When it comes to increasing profit, companies know that it’s much easier to gain a greater share of an existing customer’s spend than it is to find a new customer.
But what if your customer retention is lacking? You can’t grow customer spend if you can’t hang on to your customers!
Do you ever wonder why some customers leave and some stay? What are the things that make your company more attractive than your competition?
Companies seeking to improve their profit in an increasingly competitive market look for strategies that differentiate their business from the competition. Digging deep and creating actionable strategies that you can put to work right away increases your company’s profits through customer-centric innovation. However, before implementing strategies for improving customer service, you must ask the right questions and get reliable answers in order to create a data-driven strategy in the first place.
Is Your Company Really Customer-Centric?
Despite the increasing recognition of the importance of becoming customer-centric, research suggests that many companies fall short in their ability to actually be customer-centric. A 2014 survey of senior marketing executives showed that, although 73% of respondents viewed customer-centric focus as critical to their success and that of their organizations, only 14% said that customer-centricity could be considered a “hallmark” of their companies and only 11% thought their customers would characterize the companies as customer-centric.
The Two Questions You Have to Ask
Why does this gap exist? We think the key lies in two questions that you must answer to ensure customer-centric innovation and high-level customer service:
- What do your customers want?
- How satisfied are they with the extent to which you’re giving them what they want?
Finding the Answers
Companies need to answer those two core questions with hard, quantitative data. We know that most of you rely on anecdotal data from visits with customers, trade show conversations, and feedback from your sales personnel to know what your customers think.
Although your salespeople would love to convince you that they can answer these questions for you, the reality is that there is simply no substitute for hard data that show what your customers want and how well you’re giving them what they want.
The Opportunity Generator™ and the Feedback Generator™ provide those data, allowing you to serve your customers better and support continuous process improvement. As a bonus, you gain invaluable information for your marketing — information that most of your competitors won’t have.
This information — what your customers want and their satisfaction with your performance — is the foundation for any customer service or marketing strategy. With these data you can be sure that your strategy for innovation and growth is truly customer-centric. Additionally, the continuous feedback provided by the Opportunity Generator and the Feedback Generator keeps your service on-target and provides data for continual innovation along the way that will set you apart from the rest of the market and increase your profit dramatically.
