The secret of transforming customers into promoters
Though there is a myth that selling products is done by the marketing and selling team, the true fact lies in the fact that customers are the one who does effective marketing for your business.
“Just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.”
-Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC)
The important reason that helps with expanding your business to a great extent is based on the customer experience reviews that are shared across the world by your product users. As we live in an era of social media, your first customers and present customers post about their experience on social platforms like Google, facebook, twitter, Gartner peer insights, Quora and ProductHunt in no time after their use. This makes it easier for your forthcoming customers to find out about your products even before you can reach them. If you provide the experience your users have been expecting, you get positive reviews and create a good brand value for the marketing team to work with. As an end result, you have a greater pool of prospective customers who are interested in using your product.
92% of customers trust the products that are recommended by known people. (Source)
So products should make use of this new showcasing reality, encourage their customers to advocate for them, make an impact in the business sectors, and make necessary commitment in zones like product improvement and administrations.
Here are some secrets that will help in changing your customers into promoters.
Deliver a great customer experience:
People gravitate towards the products which deliver great customer experience. Great customer experience happens when you provide a customer experience which is more than expected. Like how the first impression is the best impression, You need to deliver your customers a good satisfying experience in their first use of your product or service.
Offer your customers more than just a service. Customer Service just helps in marketing your brand whereas delivering a good customer experience has more impact as it related to their emotions and feelings. This lays the path for the entire journey of your customer.
Without customers, there will be no business and this is the reason organizations are concentrating on the most proficient method to captivate new customers and more imperatively, holding existing customers. Great customer experience can make this easy.
Here are few guidelines and examples for building a great customer experience:
Find out the pain-points people are facing and try to solve it using your product or service so that your product resonates more among the people.
86% of customers are ready to pay more if they have a great customer experience. Gartner survey on marketing discovered that 89% of companies compete on the basis of customer experience Source.
Find your potential and loyal customers:
Foster your marketing using potential customers. Effective incorporation of targeting potential customers can take you to greater success.
So how to decide who your potential customers are?
Now there are easy steps to find out your potential customers using less monetary investment and time. Only when you know about something you can conclude a decision. Similarly know more about your customers.
Do social media monitoring and find who already talks about your company and the super fans of your business. Conduct surveys for your customers and your target audience. Using the survey information, you can analyze and find who truly are your potential customers.
Use social media to collect data about customer needs. Work on those needs and share about it on the internet. This way you can captivate a huge number of customers. Make your customers feel valued by responding quickly to their questions. Train your employees to deliver reliable customer service. Be attentive and adjust according to customer needs.
Your potential customers can help your new features and products from falling flat if you engage them with the product development process.
Once you find out your potential customers, involve them through the whole process of building a product. This will be more effective than telling them about the product during its launch. It helps the customers understand the products precisely and increase their connectivity with your business.
How to involve your customers from the start?
A good start of involving your customers in the process of developing a product or a feature is asking them for feedback. Before your customers could give feedback, make sure they are clear with your feedback policy. Next phase of the process is building the product.
When you involve your customers in this phase, you don’t miss out valuable insights and building the product will be effective. The last phase is launching the product. Before that, you can ask your customers to try the beta version of your product. This way you can launch a successful product and success for that product happens eventually.
Voice of Customer program:
A successful customer program is a way to systematically listen to your customers and act on the information they provide you. The problem is, some businesses don’t understand how their customers interact with their business or what their perceptions are. Hence, making sure of maintaining customer programs to enhance the company’s engagement with customers would help involvement from both sides.
So, how exactly do you create a successful voice of the customer program?
- Rate your company’s standards and culture.
- Recruit the appropriate employees and train them for customer programs.
- Getting feedback from customers is very important. Hence, get feedback from customers as well as from the employees working for the enhancement of customer programs. This will help assess the whole process vividly.
- Check how the results have turned up. If there’s an improvement, make changes and adapt to the customer population accordingly.
- Follow through.
Nurturing relationships with customers:
Social support and human interaction are one of the most factors involved in determining the well-being of everyone. Maintaining active participation with the customers would increase their interest in promoting a product.
A great opportunity involving interaction and building up a relationship with customers will be missed out if there is no customer engagement.
Customer engagement is basically an emotional connection between the customer and the brand. Highly engaged customers will buy more, promote more and, demonstrate more loyalty. Providing a high-quality customer experience is an important component in customer engagement strategy. Reduce the chance of customer frustration.
This can be done when you take good care of the mental health of your employees and avoid employee frustration. Be readily available so that your customers reach out to you easily for help or any discussion.
Act upon their feedbacks and provide a service more than promised:
The usage of feedback gets fulfilled only when you act upon them. Just listening to customer feedback won’t get you anywhere. Have a clear mechanism of receiving feedback. When customers post their problems they are facing when they use your product, try to solve with a customer-centric motive, not with a business-centric motive. Because being business centric cannot improve customer experience. Sometimes it may have a negative impact too.
When you allow your customers to offer you ideas on how to improve products to deliver unique customer experience which can set your brand apart from others and will help you succeed. Use the right tool to analyze the feedback data carefully and find those valuable insights and work on them.
This way you make your customers submit their concerns directly to you without using a third party feedback system and when you work on them you save your brand name from being criticized on social media.
“If you are persistent you will get it; if you are consistent you will have it.”
Acting on feedback should be a consistent one to have a long-term relationship with your customers. Appoint a team to monitor that the changes you make according to customer’s feedback work efficiently and ensure that bugs are fixed. The customers who have a highly satisfying experience will only share information about your products without incentive and these points will help you achieve it.
Keep a track on the metrics:
Metrics can help you evaluate better about your performance and customer experience. Some of the metrics that will help you are:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS):
NPS helps in evaluating customer experience CX using survey questions. NPS uses the inputs from the survey questions and estimates who are promoters, detractors, and passives. This tells how many percentages of users will recommend your products to their family and friends. NPS will also help you with powerful insights to improve customer experience.
2. First Response Time:
Nobody has the patience to wait a long time even if they don’t have a busy life. As there are a lot of choices in the market, people can easily change their brand if they are unhappy with the waiting time. So what matters is how quickly you respond to customer from the first time they approach your service. First response time is the time between a customer submitting his/her requirement and a rep from the customer support team to reach them.
Even if you have a small number of people in your support team, you can use live chats, knowledge forums and make the process of quickly reaching your customers. Training your customer support team, proper scheduling of the requests submitted and choosing effective communication channels will help you respond at the fastest pace. You must keep track of the average first response time to increase customer experience.
3. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT):
CSAT metric is to calculate the customer satisfaction score from the customers. This ensures that customers opinions matter a lot to the company. You can calculate the score using survey questions or using a scale ranging from 1 to 10. This scaling method allows the company to rate itself and compare the results. From this, they can either improve for better customer satisfaction or sustain the standard scores provided by the customers.
4. Customer Effort Score (CES):
CES is also a metric that helps in surveying customer satisfaction. It basically deals with the measure of ease in customer experience which is on a five-point scale, ranging from “Very hard” to “Very easy”. Measure CES regularly after engaging and interacting with your customers so that you can see how user-friendly your product is and calculate the aggregate of customer experience.
Gift them personalized offers:
Personal attention and service are always appreciated by people. Personalized service to customers will set the company and the brand apart. Statistics say that 66 percent of consumers believe that customer service is a huge motivator for customer investment. Providing them personal offers and gifts shows them you care and encourages them to buy more and promote more.
Personalized service can be given in plenty of ways, few of them could be:
- Getting to know your customers and their whereabouts.
- Handwritten notes to show effort from the company.
- Rewarding loyal customers.
- Giving importance to customers who take the time out of their schedule to provide feedback about the brand.
- Educating them about the company’s products with demonstrations, free trials and so on.
- Allowing them to criticize constructively and act upon that.
Collect Customer testimonials:
Your customers build a reputation for your organization. When customers are satisfied and go through a great experience while using your product, they leave positive reviews everywhere they go. They post it in social platforms, share it with their friends and family.
This will increase the number of users for your product. People believe that there is credibility in customer reviews than what the company says about its product. As a step forward you can ask for testimonials. This influences the purchase decisions of numerous buyers and as an impact, you create a large customer base for your business.
Testimonials consist of data which can answer the questions of the prospectors and convert them into buyers. Testimonials narrate the experience of the users like a story. This influences people to trust and invest in your products. Because testimonials are social proofs that allow others to know about how happy and satisfied the users of your product are. so naturally, people will become willing to use your products.
Make your testimonials more powerful by using images, videos. Nowadays people prefer videos than reading a large amount of text-based content. As videos portray the emotions of the users exactly, a few best testimonial videos can give you the whole benefit of a collection of text-based testimonials.
Don’t forget to leave a note of thanks:
Customers who are transformed into promoters are invaluable assets to any product. They enable you to see your business from their point of view so that you deliver great customer experience by making the right decisions and changes. So never fail to thank them.
Thank every customer personally. Take time, put effort so that your customers’ feel appraised. Write a personalized thank you note. This will be engraved in their memory for a long time. Conduct loyalty programs. Make your customers feel special by giving personalized offers and providing VIP service.
Remember your customers during special occasions. Sent them greetings or gifts. Offer them sneak peek for your products. All these will help your brand promoters stay with you on the long voyage of your business.
All the data that I have enclosed in this blog will guide you on how to promote your business in a most legit way, increasing the revenue as well as benefiting everyone who uses your product.
