating on few simple methods you can adopt to develop a strong and satisfied customer base.
Gain knowledge of customer needs and demands
A customer lies at the heart of any business venture. All the decisions, strategies, and developments are contingent on his needs and demands. Therefore, understanding customer experience and heeding his voice need to be made the utmost priority. To gauge customer response, companies generally rely on customer feedback forms, market surveys, complaints etc. However, these paint only a partial picture of the whole. While nitpicking on only some of the most obvious questions and issues, there’s a possibility of missing the forest for the trees and the company might still incur losses without realizing why. This is where the importance of social media analytics is realized.
The coordinated working of human expertise and technology is seen to reap astonishing results. High-end analytical servers are capable of extracting enormous amounts of relevant social media data and processing them to produce an array of results presenting the whole view of the ecosystem. Having these results analyzed by a team of experts generates more accurate and valuable insights and trends.
Create better products and services based on customer insights
Now, social media isn’t just confined to being a communication channel. Its purpose and utility has diversified and is continuously evolving. With users increasingly being vested with more and more power, we are witnessing an unprecedented level of interaction. This has called forth an extensive collaborative process where users of a product are playing an active part in its development.
Many new ideas are generated every day through discussion pages, posts and tweets. One simple strategy is to closely monitor all of these conversations and track customers, competitors and competitors’ customers for ROI and key insights into popular trends and ideas. This way you can get to contemplate on what works and what doesn’t and make tweaks to your existing product development accordingly.
If you are on the initial research stage of product development, social media insights can help you zero down to one specific idea which will serve as a foundation for an entire process. You can inculcate existing popular features and also add new desired ones based on your target users’ opinions. This way, you’ll have a clear edge on your competitors and also a chance to attract their customers to your refined products or services.
Offer great support
Customer intelligence is used for effective customer relationships and support of strategic decision making. It leads to improved quality of response. The real-time capability of social media means that you get time to pass the issue to the appropriate department in the organization, elicit a response and convey it back to the customer. The quality and time duration of the response determine the customer’s satisfaction quotient.
Always being there for customers, providing personal assistance and customizing help to resolve their specific queries goes a long way in enriching the overall engagement experience of the users.
Great customer support is determined by response strategy, channel strategy and a proactive customer relationship management. It can be achieved by:
- Understanding customer sentiments and emotions and connecting with them.
- Using the appropriate strategy for different channels of response depending on the nature of the query and customer demand.
- Proactively searching for new customer engagement opportunities and turning passive customers into active ones.
Create meaningful customer engagement
Today, social media is no longer the prerogative of just a few select individuals in an organization as it used to be in the past. Now, in order to proliferate their presence companies want as much customer engagement as possible. To achieve this, an optimal social media marketing strategy needs to be put in place. While crafting this strategy factors such as industry, target customer demographics, communication channel etc. need to be kept in mind.
According to a study by Altimeter, four key elements were identified as crucial for engagement with your customers:
- Emphasize quality, not just quantity
- To scale engagement make social media a part of everyone’s job
- Doing it all may not be for you – but you must do something
- Find your sweet spot
Following these simple steps, you can use the customer feedback - direct or indirect - to offer great customer satifaction!
