Customer advocacy, from online reviews to social media and even word-of-mouth, can be instrumental in helping businesses succeed. Businesses must offer their customers exceptional goods and services if they want their customers to recommend them. Although businesses claim they are moving from focusing on their products to focusing on their customers, studies show a different picture:
- 54% of US consumers feel the customer experience could be better
- 68% of consumers leave a company because they didn’t feel valued
Today’s business competition is stronger than ever and customer retention is essential. And the best people to help businesses attain this goal are the customers themselves.
Listen to What Customers Are Saying
By paying attention to the Voice of the Customer, businesses can get a sense of how customers are perceiving them. Online reviews and social media comments can provide valuable insights into what customers think about certain products and the experiences they receive. Even negative feedback can be important, as it can help businesses figure out where they need to improve.
Contact centers have even greater access to the Voice of the Customer through recorded phone conversations. Utilizing solutions, such as speech analytics, can help companies easily analyze these conversations. Taking call monitoring a step further, searchable call transcriptions can be used to quickly locate specific words and phrases to identify which agents are succeeding, and which ones need additional training.
Businesses also use speech to text call transcripts to find out which products and services are receiving the most attention, how they stand against the competition, and other data that can help companies formulate strategies to improve the customer experience.
Listen to What Customers Are Not Saying
Sometimes determining what’s most important to customers can be accomplished by paying attention to what they don’t say. This may seem counterintuitive, but every single conversation in the contact center contains a wealth of information, such as customer wants, needs, and pain points. Tools like sentiment analysis can help detect trends and patterns in conversations, as well as the overall mood of the conversations.
Businesses can use this data to better determine their customers’ expectations and the experiences they receive, even if the customers are not blatantly expressing them. As a result, businesses can gain critical in-depth knowledge of how best to serve their customers. Each phone conversation holds hidden data that helps businesses improve customer retention. Businesses just need to know how to find it.
When You Advocate for Your Customers, They Advocate for You
A good business should be able to grow and evolve along with its customers and their needs. Rather than using outside sources to learn customer preferences, businesses have the means to uncover that information from the customers. When companies develop goods and services customers actually want, as well as providing a superior customer experience, they develop a strong customer advocacy. And when you advocate for your customers, they advocate for you.
