Ultimately, it is the relationship that customers buy, not the product. It's an amazing concept, but one that has been proven time and time again. If the service is really great, customers will put up with a few technological glitches, will understand about outages or shortages, and will stay with a company that genuinely cares about giving them the best they have.
This doesn't mean that a shoddy product is okay. It simply means that, if all else is equal, and it often is, then what tips the scale is the service. It makes sense, then, that a key strategy in creating a loyal customer base is to define what you believe a customer relationship should look like. Is it a live person on a phone every time? Is it a service technician that is always availabe? It is definitely a sales staff. But is it also the ability to communicate customer needs online and get a quick response? It can be all of those and more!
How Do You Measure the Quality of a Customer Relationship?
Let's face it - most people don't have the time or inclination to
fill out lengthy questionnaires. So, how do you measure customer
service success? First, again, you define it. Does success mean a
percentage of customers that have been with the company for a
specific number of years? Does it mean the percentage of new
customers a company gets from referrals? (Does the company know
how to capture that data?) A good CRM solutions software provider
can work with a company to create an environment in which the
information is obtained and used to great advantage.
Once a company has a grasp of what types of interactions their customers regularly experience, they can start to define the success of those interactions using one or two questions at the end of an interaction. For example, "How was our service today?" It is important to take into account every transaction type. A customer who likes a customer service representative may not like the gyrations she has to go through to communicate online.
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