Satisfying Your Customers

Do consumers perceive and appreciate your company as a brand or as a specific product provider? Understanding how your customers see you can have an impact on their overall satisfaction. The marketplace may react differently when end-users consider the business to be product driven versus consumer driven.

This concept is more than a marketing nuance. Understanding if such perception variances exist can help business navigate through competitive storms and loyalty shifts in a demanding marketplace. In fact, we regularly notice parallels between customer satisfaction and shifts in Net Promoter Score (NPS) for clients. Negative sentiment towards actual products or services seldom impacts NPS results as much as adverse consumer perception towards a brand overall.

Customers tend to focus their communications on a narrow list of issues around products or services.

Three specific satisfaction indicators that can be listened for and then measured to are:

• Consistency of quality
• Perceived reliability
• Fulfillment of customer needs

“It is therefore important to develop listening practices that observe overall satisfaction to better understand their true challenges and needs.”

Measuring overall satisfaction is important because it provides business owners with benchmarks that can be used to improve their businesses. Establishing such benchmarks will help business owners to:

• Define points of marketplace differentiation
• Identify consumer cognitive dissonance
• Reduce customer churn
• Increase customer lifetime value
• Indicate consumer loyalty and repurchase intentions

Most companies want to believe that they are the best and they have no unhappy customers. The reality is that 96 percent of unhappy customers do not complain. Measuring for overall satisfaction across a marketplace will enable businesses to attract new customers in competitive industry environments.

How do you measure the overall satisfaction towards your business to identify unhappy customers?