Better customer service is equal to enhanced brand loyalty
“What do my customers want?” This is the question that every organization today is concerned with. Modern businesses have already understood the fact that coming up with great products and services is only one side of the coin. An amazing customer experience bundled with great products and services is what keeps your business ahead of competitors. Better customer experience higher is customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction or brand loyalty?
Nevertheless, having satisfied customers is undoubtedly the biggest achievement of any business. But customer satisfaction is reactive, it is backward-looking. You are looking backward when you want to find out customer satisfaction.
NPS campaigns, customer feedback surveys, and the voice of customer surveys are mostly targeted to understand customer satisfaction. To increase brand loyalty you need a forward-looking approach, which is predictive. You need to know what customers will do in the future, will they continue buying or subscribing to your product? Will they churn out? Are they willing to recommend your brand to their friend or colleague? Will they speak about your product on their social media accounts?
The costs to acquire new customers is about 20 to 25 percent more than retaining them. Additionally, 89 percent of customers switch brands due to bad customer experience. The interesting fact is, customer service related problems are the major problems resulting in increased churn out.
Almost every business owner spends resources for providing basic customer service. But, improved customer experience will earn you brand loyalty. QuestionPro’s CX platform comes with all the necessary features you need, to assess customer satisfaction levels and keep track of brand loyalty.
Difference between customer experience and customer service
Once Bain and Company carried out a survey, asking participant organizations to rate their customer experience quality. To their surprise, almost 80% of the organizations replied saying they were delivering superior customer experience. Contradictorily, only 8% of the customers belonging to these organizations committed to receiving superior customer experience.
The results were devastating for both researchers as well as the organizations. So, what went wrong and from where did the organizations get the misconception that they are offering above par customer experience. Eventually, the truth was out. Many organizations participated in that survey failed to distinguish between customer service and customer experience.
Customer service is assistance or advice provided to the clients or customers for products or services they purchase from you. Customer experience, on the contrary, covers a broad concept of the customer journey across the organization which takes into consideration every single touchpoint between a customer and your business. When we speak of the customer journey, customer service is also one of the parts or a customer touchpoint of this journey.
Understanding customer experience by a case study
Let us look at an example to understand these concepts. Back in 2013, Harvard Business Journal conducted a study on Customer Experience. What they found after a few months of researching a popular cable business was surprising.
This cable business in question was sending out regular customer surveys after every interaction with each of their customers. That is after a cable technician would install their product inside a home, the company would email the customer a survey asking how the installation process went. This customer satisfaction survey strategy always yielded fantastic results. They would consistently get 4.5 out of 5 stars for their customer service.
They also wanted to improve retention. So their C-Suite decided to send out surveys at random to their customers. The surveys were created with a motive to ask their customers about their overall experience with the company. This was a completely different approach for a company that was used to send a short rating question survey only once and that too after installation.
To their wildest surprise, the survey results astonished them. In the survey that particular cable company received an average of 2.5 out of 5 stars for their customer experience. This is what puzzled the researchers. How does a customer, who felt like they received amazing customer service, turn around and say they’ve had a terrible overall experience with the company?
Reason for Detraction?
This happened because the cable company failed to understand the difference between customer service and customer experience. The company was simply dressing up customer’s issue instead of healing it. In other words, the company was only being reactive instead of being proactive.
Customer Service is reactive, whereas Customer Experience is proactive. A business is reactive to its customers when it is not preventing the customer issues, but are just trying to solve issues once it has surfaced. On the other hand, when a business is proactive with towards solving customer grievances, it is actually taking time to understand what issues might happen and prevents them from happening. In short, it was only providing great customer service and not customer experience. And in return, they earn the loyalty of their customers.
How can Survey Software help?
Not any survey software, QuestionPro’s CX platform is designed being mindful of these differences. Our survey software not only provides insights to your customers but also equipped with features to measure your brand loyalty. If you can measure it, you can improve it. Our 24X7 support team can help you understand your customer journey and identify the touchpoints of customer interaction with your brand.
From the stage of Awareness till Customer advocacy, QuestionPro’s survey software has different features to help you accurately calculate customer’s brand loyalty. We also analyze the feedback over time and help you track the changes in customer sentiment. Our survey software can also be conveniently integrated with popular CRM you might be already using. Our mobile application is capable of collecting data through online and offline surveys keeping you in touch with all of your customer communities that might be hard to reach online. The survey software comes with options to add your personal touch and send out branded surveys and allows promoting positive feedback via integrated social media buttons.
Many organizations may be ignoring or failing to understand the difference, and this created a delivery gap. It is extremely difficult to understand what customers want and build good relations with them. With the modern-day competition in every industry, retaining brand loyalty is only going to get harder. Our survey software can help you close the tactical and strategic loops of customer feedback. QuestionPro is your technology partner helping you be proactive rather than reactive.
Looking to deliver an exceptional customer experience with QuestionPro CX? Discover more about how to delight your customer at every touchpoint and turn them into brand advocates.
