Month: March 2020

Customers expect more from businesses today than ever before. If you’re an owner, you’ve seen that in action: A customer whips out a phone to tweet or text about an experience, perhaps even as it’s happening. What you may not have seen, however, is just how much that one encounter can affect your ROI, or return on investment.

How Does Customer Experience Affect ROI?

Customer experience affects ROI because it affects profits. Happy customers spend more money, act as brand evangelists and return to your business more often. Unhappy customers obviously don’t do those things — but their impact doesn’t stop there. 

Let’s start with the good news:

Satisfied Customers

Good customer service is the single most important factor for consumers in developing a relationship of trust with a business. In fact, 42-62% of consumers return for a second purchase after having a good customer experience.

Dissatisfied Customers

When customers are dissatisfied, however, they tend to be more vocal. A customer who has a negative experience:

• Is highly likely to share that experience by leaving a bad review,
• Will typically tell 9-15 other people about that experience, and 
• Won’t do business with the company again 91% of the time.

That’s bad for your brand, your bottom line, your ROI and your company morale. 

How Far Can One Bad Review Really Go?

Farther than you think. Inc. found that it takes roughly 40 positive customer experiences to undo the damage of one negative review. 

You can read how they came to that conclusion here, but the gist is that: 

• Unhappy customers leave reviews far more often than happy ones, and
• Ratings are calculated as averages, so 
• One bad review can easily tank your rating.

How Does A Bad Review Affect Profit?

ROI is hard to measure, so we’ve developed a calculator to show you how much one dissatisfied customer can cost.

Say your business has 15 locations and your average annual revenue per customer is $125. If you have one dissatisfied customer who walks out of your business each month, that can create an annual loss of $22,500. That means one unhappy person equals weeks or months of advertising down the drain.

How Do You Fix It?

The execution isn’t simple, but the solution is: Create better customer experiences. Make sure you have a way to find out when problems arise, and respond quickly when they do.

With Mentor, all of that is built in. When a customer has a problem, they scan a QR code displayed in-store to leave their feedback. The Mentor platform prioritizes that feedback (positive, negative, or neutral) and alerts your team so they can address it ASAP — sometimes right on the spot. If you need to, you can also follow up via text, email or call.

Why Does It Work?

Because your team not only gets the opportunity to fix a customer’s bad experience on the spot — they get the opportunity to turn that experience into something positive. Loyal customers are made one personal, positive interaction at a time. It’s up to you to make those interactions happen. 

Contact us to learn how we can help you start doing that today. 

It’s vital to listen to what your customers are saying. In 2015, US companies lost $62 billion a year because of poor customer service. That’s a ton of money left on the table because businesses didn’t make an effort to give customers what they want. Don’t let yourself fall into this hole. Here’s how you can use customer feedback to tailor your customer service strategy.

How to Organize Your Data

Your primary goal in obtaining customer feedback is to garner an understanding of the customer experience. Once you’ve collected enough customer feedback, you’ll need to find a way to parse through it. Start by separating it into feedback based on your products, your customer service, and your marketing techniques.

• Product feedback might include things like problems with a new release or requests for a new feature.
• Customer service feedback lets you piece together commonly asked questions so you can see widespread issues and address them head-on.
• Marketing feedback lets you see where your advertising campaigns might be misleading, which you can use in the iterative process.

Once you’ve organized everything into three simple categories, go a step further by giving each item a code. For example, you might want a tag for email issues, incorrect product data, or compatibility problems. This helps you quickly see what your customers’ most common issues are so you can start addressing them.

Focusing on the most common issues allows you to make as many people happy as possible, but don’t completely neglect smaller items. Even the smallest group of customers have a voice, which can damage your reputation if you don’t listen.

Putting Feedback Into Action

The most crucial step of customer feedback is actually putting it into action. This can be a little tricky, but consider taking the following steps to keep the customer happy.

• Train your employees on how to respond. If you discover an issue with your software, make sure all your employees are aware of it. Nothing is more frustrating than a customer chatting with a knowledgeable rep and then following up later with a rep who has no idea what is going on.
• Identify which channels are the most popular. Chances are, after organizing your data, you’ll quickly begin to see which of your customer service channels are most popular. While chats and emails are becoming more common, research shows that 70% of customers still appreciate being able to call for a quick response. If you’re throwing more and more of your budget into developing the perfect chat response bot but a majority of your customers are still calling in, think about reallocating funds.
• Test new follow-up strategies. Perhaps your customers have indicated unhappiness with your service. Rather than taking that at its word, try following up with customers after a few weeks after their purchase to see how things are going. Consider email surveys or even a personalized phone call to ask if their level of satisfaction has gone up or down.
• Revise FAQs and other informational content. If your customers are asking a lot of basic questions about your service, perhaps your FAQs are lacking. Beef up this content so customers can find their answers on their own. This gives them more autonomy and also frees up your customer service team to handle more pressing issues.

Always Review and Revise

As with any new changes you implement, it’s crucial to follow up and see if they’re making a positive difference. See if you can ask the same customers who provided your original data to rate the improvements you’ve made. If they still aren’t happy, keep at it. Customer service is an iterative process that constantly requires your attention.Need more help taking your customer service to the next level? Consider Mentor, a fully-fledged service that can help transform your business.