When it comes to finding out if your customers are happy and if they are loyal brand proponents, your first strategy should be to listen. Listen to what you are doing right, to the areas where you can improve and to what your customers’ true needs are, according to ACCENT Marketing Services.
“Listening is more than just listening to phone calls or tapping into what is going on in a variety of channels,” Tim Searcy, chief executive officer of ACCENT Marketing Services, told TMCnet in a recent podcast. “We want to see not only what the customers say about the brands but how they feel about them. We find this includes a lot of social networks and community components like Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) and the Blogosphere. You can also listen by requesting feedback from the customers – kind of a more classic market research and customer satisfaction – but capturing those inquires through both direct and indirect channels, creating a singular strain of customer information around each customer and then being able to batch those pieces together to come to some conclusions and draw some ideas around how to do more.”
ACCENT, a performance marketing company for brands that are passionate about keeping and growing customers, recently sat down with TMCnet to discuss just how important it is to listen to customers and why companies should adopt to ACCENT’s Continuous Engagement Improvement Process, which couples ACCENT’s resources with a data-driven approach to help brands get the most out of their customer relationships.
According to company officials, companies ought to go through five steps when trying to reach their customers: listen, learn, connect, influence and optimize. Each stage is centered upon making each customer interaction more intelligent and engaging than the last, regardless of the interaction channel.
And no step is perhaps more important in the customer engagement process than listening.
“It’s about putting a listening post out that doesn’t care about channel but really cares about both the customers stated feelings and the intensity and emotions associated with them ,” Searcy said.
While it might seem like an easy step, many companies take a wrong turn when trying to listen to their customers, particularly companies that are antiquated in their marketing strategies. As put by Searcy, several organizations make the mistake of deploying old customer engagement methodologies that no longer work anymore. For example, phoning customers to perform a telephone survey is a futile attempt when customers no longer answer the phone.
Moreover, companies who fail to consider the impact of social media or the Blogosphere will be left with an incomplete picture with regards to customer happiness.
“They become siloed in their histories to the point where they are only paying attention and listening in the traditional ways they have done in the past,” Searcy said. “The second thing we see is that they listen for just one topic, something like satisfaction, they won’t be paying any attention to things that go beyond that – the underlying rationale for why someone doesn’t stay satisfied. You in essence start to create your outcomes when you pick which topics. We believe instead you need to start listening in total.”
For more on the “listen step” of the Continuous Engagement Improvement Process and on what brands can learn from their customers during this stage, click here to download the podcast.
Edited by Rich Steeves