Customer Experience and Customer Satisfaction

Customer Experience and Customer Satisfaction are critical to growing the Business of our companies.

A user experience survey is essential to understand what to improve in our organization. What are the strengths and what are the weaknesses.

That is why it is essential to conduct a survey at your store, store, restaurant, fitness center to find out what customers think of your business.

Basically, you need to collect data to measure customer satisfaction and what the various touch points are with your reality (customer journey).

Many times, when I meet entrepreneurs who want to entrust the marketing and communication consulting to Factory Communication, they tend to tell me only about the positive aspects of their business.

How well the company is doing, how effective their products and services are and how easily they sell.
Leaving out, again and again, the small problems and disservices that normally exist within every small and large company or firm.

During the initial brief with Clients I try to delve into all aspects of their business.

I am as interested in strengths as I am in weaknesses.

“What is not working in your company? What is wrong with your products and services?“

It is one of the most distrustfully perceived questions by the entrepreneur or sales manager.

Customer experience and customer satisfaction

What is Customer Satisfaction?

Customer Satisfaction, literally translated, means Customer Satisfaction.

The instinct is to conceal or simply not talk about problems or disservices.

Hiding them means not dealing with them. This can lead to major problems in the medium and long term.

If customer support is rude, or does not provide the right answers, in the long run customers will go to another company.

For this reason, it is essential, periodically, to check the user experience at each stage of contact with the company.

From requesting information, to making the quotation, to providing the material or service, to after-sales support.

They are all fundamental points of contact. They are links in a chain that expresses the value of the company.
And the perceived value, does not correspond from the summation of the individual links, but from the weak link.

You just bought a car. The salesman was great. The car was delivered on time.

You are extremely happy. You have a small problem with an ECU. The workshop manager tells you that he can’t take action for five days.

“Gosh but the car is new, I need it for work, you can’t leave me stranded!!!”

The workshop leader has just compromised your company’s value chain.

The problem? That you probably find out too late.
That customer has already talked to other people who wanted to buy, right at your dealership, a new car.

I know perfectly well that the mission of the entrepreneur is to focus on developing his or her business.
Therefore, one of the personal goals is to enable the entrepreneur to do his or her job.

Factory Communication ‘s mission is to support the entrepreneur, in the development of their business.

Customer Satisfaction and Customer Experience: what to do?

Before designing and implementing the marketing strategy to increase the number of customers and revenue, we believe it is essential to check the needs of customers and what they say about the company.

In marketing it is defined as customer experience.

Next, we focus on business improvement, which can occur through several avenues and stages:

A proper positioning strategy to accurately and effectively reach the potential target audience.
An increase in revenue per customer. Many times customers know only part of the services or products we make. Before seeking new customers, it is more effective and profitable to increase turnover per customer by selling supplementary packages, service contracts, service training courses etc…
The implementation of marketing and advertising campaigns to acquire new possible customers.

It is clear that if one or more customers, experience a problem or disservice in our company, it is difficult to push them to buy again.

How to solve this kind of problem?

First of all, it is crucial to guide the entrepreneur in understanding what the known and especially the unknown problems are within his or her Company.

Several strategies and avenues that can be pursued are…

Consumer experience determines a company’s success or failure.

If customers are happy, they speak well of us, becoming our best allies.

If they are unhappy, not only do they stop buying our products or services, but they start a negative tam tam against our company.

Do you want to really know the value of your products and services?

Carry out a real survey by putting the real customer experience at the center.

To explore this topic further, I will give you a concrete example, created for a Client in the Fitness field.

Through a user experience activity, we were able to identify strengths and weaknesses of the facility and generated a customer satisfaction score.

Many of the strengths and weaknesses were not known to management.

The analysis was done in the round. The fitness center in question is a large gymnasium.

We created a detailed survey to understand every element, every touch point, between the fitness center and the possible customer.

Next, an agency staff member, implemented the customer experience analysis.

The analysis lasted about three months and took about three months to develop.

1.Verification of contact points

The contributor contacted the fitness center, under a few different names, through all possible channels: e-mail, phone, form on the website, social channels.

For each point of contact, the time elapsed to receive the response, the quality of information received, how the gym staff stood toward the employee etc. was tracked.

2. Verification of service delivery: collecting feedback

Our colleague attended the gym for about three months on different days and times.

He has participated in several courses. He trained with the help of several trainers, testing the various rooms and services offered.

Nothing was left to chance, as the questionnaire had as many as 30 items to be checked, including cleanliness and hygiene.

3. Reporting and identification of areas for improvement

At the conclusion of the quality survey, we produced a detailed report, which we later analyzed with the gym’s management.

The report allowed us to check the positive aspects of the company’s business and more importantly, take action on the negative ones, turning problems into business opportunities.

Clearly, each company and business has its own target audience, market, product and service.

The survey related to user experience, must be designed ad hoc.

There is no pre-established model.

It depends on each individual company’s business model and the factors above.

Know your Competitors and turn one of their strengths into a weakness and take advantage of this action.

Properly researched Competitor Analysis can also help you make a difference within your market.

How?

Again, I find it useful to tell you about a strategy created, some years ago, for a Client who owned a small copy shop.

His business was basically fine, no major problems.

Like all entrepreneurs, he had the need and desire to increase revenue by generating new Business opportunities.

After an analysis of the market, we identified its major weakness.

A competitor, located only 250 meters away, that had specialized in making photocopies in very high volumes, low costs, and very short time frames.

In our client’s mind, the only way to displace the competition was to specialize, too, in making photocopies cheaply, and very quickly.

This involved a real revolution in the structure of his copy shop.

New machinery and more staff, resulting in shrinking profits if he failed to significantly increase sales.

Customer Experience Management: improving customer satisfaction

Does it turn a weakness into a strength? How?

Through proper communication activities that can inform and advertise a type of service based on product quality and not speed:

If like so many of our satisfied Customers, you are not interested in having photocopies printed quickly, but love quality and great service, trust us!

In this way we worked on the competitor, turning one of its strengths into a weakness in our favor.

We made the potential target audience feel that, a job done quickly often does not equal a job done well.

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