07 Feb The key to customer satisfaction

Do you know the key ingredient to customer satisfaction? A study of 27,000 consumers from Mckinsay & Company found that most consumers value consistent customer experience over anything else. They found that the consistent customer experience helps build consumer trust and boost loyalty. An excerpt from Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business states “Companies that want to produce a high-quality customer experience also need to routinely perform a set of sound, standard practices. These practices fall under six high-level disciplines: strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, governance, and culture.”

With consistency as such an important factor for customer satisfaction, we brought you some of the most prevalent benefits that come with increased consistency.

Customer-Journey Consistency

The customer journey is an important factor of customer satisfaction due to the many areas it covers. Your employees must be able to clearly deliver your company message and communicate what your company strives to excel in. In the client facing world of your business, you do not want half of your employees offering high-level service while the other half delivers lackluster, sub-par service. To ensure that you have consistent services your company must have clear rules, policies, and support measures to help insure that every interaction is just as satisfactory as the one before it. From sales, to support, and even management, all areas of the company must have a proper understanding of what your company offers and how to deliver it to the customer.

Emotional Consistency

According to the authors of the study, they found that trust is one of the biggest factors in customer satisfaction and loyalty. They found that when customers have a positive interactions with employees they develop more trust towards the company as a whole. Emotional consistency must be considered when planning for your customer experience strategy. You must ask, “how do we want to service our customers?” As well as, “how do we plan on amazing them and drawing them back in?” An example of how important this is would be a customer being impressed with their very first interaction with sales, but then being disappointed upon speaking with customer service afterwards. While the customer might feel good about how the sale went, they may not come back because of the bad tasted left in their mouth from the customer service experience.

Communication Consistency

With communication consistency, a company must plan the message they want to communicate and plan how they want others to perceive their brand. According to the study, consistent communication can be a key factor in increasing your customer satisfaction. The key to communication consistency is to focus on the promises made in your messages. An example of this would be South-West Airlines, by always promoting cheap, no frill airfare customers know what to expect when booking with this company.

When a customer interacts with a new business, they base their expectations for customer service on what the products and services are like. When the company interacts with a new customer for the first time, they want to ensure that their brand messages and the way they are communicated is consistent. By not implementing consistent employee practices and failing to enact value based service across the board, major trouble can because for the company. If there is no consistency in a brand and its

positioning, then the company runs the risk of confusing the customer, which can, in turn, lead to a bad customer experience.

Increased customer satisfaction can lead to countless benefits across the board, here are some reasons why you should invest in improving your customer consistencies.

Consistent experience means you always meet expectations

Exceeding your customer’s expectation should be one of the main goals of your business. A study from Parasuraman, by Leonard L. Berry, and Valarie A. Zeithaml, found that every customer has a preset notion of the business they are about to enter a relationship with. Your goal as a business is to aim to always meet and exceed this preset notion that they have in mind. An example of this would be a customer at a jewelry store, the customer believes going into their transaction here that the more money they spend the more value they should receive from the items they have purchased. With this typically being true in a jewelry store, the best way to please this customer and exceed their expectations is to accompany their jewelry purchase with exemplary services that leaves a memorable mark on the customer.

Consistent experiences build trust

Customers like dealing with the same people each time they interact with a business. This can help build a long-term relationship with the customer if they know they can interact with an employee that they trust.

Consistent experience show that you care

Showing customers you care can be one of the biggest steps a firm can take to build customer satisfaction. Customers want to feel like your company has their best interests at heart each time they interact. By practicing consistency you show the customer that you care and will always deliver on the services and products that your company offers.

By improving consistency throughout your company’s emotional connections, communications, and customer journey experiences you insure an increase in customer satisfaction and a better company image as well.