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9 ways to a customer’s heart

Customer

Engaged customers are key to profitable growth 

Our new Profitable Growth Cycle research reveals the importance of engaged and loyal customers for an organisation to achieve profitable growth, even in times of low economic growth. High growth organisations shine in nine key areas when it comes to increasing customer focus and engagement, and benefiting from the increased customer loyalty and advocacy that results.

 

Customer

Customer focus and engagement

Customer focus ensures that organisations really understand their customers and craft value propositions that meet their needs and expectations.

This involves:

1. Seeking customer feedback to build and maintain strong customer relationships

2. Ensuring systems are appropriately aligned with meeting customers’ needs

3. Meeting customer expectations in relation to quality service and price, and designing a Customer Value Proposition (CVP) that ensures internal standards are aligned with customers’ expectations.

Customer engagement refers to how the organisation interacts with its customers and the depth of relationships that it builds over time. High growth organisations build deep and trusted relationships that result in customer loyalty and advocacy. They build customer engagement by:

4. Being responsive to customers’ needs and investing time and energy in understanding their expectations around dealing with queries and issues

5. Solving problems with processes in place to manage issues well and quickly, and staff empowered to rectify problems and provide effective solutions

6. Building trust which is essential for successful long term customer relationships, with staff demonstrating consistency, competency and credibility in all their customer interactions

7. Building commitment which results from high levels of attachment to the supplier organisation and its employees. This is usually due to a great experience with the product or service and the employees’ responsiveness, expertise, empathy and ability to deliver the right solution.

Customer loyalty and advocacy

Loyal customers represent repeat business, tend to buy more and are more likely to pay a premium price. They also cost less to work with. High growth organisations benefit from their increased customer focus and engagement by building a larger base of loyal customers.

8. Customers increase their purchase intentions as the organisation meets expectations, delivers the promised benefits, builds deep customer relationships at multiple levels and invests in committed employees who understand their customers’ needs.

Customer advocacy is a key component of the profitable growth cycle. Being willing to recommend an organisation to others is not only strongly associated with future purchase behaviours, but is also an invaluable avenue for organisations to win new customers through referrals. High growth organisations benefit from increased customer advocacy by

9. Seeking customer referrals as an integral part of their customer growth strategy, often measured by the Net Promoter Score (NPS)* which determines the proportion of customers that are “promoters” versus the customers that are “detractors”.

These nine areas of improving customer focus, engagement, loyalty and advocacy are part of Insync Surveys’ profitable growth cycle, which identifies the five key people drivers of profitable growth.

Click here to read more about the Profitable Growth Cycle

Want to measure customer experience?

Learn more about our customer experience tools to build customer conversations and outshine your competitors with a customer experience strategy.

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