None of us are strangers to the customer satisfaction survey that comes at the end of our lengthy phone call with our cable provider or in the mail with a renewal notice for our magazine subscription. Most of us will probably hang up or throw out the paper, as we do not have the faintest interest in taking it. But, for many companies, this survey comes from a good place as the company is looking to keep you happy and loyal.
Today, customer engagement is an increasingly harder process as the advent of social media and the Internet has made it easy for disgruntled customers to take to the Web to lambaste companies and become brand slanderers. Consequently, companies more than ever need to spearhead initiatives like customer satisfaction surveys, among other things, to make sure that they are keeping you content.
A recent blog post titled, “Using the Survey to Build Customer Engagement in Neolane,” explores the benefits of surveying customers. As argued, “A core value of customer engagement is to market based on thorough understanding of customer segments and how they differ from one another. In theory, this makes sense, but in actual marketing practice, carrying on communication with customers is always a challenge… how can we reach out to half a million people and get to know how they think about a ‘bigger’ concept – a company product, an innovative service, a marketing promotion plan, or a company recruiting tactic?”
The answer, according to the blog, is through a customer survey. The survey is a cost effective way to make sure that the customers’ voices are being heard. As explained in the post, nowadays it is extremely expensive to meet with customers face-to-face let alone have a conversation with them via the phone. Thankfully, email has emerged as an “effective and efficient way to deliver surveys and gather a lot of information about a majority of your customers.”
Moreover, marketing automation tools allow companies to connect survey results with specific customer segments, which helps businesses tailor strategies and campaigns.
One company that prides itself on ensuring the brands maintain customer engagement is ACCENT Marketing Services, a performance marketing company for brands that are passionate about keeping and growing customers. Since 1993, ACCENT has been helping world-renowned brands acquire, support, retain and grow customers at every lifecycle stage thanks to its Continuous Engagement Improvement Process.
"Founded in 1993, ACCENT was originally a direct marketing company created to meet the needs of manufacturers and retailers by marketing extended service plans to consumers at the time of product warranty expiration and contract renewal,” Tim Searcy, CEO of ACCENT, told TMCnet recently. “Leveraging our direct marketing and data analytics heritage, ACCENT has today grown into a performance marketing company that offers a full suite of multichannel engagement solutions across the customer lifecycle from pre-acquisition to collections and every stage in between.”
“Whether consumers are on the phone, online, or in the social cloud, ACCENT’s mission is to keep our clients in the conversation,” he added. “We understand consumer behavior and have developed solutions to help our clients actively engage their customers while transforming their customer service touchpoints into powerful brand and relationship building tools.”
For more on ACCENT, click here.
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Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TMCnet. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication's social media initiatives. Carrie holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and a bachelor's degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Rich Steeves