As the head of a company, customer satisfaction is your top priority. Yet with so many contact points throughout the process, perfecting every piece can be a challenge.
To ensure customer satisfaction, you need to attract the right potential clients, gain their trust, provide them with a high level of service, and finally be there for any comments or questions that may arise throughout the process, even long after the sale has been made. That’s a pretty tough order to carry through with.
Because at any point in the process, there is always the potential for breaking down. You can have the best salesperson in the world, but if they experience a poorly trained customer service representative and get frustrated early in the process, the relationship may be damaged beyond repair.
There are many ways that technology can impact what your prospects and customers think about your company as a whole. Here are a few ways to improve your process with the use of technology:
Start By Talking With Your Customers To Find Out What They Want
How many times throughout a week do you get the opportunity to fill out a survey or offer your review of how well a company is doing? Almost every day. You’ll find cards lying on your table at your favorite restaurants, and you’ll be redirected to a survey page every time you make a purchase through the website of your favorite online store. Customer satisfaction surveys are everywhere. But here’s the thing; no matter how often you fill one out or what you have to say, how often do you see a change implemented?
In many cases, these surveys are simply touching the surface of what people truly want. They give people an avenue to vent if they’ve had a bad experience, while most people that are satisfied simply walk away without leaving a comment at all.
If you really want to know how to improve your customer service process, ask deeper questions with your customers. As an IT department, your end user may be departments within the company, or they may be with prospects and customers that will ultimately bring in revenue. Determine all the different paths your customers will take, then speak directly with your customers to determine what needs they have. Do your current processes work well? Or are there some visible disconnects that should be solved? What expectations do they have before they do business with you? How well would they rate the entire process over all? By getting into the minds of your end user, you can often come up with viable options for what they would truly like to use, and what would mean the most to them as they connect with your company throughout the process.
Improve Your Processes
Once you find your disconnects, its time to put new systems in place. Yet that doesn’t mean its time for another system to be added to the process, or another tool to be tacked on to an existing system. Instead, it may mean taking a step backwards and reevaluating the systems you already have in place.
Technology changes faster than any of us can keep up with. New programs are added and updated every day. What you considered to be the right solution even a few months ago may now be archaic and out of date. And when bandaged together with several other third party systems, you could be creating more of a mess than a viable solution. As you find out what your customers really want from you, determine if you can easily provide the solution with what you currently have in place. If its not an easy solution, it may be time to re-evaluate your strategy and make bigger changes to your system. And here’s the good news: in some cases it may save you money. Instead of retrofitting several third party systems together, a new and more viable system may be the perfect solution, saving you money every single month.
Repeat Again And Again
Customer satisfaction is always relative and can change quickly over time. What can seem easy today can become clumsy and outdated within a few short months. At a minimum, review your customer satisfaction measures every three to five years to make sure you are delivering the right service in the right manner to meet your customers’ demands.
While customers come and go, and technology changes every day, there is one thing that remains: the need to have a solid system and a successful strategy in place. If you haven’t evaluated your customer service process in a while, or if you are wondering how you can use technology to make the process more efficient for both you and your customers, it may be time for an assessment. Lets talk.
