Everything your customers have never told you. The keys to truly listening to customers.

You've likely implemented best practices and drawn inspiration from leading models to consistently satisfy your customers. Perhaps, like 80% of businesses, you believe you offer 'superior or excellent' service quality to your customers...

The problem is that only 8% of your customers agree! (Lee Resources study). Enough said!

There is a real gap between your vision of satisfaction and the concrete perception of your customers.

How to ensure you really satisfy them? KESTIO offers you a list of four major fundamentals to master for an efficient customer experience.

1 – Truly understand your customers

What is customer satisfaction? It's the customer's assessment of the service provided by the company. When the customer feels that the quality of service meets or exceeds their expectations, everything is fine. Customer satisfaction is therefore determined by their own expectations and their evaluation of the commercial performance they perceive from the service. Not all your customers have the same expectations of you, nor do they have the same view of the efforts you make for them. Thus, a relationship identical in every respect will not be judged in the same way by two customers.

Having made this preamble, we can see how essential it is to know your customers well. Not in a general way, but on the contrary in a more detailed, individualized way. Depending on who they are, what they experience, and what they expect from the brand, a customer will not have the same judgment about your service. Having a "customer-centric" approach, placing customer knowledge at the heart of your efforts, is therefore essential to improve your satisfaction score.

Studies such as focus groups, customer surveys but also feedback from employees in direct contact with your customers, provide an initial vision of these elements. Tools such as personas, the study of expectations, or the definition of customer journeys are all useful approaches to share and keep the customer focus. Better still, having framework documents and compiling information from the field is essential to... structure your listening approach!

2 – Listen to your customers!

The evaluation of the quality of service (both real and perceived) inevitably involves... listening! Are you making efforts to structure your sales pitch? Do you have internal procedures for your approaches to clients, for your points of exchange? That's good. But also remember to listen to your customers. Why is this listening effort so crucial? Because nearly 98% of negative experiences do not result in any complaints. Customer "complaints" are therefore far from representing the level of satisfaction of all your customers. A low volume of complaints is not a sufficient indicator to prove that your customers are satisfied with your services. A restaurant that does not have (or has few) comments on a customer review platform does not necessarily inspire confidence. The same goes for your company.

It is therefore important to implement a comprehensive listening system that corresponds to your company. You need to find the right moments, the right questioning themes, and the right associated media and channels. What matters above all is that the elements captured are recorded effectively to be used. Listening alone is not useful. The feedback must then be used to change your habits, evolve behaviors, or even your products and services! These evolutions or considerations must also be visible to the customer to enhance their intervention.

3 – Place satisfaction at the heart of your effectiveness

Placing customer satisfaction at the heart of your organization and making it a driver of team efficiency and motivation is an innovative challenge for your sales strategy. It is not recommended to isolate customer satisfaction measurement and treat it as just another indicator monitored sporadically. Instead, making the information gathered from customers usable and concrete is essential. This openness allows you to:

• • Managing teams and raising awareness of customer culture throughout the company. Sharing indicators, which leads to an adaptation of the remuneration system, makes it possible, for example, to involve everyone in the efforts required.
  • Manage and enhance a consistent quality approach and processes through your sales management. With open data, the effort is collective, and the solutions adapt and correct themselves based on customer feedback. We don't operate in isolation but as part of a genuine 'team' serving the customer.
  • Optimize marketing campaigns through more precise targeting (specific emails to dissatisfied customers to win them back, promoting satisfied customers who know your quality, etc.);
  • Develop an offer that is truly and constantly adapted to the target through increased customer knowledge. The better you know your customers, the better you can identify their needs, and therefore optimize all the key indicators (conversion rate, order rate, recommendation rate, average basket).

4 – Use appropriate tools

Good customer satisfaction monitoring also involves choosing the right tools. Tools for measuring, collecting, and processing information, but also for sharing data. Good dashboards, easily readable and available, will help you streamline exchanges and make customer satisfaction that famous shared indicator, seen by all.

The selection and implementation of tools is a separate topic that we will develop in a dedicated article soon! Stay tuned!