How Do You Increase Customer Loyalty? (Hint: By Listening to Them)
When customers’ insights can be captured and passed on to your product team you’re more likely to meet their specific needs. A valued customer is also a more valuable customer. In fact, happy customers are more than twice as likely to repurchase from you as their more neutral-minded cohort.
Some supermarkets have those plastic toy cars attached to the fronts of some shopping carts. They’re great for antsy kids who want to be in the driver’s seat, but of course they don’t actually steer the cart: the kid stays engaged with the necessary process of grocery shopping while the parent takes care of business.
Good Voice of Customer (VoC) tools give your customers the same feeling of steering the cart, but not all of them have the added benefit of actually moving the wheels. For proper VoC management, the steering wheel has to actually affect the shopping cart’s movement, at least to an extent.
Meanwhile, your product team also has to be able to take care of business without getting overwhelmed by outside input. There’s a lot of expertise to be found in customer feedback, but we’re talking about diamonds in the rough. Your product team––and all decision-makers in your organization––have to be able to go to one place to separate signal from noise, and see where outside insight gels with in-house expertise.
Now comes the part where the plastic car helps steer the cart: customers who provide that feedback must be kept aware of the progress of their ideas. That’s actually the best part of a functional VoC mechanism: Your customers can feel the value of their input. Once your customers get positive affirmation that their input has helped guide a product or impact their customer experience, they will feel personally invested in a brand and will become devoted advocates.
Listen, Understand, Act
Listening and even understanding are just empty exercises unless they’re connected to action. The challenge, then, is to make sure you’re hearing customer suggestions, taking the good ones into account, and then making sure your customers know they’re being heard. Wantoo will help you with that.
We’ve done it with out own product: when developing our feature set, we listened to our earliest adopters, who were kept in the loop as we went on a building binge. This is what it looks like at the moment.
If you were, say, a bank, your Idea Board may look more like this.
Once your product team begins work on one of your customers’ ideas, Wantoo will automatically keep that idea’s supporters up-to-date on its progress.
Once you launch, your customers will know, and they’ll be happier for it. Happy customers are repeat customers. Better yet, they’re your most vocal evangelists. Instead of compounding your workload by bringing in a VoC tool, bring in a VoC tool that compounds productivity… and even happiness. Give Wantoo a try for free.
