The business of different sizes and types are all investing heavily in customer satisfaction solutions all over the world. Especially in Dubai and other parts of UAE, the business is competing very hard to satisfy their customers. It doesn’t matter whether you are a local store, a small shop, a medium-sized enterprise, or a large corporation, customer happiness and customer satisfaction are equally important for all types and sizes of companies. Businesses are trying to improve their services and products, the customer journey, and customer experience. Unless and until a business understands clearly what customers want and what they think of the brand, customer satisfaction is extremely hard to achieve. The customer opinion about the brand, its business practices, and its services/products, is extremely important to understand customer’s needs, demands, and market trends. The marketers not only in Dubai but all over the world are struggling these days to satisfy their customers. Businesses are also investing a huge sum of their hard-earned profit in customer satisfaction solutions to ensure a long-term relationship with their customers.
Businesses clearly understand the importance of customer satisfaction but most of the time businesses are unable to understand why feedback is important to attain higher customer satisfaction? Well, let us assume you are a marketer or a business owner or a general manager, and you have improved your products and services, you have installed a brand new IT infrastructure, you have started offering digital services, you have improved customer interaction with your staff by various training programs and you did whatever you thought was necessary, but the question remains, how would you quantify all your efforts? How would you know if all those efforts are making your customers happy? What do your customers think about all those efforts? The simplest answer is to ‘ask them directly’. And a digital customer feedback system is the best method to do so. These days are long gone, when your sales staff or employees were going after customers and asking them to fill in long feedback forms on paper. Today the world is technically more advanced and digitalized. People simply just don’t do that anymore. But if you can provide them a digital medium to interact, they will happily express their feelings and experience with your brand.
Here are some benefits of a customer feedback system:
1. Listen to Your Customers’ Opinion
These days the marketers and businesses are ditching the old traditional marketing techniques. The customer experience and customer satisfaction is far more important than ever before. In order to improve your customer’s experience, you must let them talk and you must listen to them. Give them an impression that you are eager to hear their opinion. Customer Feedback System provides a direct channel to your customers to express their feelings and thoughts. When your customers know that you care for them and you value their opinion they will become more loyal and more flexible towards your brand.
Personalized surveys and feedbacks are very important and can provide a very accurate and comprehensive understanding of customer’s mindsets. It is important to know what they like and what they dislike, it is vital to understand what your customers are expecting from you. If your customers think they are unheard they will immediately start thinking about other options. If they have the assurance that the business is eager to learn and resolve the problems they are facing they will remain loyal. A customer feedback system provides a chance to build trust and loyalty among customers and businesses. The data collected from the feedback doesn’t only help businesses to identify the areas of improvement but also leaves a very positive impression on your customers. These days the customers are very attracted towards personalized experience, once you ensure them that you will listen to them they will start getting attached to your business and brand.
2. Let Your Customer Know they are Important
A customer feedback system also gives an impression that the business value its customers and their opinions. This leaves a very great impression on customers’ minds. If they think they are valuable they will remain loyal to the brand as well. This is very important for customer retention that a brand conveys that message to their customers that they are very valuable to them, it builds a sense of importance. In Dubai and in fact, all around the UAE the customers’ expectations and behavior have been changed rapidly over the past few years. The two major factors that impacted the market are the competition, the entire UAE market is very competitive and growing, and the second factor is customer awareness, customers are far more aware and more demanding now. The customer feedback system is one of the most effective ways to increase customer trust and customer engagements, when a customer is proactively asked to opine or express their feelings and then adequate actions are being taken to satisfy the customer, this makes them happy and satisfied.
When a business regularly asks their customers about their opinion and then takes action, the customers feel more connected to the brand and think that the business is actively resolving their issues and problems and prioritize them. This improves customer retention and customer loyalty too. The customers with such experiences tend to remain with the brand even if they had a few bad experiences over time. And that is very important for customer retention. A sustainable and loyal customer base is a key to success. Without customer retention, a brand or business can’t survive. Their profitability will decrease, their marketing budget will be increased and their growth will be halted. So, maintaining a great, personalized, and trustworthy relationship with your customers is the key to success in the modern digitalized and internet-driven world.
3. Measure Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is literally the direct measurement of the entire performance of the business. If your customers are not happy and satisfied then that means you are lagging somewhere. Here in Dubai and all around the UAE, the general population is very advanced and technologically sound, the trends are media-driven, the internet plays a very important role in a common man’s life. This is the reason the customer’s expectations from their brands are also very high. In such scenarios, customer happiness and customer satisfaction are extremely important for a business to sustain and grow. There are several methods to measure customer satisfaction using a customer feedback system, some of the most popular are:
- CSAT Score: This CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Score category has general questions with predefined answers, or smiley emoticons, or 0 to 10 scale and such.
- CES Score: The CES Score or Customer Effort Score is used to understand how difficult or easy the customer journey was in the eye of the customers.
- NPS Score: One of the most important customer feedback categories is NPS Score or Net Promoter Score, it asks the customers how likely they will going to suggest or recommend your brand to others.
- General Satisfaction: This is usually a random question about their experience, and is used to improve the customer engagement in the customer feedback or survey.
- Open-Ended Question: The open-ended question is usually a text box where customers can express themselves freely by writing their suggestions, feedback, compliments, or complaints.
These are just the basic categories of the questions in a standard customer feedback system and these are the most commonly used questions to measure customer satisfaction. These questions will help businesses in understanding various aspects of the customer interaction with the brand and this data can be further utilized as business intelligence input to make future strategies to ensure higher customer retention and growth. Moreover, businesses can directly ask them about their interaction with the employees and later businesses can easily take steps to improve employee performance which will directly impact customer satisfaction and customer experience.
4. Improve Products and Services
The customer feedback system is a great tool to understand market trends, customers’ behavior, and their expectations. Using a customer feedback system businesses can directly ask them to opine on various aspects of the product they have purchased or the service they have availed. The businesses can ask them directly to opine on different specs and features of the products and services to evaluate them. This will help businesses to improve their products and services in the future. Here are some examples of the questions that businesses can ask:
- The customers’ expectations from their purchased products or services such as what would they like to see in the future in the product or service they have purchased?
- What things do they like and what they don’t like?
- What makes their products and services better than the competition?
- What other products or services they would like to purchase in the future?
- What other products or services they think that you should offer in the future?
And a lot many other questions. Those questions could also be about a particular product or service and its features which will help businesses to get a better understanding of what is being appreciated by their customers and what else they should offer them to improve this particular product or service.
For example, let us take an example of a smartphone, the reason why I am taking this example is that in UAE almost everyone owns a smartphone, and there is a 60% chance that you must be reading this article from a smartphone or a tablet right now. Anyway, in the case of a smartphone, the brand can ask them why they are purchasing this particular smartphone, is it the long battery life, or the touch screen, or camera or the sound quality or any such thing, this will provide the brand with an understanding of the general liking and disliking of the people, for example with this example a brand can understand that a particular flagship for a certain price range is desired by its screen or long battery life, and in future, they can improve their upcoming models and make a marketing strategy to improve sales.
The customer feedback system is a very powerful tool and it provides a lot of information and data that help businesses in many ways to improve profitability and growth. Customer satisfaction is obviously the primary objective but all other relevant things can be improved too which either directly or indirectly impact customer satisfaction.
5. Improve Customer Journey and Customer Experience
The customer feedback system is very capable of evaluating every touchpoint and all sorts of customer experiences throughout the entire customer journey. Whether you are selling products or offering services, or you are a small salon owner or an airline, customer feedback is equally important for all sorts and sizes of businesses. These days especially in Dubai and all around the UAE the customer journey has been completely changed due to huge shifts in customer behavior and market trends in past few years. Designing and improving customer journeys could be tricky. Businesses are introducing innovative solutions and systems to resolve this problem. Some are investing heavily in IT infrastructure and digitalization. Some are investing big in opening up new branches at newer locations. Some businesses are investing in marketing and social media to improve their brand image. Almost all sorts of industries and sectors have witnessed a huge rise in the adaptation of digital solutions and services. This is why the customer journey is getting trickier and difficult to manage.
Businesses are investing big time in improving the customer journey and customer experience these days. There are so many vendors and service providers advertising new solutions to improve the customer journey and customer experience. But the only way to evaluate and understand the effectiveness of all your efforts is to ask directly to your customers about it. Businesses can ask different types of questions to understand various aspects of the customer journey, such as:
- Q: How was your experience today? A: A score gage or scale, happiness meter, etc
- Q: How would you rate the agent? A: Rating Scale, 0 to 10 scale, Happiness Meter, etc
- Q: How well the agent understands your needs? A: 0 to 10 scale, Happiness Meter, etc
- Q: How was your waiting experience? A: A score gage or scale, happiness meter, etc
- Q: How easier or difficult was the payment process? A: 0 to 10 scale, Happiness Meter, etc
- Q: How likely will you recommend us to others? A: A score gage or scale, 0 to 10 Scale, etc
- Q: How difficult it was to find a parking spot? A: A score gage or scale, 0 to 10 Scale, etc
Such questions that help customers and visitors to express their feelings about their current experience and journey provide a deep insight into the customer experience. The customer feedback system with the right tools and features could be a great help in identifying the areas of improvements in the customer journey and customer experience and also evaluating your products and services. The businesses can easily understand the customer interaction on all touchpoints hence singling out the one that needs improvements is easier. On top of that, the customers do also opine on what they need or what they wish the brand to offer in terms of customer experience and/or products and services. Which is a great source of business intelligence data that is very helpful in taking actions, making strategies, and improving the customer experience throughout the entire customer journey.
6. Identify Happy and Unhappy Customers
Identifying happy and unhappy customers is very important and is very helpful in improving customer experience and customer retention. Whenever a business installed a customer feedback system both types of feedbacks are expected. Most businesses only focus on unhappy customers and negative feedback, but it is equally important to consider positive feedback too. Here in Dubai and all around the UAE our customers usually show concern about the bad customer experience, they are only focused on identifying the causes of the bad customer experience and trying to improve everything to prevent those bad experiences. However, good or bad all feedbacks are equally important and businesses can learn a lot from both types of feedback.
In case of bad customer feedback or negative feedback, the businesses should immediately identify the customer who has had a bad experience, then the concerned team should contact them to enquire further or take steps to prevent that. In case of any bad customer experience and negative feedback, the businesses must have to identify the root cause of the issue as well. The business should contact the customer, ensure them they will take steps to fix it, then inform them that we did this or we did that to ensure such a bad experience won’t happen again. Offer a promotion, or discount, or something good to the customer which could reduce the negative effects of their bad experience. There are tons of data and various studies showing that negative feedback has very negative effects on the brand reputation and in order to neutralize its effects almost ten to thirteen positive experiences are required. So, it is extremely crucial to identify the unhappy customers and then try to make them happy.
Similarly, happy customers are also very important. The happy customers will tell you about the good things about your products and services, you can try to improve those features and offer more similar features in the future to increase customer happiness. Another important thing is that the happy customers with positive feedback are the ones who are most likely to spend a little more in the future. So, the marketing team can try to pitch them new offers and the latest products and services and they can get a better conversion rate. In addition, the business can prioritize them to improve their experience and customer journey even further to increase their loyalty to the brand. A loyal customer base is considered to be the foundation of success. So, it is equally important to identify the happy customers as well as the unhappy customers.
Collect Vital Business Intelligence and Make Future Plans and Policies
The customer feedback system is a great source of business intelligence data. It provides very accurate data on customer satisfaction and customer happiness. The businesses can easily evaluate the existing customer journey and customer interaction with the brand and then this data can be analyzed to further improve the customer journey and customer experience. The business can also evaluate its products and services using a customer feedback system. Moreover, employee performance can also be analyzed on the basis of customers’ opinions and feedback data. Businesses can take initiatives to improve their products and services. The features that are most disliked can be discarded and the features most praised can be improved further to attract more attention from the customers and visitors.
One of the greatest advantages of a customer feedback system is that it provides very accurate and direct feedback from the customer. Since the customers are giving their opinion on an automated system, mostly the feedback is highly accurate and the opinions are very honest. This further helps businesses to make policies, strategies and plans to improve each and every area of the customer journey that can make their customers happier. The employee or agent’s performance can also be measured and then the business can take steps to either replace the low-performing employees or to train them to make them able to satisfy their customers. For decision making, such as an amendment in the customer journey or improving your products and services and quality the customer feedback system’s data is very vital. Using this data businesses can make plans and strategies to improve customer happiness and satisfaction.
Conclusion
The customer feedback system is a very important tool to improve customer happiness and customer satisfaction. The customer feedback system allows businesses to directly ask their customer about various aspects of their customer journey and customer experience. The business can also get a direct opinion of their customers on their products and services. The data collected from a customer feedback system is a great source of very accurate and important business intelligence. The business can utilize the data to improve their products and services, customer journey, customer experience, and overall profitability and productivity. The customer feedback system is also very convenient for the customers, it can offer multiple mediums and channels to the customers to let them give their feedback easily. The in-built data analytical engine process customer feedback and generates reports.
The customer feedback system is a very powerful tool designed to improve customer happiness and customer satisfaction. Especially in Dubai, UAE businesses are very concerned about their customer journey and the influence of modernization and digitalization. In such circumstances, a customer feedback system is a great source of gathering vital business intelligence and it also aids in building pleasant relationships with the customers. The customers feel a sense of importance when businesses proactively ask them for their opinion. It builds trust and loyalty. A loyal customer base is a foundation of success. It is always recommended to acquire professional help in such projects. RSI Concepts is a leading customer satisfaction solutions provider in Dubai, UAE. We are offering state of an art customer feedback system with modern and advanced features. Feel free to reach us out through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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