Finding Out What People Really Think Of Your Products And Services

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |User Experience|Finding Out What People Really Think Of Your Products And ServicesTo ensure you provide an excellent website experience, you need to find out what an actual real-life user’s experience is of your website, product, or service, and so on.

One way of doing this – and don’t forget, this will change from one project to another – is to interview real-life users in real-life situations.

This means getting a group of people and asking them for their opinion on your product, whilst they are actually using it. This information can be invaluable for a content marketing agency or a person in charge of your digital marketing efforts.

Sounds a tough call and it can be, which is why many companies employ people who are specialists in what is known as UX interviews. Be aware though that not everyone who puts this on their CV is a specialist of this kind. It takes more than a cup of tea and a biscuit to understand, process, and collect this kind of data from people.

For a start, you need to find customers who are willing to have their user experience measured and quantified. Projects of this kind can work in all kinds of ways. Individual interviews are commonly used where the information the business wants is particularly detailed and thorough.

Focus groups are important and can be run along pre-determined lines. For example, the groups may be determined by age or another indicator such as level of experience in using a product and so on.

How the information is gathered is important too. Brainstorming sessions, user interviews, as a group or individually, and asking people to complete a questionnaire are all common features of UX projects.

Many of these kinds of interviews are based on observation too. As a result, the person doing the observing of users and customers needs to have a heightened awareness of their own thoughts and opinions.

Our own judgments invariably color how we see things and when we observe someone struggling to check out online, rather than thinking this may be a design fault, we may assume it is because their computer skills are pretty low.

Take a look at some of the things that make for a great set of user interviews:

  • You need to be genuine and interested in what your customers are saying – Don’t be defensive.
  • You need to adapt to each and every user – For example, if they have stopped talking, are they thinking, or have they finished what they have said?
  • Be aware of how the customer is interacting with you – Are they telling you what they think you want to hear, rather than being honest?
  • Makes sure the customer is providing their opinion – Did they find it difficult to use your website for example? You don’t want to know if their mom does…
  • Some people will censor their own views – They might say it is a ‘complicated website to use, but for others, it’ll be fine.’ It’s never fine if they found the website difficult to use.
  • You want to know the problems, not the solutions
  • Always dig deeper – For this, you need to ask the ‘why?’ question.
  • Your observations must be objective
  • Let people speak spontaneously

4 Common Customer Service Problems – And How to Fix Them

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Service|4 Common Customer Service Problems – And How to Fix ThemNo matter what kind of business you run or how many years of operation you have behind you, how you engage with customers can be the difference between running a successful brand and falling at the first hurdle. Excellent customer service is critical for keeping your audience on board and satisfied with your services, so to ensure you and your team are putting in 110% effort, here are some of the common customer service problems and what you can do to solve them.

Long Response Times

Many of us live busier lives than ever before, meaning customers simply don’t have the time or patience to wait for an answer. Whether they have a problem with a particular product of yours or need clarification on a matter, the longer they’re waiting for a response, the more agitated they will become. Thankfully, there are several things you can do to ensure the customer isn’t waiting too long, such as having enough members of your team to address queries whether it’s by phone, email, or social media, as well as devising pre-packaged answers to the most commonly asked questions which may help the customer. There are call center software providers like https://www.aceyus.com/call-center-analytics you can use to speed up the response time and track the customer journey from start to finish.

Not Listening to the Customer

When dealing with a customer, it’s vital that you listen to everything they say so they feel valued and appreciated. If you fail to listen, you won’t know what your customer needs which can make the situation worse. No matter what, make sure you have thoroughly understood the issue your customer has come to you with, and double-check the problem if necessary.

Customers appreciate honesty, so if you don’t have a solution straight away, it’s better to tell them rather than not giving any answer at all.

Transferring the Customer to Multiple Departments

Many of us can count on several hands the number of times we’ve been transferred to multiple departments across a company before getting to the right person. Not only can this be time-consuming, but the situation can also be incredibly frustrating. If you must transfer the customer to another member of staff, make sure you give the customer a reason for doing so and explain the present situation in detail, so they know where they stand.

Bad Attitude toward Customers

We will inevitably have down days from time to time. However, no matter how you’re feeling or what is going on in your personal life, anyone engaging with customers should always remain professional and attentive from start to finish. First impressions count, so if a team member is displaying a poor attitude to customers, this can put your business in a bad light. Regular training is critical for all employees, helping them to understand the code of conduct in your organization, what is expected of them when dealing with customers and brushing up on their communication skills and time management.

Whether you’re about to launch a startup or already run a business, understanding the common customer service problems and what tactics to employ to solve the issue will make sure your customers are always put first.

Inexpensive Ways to Engage Your Clients in 2021

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Engagement| Inexpensive Ways to Engage Your Clients in 2021Thanks to the technology available nowadays, engaging them has never been easier or more affordable.

When done right, your engagement strategy will result in a customer-focused business which will, in turn, boost more growth and loyalty.

Follow these steps and learn all you need to know about inexpensive ways to engage your customers!

Ask for Feedback

Feedback is an absolute must for every customer engagement strategy.

Your clients want to be asked about their experience with your business. It makes them feel valued.

By asking and responding to feedback, you show them their opinions matter. People need to feel heard and valued in order to be motivated and open to collaboration.

When your customers can freely express themselves, they will also want to communicate and engage with your business.

Feedback also develops emotional connections.

When your customer realizes they are not dealing with a faceless corporation but a real person behind it, it is the foundation for developing a stronger relationship.

Once you accomplish that, it will lead to more loyalty and more customer engagement.

You should create a feedback strategy that is sustainable for your business. Don’t be afraid to redefine it and try different approaches.

For example, you can include surveys, net promoter scores and social media monitoring. None of this requires spending too many resources or developing an extensive strategy.

Asking for feedback is one of your most important methods of motivating consumers to engage with your brand.

Engage Across Social Media Channels

Make sure you use multiple social media channels to communicate with your customers.

Being reachable and responsive across social media channels shows that you are ready to assist your customers at any given time.

Using your social media accounts will not only help you stay on top of trends, but also enable you to nurture your relationship with your customers on a daily basis.

You are there for them if they have any questions or concerns. Your customers will recognize the value of that.

When you create an online community on your social media, you engage your users to get more insight and information.

It is a cheap and effective way to present any news, products and quality content. Interesting and engaging information you provide on social media will keep the communication going.

When one person shares your post, you can reach hundreds of people at virtually no cost.

Even when you invest in a social media campaign that produces tons of shares and generates more views, you are still gaining more publicity than with many other, more traditional strategies.

Social media channels will help you build a reputation of being responsive and engaged with your customers at all times.

Host Webinars

You need to embrace the opportunities that come with 2021 — and one of them is hosting webinars!

With interesting webinars, you are keeping your attendees engaged from start to finish.

If the audience is invested and attentive, your customers will be open to learning more about your business and feel like a part of your community.

By making sure your webinar is informative and interesting, you will leave a strong impact and achieve better conversion rates.

Engaging webinars or seminars deliver more value to the audience.

When your customer leaves a webinar with a positive experience, his or her satisfaction will result in their loyalty to your business.

Maybe you can cover a topic that you notice your customers struggle with often.

These events don’t have to be long or expensive, but your customers will appreciate all the effort you put in and the advice you provide.

With the right webinar strategy, your webinars will be a valuable tool both for you and your customers.

Build a Loyalty Program

You absolutely need a loyalty program for your customers.

Your primary motive is to make your existing customers feel valued.

When they feel like you are willing to go that extra mile for them, they will have the motivation to continue buying from you.

This will not only elevate the customers’ appreciation of your product or service, but increase the chances that your customers share their experience with others.

Loyalty programs will also increase your revenue.

Loyal customers already have trust in your brand. When you increase customer retention, it will also increase the profit. Your customers are likely to spend more.

It is estimated that loyalty members spend 5 to 20% more than non-members on average. They also buy more frequently. This is a win-win situation for both sides.

Loyalty programs are an important part of customer experience and engagement, especially on a highly competitive market.

Conclusion

Customer engagement comprises all interactions with your customers, including feedback, social media channels, and webinars.

By following these steps and shifting your focus to loyalty programs and other engagement strategies, the interaction stays positive.

When you create your strategy around those interactions, you will help your existing customers — and bring in some new ones, too!

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Joe PetersJoe Peters is a Baltimore-based freelance writer and an ultimate techie. When he is not working his magic as a marketing consultant, this incurable tech junkie devours the news on the latest gadgets and binge-watches his favorite TV shows. Follow him on @bmorepeters

The Feeling Economy and Customer Empathy

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Artificial Intelligence|The Feeling Economy and Customer EmpathyArtificial intelligence (AI) and automation as a workforce disruptor is a genie out of the bottle. The Brookings Institute, a little more than a year ago projected about 25% disruption of the U.S. workforce – about 36 million jobs – in the coming decades. But at the same time, the needle also is moving on A.I.’s transformation of how businesses and their customers interact.

To give this collective shift more context, AI has moved from replacing jobs associated with inspecting equipment, manufacturing goods, repairing things to replacing humans in thinking tasks–the likes of data dives and calculations. The shift originated in the Industrial Revolution and gave rise to the current “Thinking Economy.” Just as the industrial revolution automated physical tasks by decreasing the value of human strength and increasing the value of human cognition, AI taking over thinking tasks is further reshaping the landscape and ushering in a “Feeling Economy.”

AI in this Feeling Economy is doing more of the ‘brain’ work. Subsequently, humans increasingly are handling the ‘heart’ work, including social interaction, emotion recognition, nuanced communication and genuine care for customers. In the workplace, the feeling tasks of jobs – communicating with co-workers and clients, selling to or persuading others, and building and maintaining interpersonal relationships – are more important than the thinking tasks of jobs.

The rapid proliferation of “thinking AI” also is significantly transforming the goods and services marketplace. The consumer interface to the business often is AI-driven.

Online-connected consumers with smartphones can tap digital assistants — from Apple’s Siri, to Google Assistant, to Amazon’s Alexa, Samsung’s Bixby, and Microsoft’s Cortana — to answer questions, order supplies and control home electronics among other capabilities, some of which have not even been thought of yet. As time goes by, as digital assistants become more understanding of such things as context and can do a better job of personalization. GPS navigation systems, such as Waze and Google Maps, simplify the difficult navigation task of finding destinations, even if the consumer has never been to those destinations before.

The machine-to-machine transactions — consumers purchasing via the likes of Amazon Prime through Amazon’s website or app, for example — leaves the emotional connection largely to humans. To match the emotionality of the consumer, the customer-facing personnel must become more empathetic, which in turn makes the consumer even more emotionally driven – requiring greater feeling intelligence on the part of the business.

Further consider the case of the customer service representative, whose easy, repetitive tasks like providing information and making appointments are being taken over by A.I. In this context, a consumer with a non-routine problem is much more likely to be emotionally involved, and the service person to whom AI escalates the problem will need to be much more empathetic than the traditional customer service person. The emotionality of the consumer forms a feedback loop: the consumer is more emotional, so the business must become more emotional, which makes the consumer even more emotional, and so on.

In our new book, The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy, we describe a real-life scenario reflecting the thinking-to-feeling transition happening in customer service:

A recent doctoral graduate, an African-American man named Jared, was trying to buy a car. He started out with one salesperson, who took a more thinking-oriented approach. This was a good match for Jared, because PhDs are among the most thinking-oriented people on Earth. The salesperson, being good at his job, was trying to match Jared’s interaction preferences. Unfortunately, Jared was then passed off to an African American salesperson, no doubt to try to match Jared’s cultural background and ethnicity. This salesperson, knowing that business needs to be more emotional as time goes by, tried an emotional approach with Jared, calling him “my Black brother,” and using other emotional appeals. Such an approach will work the vast majority of the time as consumers become more emotionally driven. For Jared, though, it was not what he needed. The one thing we know, however, is that there will be fewer and fewer thinking-oriented consumers like Jared.

As thinking AI is making consumers more feeling-oriented—from their product expectations to their everyday life—companies can take advantage of this trend by tailoring sales, marketing and service to meet the needs of these increasingly emotionally-driven buyers.

About the Authors

Roland T. Rust is Distinguished University Professor, David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing, and founder and Executive Director of the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. An award-winning scholar, he has edited several major journals and consulted with American Airlines, AT&T, Dupont, Eli Lilly, FedEx, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, NASA, and Sony, among many companies worldwide. Ming-Hui Huang is Distinguished Professor in the College of Management at National Taiwan University. A Fellow of the European Marketing Academy, she also is International Research Fellow of the Centre for Corporate Reputation at the University of Oxford, UK, Distinguished Research Fellow of the Center for Excellence in Service at Maryland Smith and incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Service Research. Their book, The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy (Springer International Publishing; January 2021), can be found at https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Economy-Artificial-Intelligence-Creating/dp/3030529762.

Practicing the Spirit of the Law: Serve Your Customer Better

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Serve your Customer|Practicing the Spirit of the Law: Serve Your Customer BetterWhether through anecdotes or personal experience, we’re all familiar with business leaders who cut corners, inflate prices, make misleading product claims, slander the competition—and worse—yet sleep soundly at night. How can good people persist in bad business practices?

In conjunction with the spirit of the law is your business and personal ethics. Many people see ethics and business as separate entities. This belief is wrong. An individual’s business ethics and personal ethics must be aligned if one is to be a person of integrity. When a person of integrity does business, financial rewards follow.

When we build an ethical reputation, we will increase our profits.There is a positive relationship between business ethics and profitability. Our employees will be more dedicated to doing their jobs efficiently, and our customers will be more satisfied with our products and service. Loyal customers buy more products and give customer referrals.

Human beings are placed on Earth to grow spiritually, and honesty in business provides this challenge. The marketplace is a perfect testing ground for ethics. When this challenge is met, you can take satisfaction in your accomplishments and your legacy. You corrected your unethical behavior and embraced honest, transparent, and trustworthy business practices. Ethics is now taught to the next generation of businesspeople.

The Spirit of the Law

Of course, the letter of the law must always be met. But we should use a higher purpose in business decision-making—the guiding principle of the spirit of the law. A person may act in a way which is perfectly legal but not ethical. The key is to determine if a person’s deeds go beyond the letter of the law and reach the higher ethical standards of the spirit of the law.

After my salespeople learn the foundation of honest selling, I teach the higher levels of ethical selling, to go beyond the letter of the law. One of my favorite teaching examples is a time-honored story about the first offer.

Biblical and Contemporary Examples

It happened that a righteous businessman had some very fine wine for sale and a potential buyer came to him while he was in the middle of his morning prayers. The customer said, “Sell me this wine for such and such price.” The businessman did not answer, so as not to interrupt his prayers. The customer assumed that the businessman was unwilling to settle for the price offered, so the customer increased his original offer and said, “Sell me this wine for such and such price.” Still the businessman did not answer. This cycle was repeated with ever-escalating prices. Upon finishing his prayers, the businessman said, “From the time you made your first offer, I resolved in my mind to sell the wine to you. Therefore, I may take no greater amount than your first offer.”

The sages made this parable an example of proper ethical behavior, stating, “There would have been no question if he had said verbally, ‘I will sell you this for the price you offer,’ but even if he merely resolved silently in his mind to sell his product for the offered price, even if he did not articulate it, he must not go back on that resolution.”

This decision embodies the concept of ‘going beyond the letter of the law,’ to instead conduct your business within the greater spirit of the law, an ideal everyone should strive to emulate. The sages laud the righteous businessman for his exemplary behavior and proclaim the verse ‘speaks truth in his heart.’ The businessman ‘agreed in his heart’ to the original price; his silence was simply misconstrued by the buyer. Of course, making up one’s mind without verbalizing it does not constitute a binding agreement, but resolving to do so demonstrates an unusually high level of ethical behavior.

Two thousand years later in the twentieth century, the owner of a scrap metal business had a policy to always close his business for the Sabbath. The day after the Sabbath, he listened to numerous voice messages from a government agent offering to buy all the scrap metal in his possession for an urgent building project. Each of the buyer’s successive and obviously urgent messages increased the price because the government agent thought the initial offerings must have been too low. When the owner reviewed all the messages, he contacted the agent and explained that he would have accepted the first offer; he had neglected to answer the initial call, as well as all the subsequent calls, only because it was the Sabbath. He then indicated that he was prepared to let the government have all his scrap metal at the price of the first offer. The agent was so impressed by the owner’s ethical behavior that he made the firm extremely wealthy as the government’s main supplier of building materials.

Another example, what would you consider an advertorial? It’s an advertisement camouflaged to appear as a feature article. Is an advertorial legal—yes. But is it ethical?—no! By typesetting and carefully writing an advertisement as an unbiased opinion, the reader is misled, deceived into believing that the content is not commercial.

Print and Website Decision-making

Management should make business decisions based on delivering reader value. Beyond what is legal, does the magazine present promotional material as regular content? Is the ad-to-content ratio correct so the reader is delivered proper value? Does management investigate their advertisers to ensure that they have business integrity, and their product offerings are honest? Even an advertisement that has a negative reference to a competitor can harm your magazine’s or website’s reputation.

In today’s difficult financial times, is it wise to turn away companies willing to place expensive advertisements? Yes—if it is unethical.

When these types of questions factor into your decision-making, you are practicing the spirit of the law. Then, you will enjoy profitable long-term relationships with your readers and advertisers.

Ethical business is smart business. If you’re pondering what to do in difficult sales situation, and you’re unsure about whether it’s your responsibility to provide full disclosure by informing or warning the customer about a product’s limitations, then err on the side of caution, fairness, and goodness—go beyond the letter of the law. It may not be your responsibility legally, but it honors the spirit of the law.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor |Joel MalkoffJoel Malkoff, a.k.a. the Ethics Giver, demonstrates that ethical business decision-making isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s the profitable thing to do. Over the course of his 45-year career as a business executive and entrepreneur, he has generated more than half a billion dollars in sales. A writer and speaker on ethical business practices and principles, he serves as general manager and vice president of a corporation that manufactures and sells medical and scientific research products worldwide. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he lives in Avon, Connecticut, with his wife, Lynn. Selling Ethically: A Business Parable Connecting Integrity with Profits is his debut book. Learn more at https://theethicsgiver.com/selling-ethically and https://www.amazon.com/Selling-Ethically-Business-Connecting-Integrity-ebook/dp/B08KSB9HY3.