Tag: customer satisfaction

Positive Word Of Mouth Will Win You More Customers

Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

 positive word of mouth

We have written quite extensively about the need to use social media to promote your brand and your business. Nothing beats a positive word of mouth about your business, it’s free and it’s powerful.

Developing a following on social media sites is more important for business than ever.

You can use RocketResponder to remind people of your social links each time you send them an email and encourage your customers to follow you on social sites.

The more people that follow you then the more people that will see the messages you send out about your business.

You will almost certainly use social media to inform customers and potential customers when you have written a new blog post, uploaded a new video or have a new promotion or product coming out.

But, just like communicating by email, this need not be a one way street when it comes to getting your message across.

You should actively encourage your customers to use social media and share their experiences of you and your business with their followers.

These days social proof is vital for many and they want to know that someone else has had a good experience with the goods or services they are interested in before they make the commitment to buy.

Think about how you can encourage your customers to spread the word about you. Maybe you could encourage them to use Twitter with a particular hashtag and give a small gift each month for a random customer who has used that hashtag.

Or you could just ask your customers to post their comments on social media sites if they particularly like your products. Sometimes just asking is all that it takes to get them to do this for you.

Remember that people are nine times more likely to leave a negative comment about you than to leave a positive comment so anything you can do to help even things up a bit is fair game.

Influencing Perceived Value Of Your Customers – Exceeding Expectation

Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

 Influencing Perceived Value

Last time we explained that it was important to give your customers value but that the customer’s perception of value is key to making them feel good about the purchase. Today we are discussing the influencing perceived value of your customers.

This leads to the rather paradoxical conclusion that your customers can feel really happy about an inferior product and really unhappy about a superior one.

Thankfully it is not totally hit and miss and you can really go a long way to influencing this perception of value.

The trick is to understand that your customer will have some expected value for the performance they want your products or services to live up to.

If, when they examine and use the goods they have paid for, the performance is better than their expectations then they will be satisfied and the perceived value will be high.

If, on the other hand, the product falls short of their expectations for it, then the perceived value will be low and they are unlikely to buy from you again.

This is why you will see that a lot of companies put huge emphasis on the notion of exceeding customer expectation because this is the performance standard which will almost guarantee happy, loyal and repeat custom.

Think of it like this, there are three things you can do in this regard:

  • fail to meet expectation – the customer will be unhappy, disappointed, maybe even angry with you and will not want to buy again. They may even demand a refund and fire off an angry email or letter to you.
  • meet expectation – you have delivered exactly what the customer wanted. They expected “x” and they got exactly that. You have not really triggered any deep emotions here and so you have not won any really loyal fans. Your product will be easily forgotten.
  • exceed expectations – You have gone over and above what the customer thought they would get. If they thought they were already getting something of good value, now they think they have got something of extra-ordinary value. You have won raving fans who are likely to encourage their friends and family to buy from you too.

Try and look at the goods and services you offer from the point of view of your customers. Do you think you meet, fail to meet or exceed their expectations and could you do anything differently to do even better.

One thing you could do is use your RocketResponder broadcast message function to ask your customers to tell you how you are doing…the feedback could prove invaluable.

Why The Feelgood Factor Is Absolutely Critical

Patrick Griffin Leave a comment

 keep your customers happy

The chances are that in business you will want to keep your customers happy.

After all happy customers are good because they:

  • don’t complain about you
  • don’t cause any problems
  • buy more from you and
  • encourage their friends to buy from you

One of the reasons you use a service like RocketResponder to communicate with your customers is to help ensure they feel valued by you.

You want to keep them happy and one way of doing that is in the communications you have with them via email.

It makes sense that another way you keep them happy is by ensuring that the goods or services you provide are of real value to them and constantly exceed their expectations.

The concept of value here is a very interesting one. Consider the following question:

What is more important, the actual value provided by the goods ore services you offer or the perceived value that the customer has of it?”

If you think it is the absolute, actual value then studies have shown that you are wrong.

Your customers will be more influenced by the value that they perceive their purchase to have – irrespective of its actual value to them.

This means:

  • your customers will be satisfied if the perceived value is better than the actual value
  • your customers will not be happy – and thus unlikely to make further purchases from you – if the actual performance of what they bought is quite good but they perceive it to be bad.

Basically they want to feel good about the purchase and feel good that the purchase is right for them and for their lives.

Think about what you offer and think how you consider your customers would perceive the value to be.

Next time we will look at what influences this perceived value.