Hey there!
This month’s TPM’s Take focuses on evaluating and improving your customers’ experiences.
We highlight some interesting reading on why customer experience is an important metric for determining business success. We also cover what you need to know about designing appropriate customer journeys to provide you with the data you need to understand and improve upon your customer’s experience. Finally, we provide a few tips to help you reach out to your repeat customers and show them that you continue to value their business.
3 MSP Metrics (Beyond Profitability) That Indicate Success
http://mspmentor.net/blog/3-msp-metrics-beyond-profitability-indicate-success
For any MSP business owner, measuring data is a key indicator of business success. But what information is crucial in this regard? Profitability is key of course, for without profitability, no business can be considered a success. However, profitability alone does not provide the whole picture about an organization’s long-term success. There are three additional indicators to inform strategic decision-making and gauge lasting success:
- Customer satisfaction: It’s not enough to boast about securing new deals; it is just as important that your customers boast about working with your company. A simple way to gauge customer satisfaction is to ask your customers through surveys. Have your Professional Service Automation tool assist with these surveys so that one is sent to a customer after a ticket has closed. The insight you gain will prove very valuable to determining your organization’s future success.
- Employee satisfaction: It’s not just enough to keep your customers satisfied. Without the right employees, sustainable success will be hard to come by. Keep your employees happy by ensuring that each one has specific work goals and a clear path for growth.
- Offer multiple solutions: The final area to consider is whether or not your business is able to address a wide range of business challenges. Doing so will help boost customer retention rates. For example, if you are an MSP that sells backup and disaster recovery solutions, you would be wise to bundle these solutions with network security and other complementary solutions in order to meet customer needs and strengthen existing relationships.
TPM’s Take
Gauging customer satisfaction isn’t rocket science but it is often a challenge for many organizations. To do better, companies must understand what the client needs, probe their feelings, and speak the same “language” in order to really resonate. Our blog post, Understanding Customer Needs & Expectations in the Cloud breaks down each of these three key areas in order to help you get to the heart of customer needs and expectations. Bonus: these tips apply to boosting employee satisfaction as well!
Designing the Ultimate Customer Experience in Real Time
Sophisticated product features may give your business a head start but it’s customer experience that seals the deal. As different competitors clamour for customer attention, a positive customer experience is the “it” factor that helps close deals. Perhaps more importantly, a poor customer experience will do more than drive customers away — it can result in significant business, financial, and reputational risk. Executing on this positive customer experience requires that businesses understand their customers’ motivations and behaviour at various touchpoints. Doing so will help provide immediate insights into customer decision-making and provide valuable data for an organization’s focus and direction.
Designing the right customer journey fundamentally requires that businesses create consistent brand experiences across channels. You must also strive to deliver an integrated channel experience by overcoming legacy issues, technological weaknesses, and potential departmental resistance to such integration. In doing so, you need to have a clear and consolidated view into your customers across all products, channels and interactions — a feat that can be incredibly difficult to deliver on without real-time analytics to work with.
TPM’s Take
Creating and monitoring the customer journey can help you drive greater brand loyalty. It demonstrates an acute awareness of what your client wants from your service, including insights into their decision-making and preferred products and services. Such data is absolutely invaluable in today’s customer-first world. However, if you fail to use the right information to create such a journey, you could risk alienating your customer base. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with our blog post, How a Customer Journey Funnel Qualifies Leads. Check it out!
The Immense Value of Repeat Customers
http://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/immense-value-repeat-customers-01899616
Businesses should not exclusively focus on traffic generation and conversion at the cost of a very important segment: repeat customers. This customer segment is already sold on your products and services. As such, they require far less of your attention — and your budget — than a first time customer.
First, repeat customers have a high lifetime value. They invest significantly in your products and services by making frequent purchases, sometimes at a higher price point. Second, given their existing relationship with your organization, it is easier to give them what they want thereby ensuring a high level of customer satisfaction. Finally, satisfied repeat customers are less likely to shop around — the safest bet is the best bet, and defaulting to an existing relationship that works is a valuable outcome.
Nonetheless, it is imperative to proactively improve repeat customers’ experiences with your business in order to boost retention and encourage positive word-of-mouth referrals.
TPM’s Take
Repeat customers may no longer require convincing to buy your products and services but you shouldn’t take them for granted. One way to maintain a strong connection with your existing customers is to engage in email marketing segmentation and personalization. According to a DMA study, segmented and targeted emails generate a whopping 58% of all revenue for companies engaged in email marketing. Check out our blog post, Using Email Marketing Personalization to Boost Conversions to learn more.
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