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There is no better measure of your company's overall health and growth potential than customer satisfaction.
Satisfied customers mean word of mouth growth. They mean that your product or service has significant, measurable benefits. They mean your company can grow into an even bigger and more profitable company. Measuring and monitoring your own health is an ongoing process, as is the health of your company. You can't just check your company's health one time and then forget about it. Better is an ongoing, long-term process that, if done correctly, will yield long-term insights and rewards.
How aware are you of your business health? Do you know how your customers think of your product or service this month? Or do you rely on statistics from six months, a year, or several years ago? Below we have explained why measuring customer satisfaction is a long-term process and how you can use Callexa Feedback to assess not only exactly how customers think about your product, but also what they think of your company in the long term, because feedback changes over time.
As your customers grow, their needs change
In the B2B area, your customers rarely remain constant. Businesses grow over time, and if they use your product or service as a central part of their business, requirements will very likely change over time.
This is especially common in the tech industry, where growth can happen overnight and a company that had 1,000 customers last week will have 5,000 customers the next week. Continuous measurement is just as important as products can quickly become out of date. A product that is currently in demand can quickly become obsolete, especially if it is in a rapidly growing market segment with rapidly evolving requirements.
It is inevitable that your customers will change. The speed of change depends primarily on your industry. As your customers grow and their needs change, it's important that you keep track of their thoughts and feedback over time.
If you continuously measure customer satisfaction, you can stay up to date on how your customers are feeling at all times. Instead of working with data that was collected months ago to measure customer needs and sentiment, an ongoing survey process always provides you with the latest data exactly when you need it most.
With this data, you can identify new needs and growing trends before they reach the point where your business could be affected. Instead of reacting too late to a changing industry, stay up to date and deliver what your customers need before it gets critical.
As your business grows, so does your product and service
Your customers won't just grow over time. As your business is successful and your own customer base grows over time, your ability to ship your product changes too. Your approach to marketing and service is likely to change as you adapt to the new size of your business.
This could lead to an improvement in the customer experience and satisfaction for your company. But it could also do exactly the opposite and lead to dissatisfied customers. Without a regular record of your customers' thoughts and feedback, it's impossible to know. Every company has to compromise as it grows. If these tradeoffs are affecting your ability to deliver the right product or service to your customers, it is important to be aware of their reaction.
If you measure customer satisfaction continuously over the long term, you can identify the areas that have so far gone unnoticed due to the growth. If these weaknesses frustrate or annoy customers, you can quickly respond to the feedback and implement new processes to win them back.
If you ignore customer feedback as your business grows, it can quickly happen that the entire customer base is replaced by another. Measure, track and respond to feedback and you will keep your existing customer base satisfied, loyal customers in addition to a large number of new customers.
As your market matures, new competitors increase the stakes
The more competitive your offering and marketing, the more important customer feedback is in order to stay one step ahead of your competitors.
It's easy to be the best product in a small market with no competition. It's far more difficult to be the best product out there when 10, 20, or 30 competitors are working hard to poach as many of your customers as possible. In industries with low barriers to entry, a single better offer from a competitor is enough to disrupt your business and cause you to lose customers. This is especially problematic if you are offering a product with a low customer investment. If it's easy for customers to switch from your product to a competitor's offering, there is a real chance they will eventually.
The key to avoiding this situation is customer feedback. Feedback can help you stay one step ahead of your competitors by identifying and addressing needs before the others can. In addition, you can gain a deeper awareness of what your customers really value in your product category.
Continuous feedback tells you how your customers are reacting to the products offered by your competitors, not just what they think of your product. This data is very valuable for creating a product that not only acquires customers, but also binds them in the long term.
Recommended Reading: Our blog article “Unlocking Growth Secrets. Mastering Your Net Promoter Score” covers how to stay one step ahead of your competitors.
The less you talk to your customers, the more you need NPS®
Of course, some companies have more customer interaction than others. An agency providing a service has frequent contact with its customers, while a product-based B2C company is unlikely to talk to its customers on a daily basis.
Companies with frequent customer interactions have less need for continuous feedback because concerns and questions are communicated in a natural way. However, in organizations with little or no customer interaction, systems like NPS are essential for measuring customer satisfaction.
With Callexa Feedback, you can automate customer feedback using a simple NPS survey. Use the Net Promoter Score to collect, analyze, and act on feedback from your customers to improve customer loyalty and grow your business.
Reading recommendation: If this article helped you and you would like to find out more about the Net Promoter Score, continue reading here: “The Net Promoter Score – Basics and Areas of Application”