For a company seeking to increase profits, retaining existing customers is as important as winning new ones. An expert in Voice of the Customer (VoC) technologies, Mindshare Technologies is engaged in gathering and analyzing customer feedback to help companies do just that. The company’s customer feedback management tools are designed to provide customers with real-time, honest input through a simple phone or Internet survey.
Recently Mindshare Technologies has come up with five tips for service-based companies in retail, food and lodging industries. When it comes to customer retention, the feedback from customers can immensely help the service providers to better understand their customers’ needs and accordingly address them. Mindshare’s tips will not only help companies understand what customers value most about their experiences after interacting with the business, they will also give them idea about how to take action on insights from their most common customer feedback.
Mindshare’s first tip to the companies is: “Engage and respond to customers.” Mindshare, which handles tens of millions of surveys each year, emphasizes responding to customers who leave feedback, simply to show that there is someone who listens and cares. This helps enhance brand engagement. Mindshare advises the company to go farther, informing the customers how their concern has been resolved or thank them for their time.
“Promote positive comments,” the VOC technology expert advises. The positive feedbacks from the customers do the job of word of mouth marketing to the perfection. In order to capitalize on the nice things said by the customers, the companies can help their customers share their own words with the world through social media.
Customer satisfaction score is important to the point of actually helping you predict your bottom line. So Mindshare points out the importance of “Correlating profits to customer satisfaction.” It advises companies to track customer satisfaction scores alongside revenue to be able to track what customer satisfaction habits contribute to the top performers at the store level.
According to Mindshare, it is also important to “motivate frontline employees.” Employees receive a great morale boost when they come to know that a customer singled them out for their quality service. They are expected to work better knowing how much they can positively influence the customer experience.
Mindshare’s last tip relates to focusing on individual employees. The research firm advises companies to separate the performers from the non-performers and then reward or retrain accordingly.
“We gather tens of millions of surveys each year to help companies of all kinds improve using their customer feedback, like identifying product issues or holding an individual manager accountable to keeping company standards. In addition to the benefits of having a comprehensive VoC program, we identified some recurring themes in this data that can benefit every business,” CEO of Mindshare John Sperry explained in a statement.
A few months back, Mindshare appointed Lonnie Mayne – who had been serving as the company's chief experience officer (CXO) – as its president.