What defines the voice of the customer strategy for small businesses? Consider how your business communicates with clients and customers. Do you tell them what you can do for them, assuming you know what they want and need?
Do you listen to their problems and develop a strategy for providing the solution? With key information about what matters most to your customers, you’ll be able to get more leads and build a stronger level of brand loyalty. That means that next time, instead of searching on Google for a solution, they contact you.
To do this there’s one huge difference you have to make. You have to learn to listen to your customers.
Why Listening to Your Customers Matters
Today’s customers have very high expectations from any company they work with for any type of service. If you want them to patronize you, especially on an ongoing basis, you have to be their problem solver. One of the most common statements from customers about what causes them to seek out a new service provider is the easiest to fix: the service department not listening to their needs.
Listening to your customers provides several huge benefits to service businesses:
- It reduces your customer churn.
- It improves customer loyalty.
- Listening improved customer retention.
- Listening helps identify opportunities to cross-sell or upsell to your customers.
- It creates better experiences for everyone.
What’s the bottom line?
By actively listening to your customers, you can analyze what really is going wrong and what their real needs are. Some studies indicate that 73% of customers report that they switch from one provider to another because of a bad experience with the service department. That’s a huge number of unhappy clients.
Let’s say that out of the next 100 clients that call you for service, how many will you know who are actually disappointed? Most often, you will not. They just look for someone else next time.
If you’re spending a significant amount of money marketing to get new clients and you’re not seeing return services, it’s time to listen to your customers. That is, you need to put the time into really understanding what their frustrations are so you can fix the underlying problem and drop that 73% down to nothing.
The question is, how do you do it?
How to Listen to Your Customers
To listen to your customers, your first priority needs to be to understand how to communicate with them. Any interaction you have should foster the same sense of clear communication.
At the heart of listening to your customers is having conversations and engaging in active listening. That means you need to let them speak without interruption. Once the customer explains the problem, communicate what you understand about their problem. Then, tell your customer how you can help with their problem.
There are numerous other strategies you can employ as well to improve your customer service team’s ability to communicate well and your own personal ability to listen:
- Stay humble.
- Be patient.
- Pay attention to the customer so they see you’re actively listening to them.
- Consider their body language and monitor your own.
- Practice these skills with people you interact with today.
Stepping Beyond the Conversation
While actively listening to your customers is often something people do in person, there’s an entire other side to the process that can be equally impactful. Most of today’s customers are already talking to you, even if you’re not listening at all. They are using the internet to communicate.
By learning what your customers are saying, you can tailor your approach to meeting their needs more effectively. Here are some strategies to consider employing now.
Phone call recordings
A large portion of the dissatisfaction customers have stems from interactions with customer service teams, including your service department. There is no way you yourself can answer or monitor the phone every single time. However, you can use recordings of calls customers have with your employees to help enhance your understanding of the problem.
Social media
Social media is a huge outlet for any person who is looking for a way to vent about bad experiences. There’s little doubt that customers are using social media to communicate about their relationship with you (good and bad).
When someone in a local Facebook group asks for an affordable plumber, for example, you hope your customers step up and recommend you. Other times that may not happen, and instead, they may be focused on sharing their bad experience. You may not have known there was a problem with that client.
Reviews platforms
Review platforms are another tool for gauging customer insight and experiences. Review sites give people an opportunity to communicate the good and bad about a company (and your goal is likely to make sure there are plenty of good reviews that outweigh the bad.
At the same time, these reviews provide insight into opportunities for improvement. They can clearly demonstrate to you what areas your team can work on to improve customer retention.
How to Know If What Your Customers Tell You Is Actually Useful vs Just Noise
How do you know when to take action and when to just let it go? It’s often the case that you cannot fix a problem. A customer complaining about industry standard prices, for example, is never going to be positive about your interaction with them. So, how do you know what to do and when to do something?
When to take action and implement now
Very specific examples of problems, interactions, failures, and frustrations need to be addressed. If a person communicates with your team member in a phone call and is treated poorly, a call recording allows you to use that opportunity to train your employee.
What you may be able to ignore
Instances in which a person shares a comment on social media about your company without ever having worked with you aren’t worth your time. If they cannot offer any insight into who they worked with, what went wrong, or if they alerted your team to the problem, others will see through this. Empty and veiled statements are not worth engaging on social media or reviews.
How to Use Customer Insights to Improve Your Business
What you need to do, though, is to gather data and information about what’s going well and what isn’t so you can formulate a plan to better meet your customers’ needs on an ongoing basis. With the information and data you have from your customers, including from reviewing all of these social listening points (like reviews and social media), you may be unsure what steps to take next.
Build your online presence
Ensure your service business has a positive presence online. To do this:
- Have social media pages established, branded, and clearly utilized on a consistent basis for your business.
- Communicate and interact with clients who interact with your page. Engagement builds relationships even online.
- Utilize review sites in a professional manner. If there is a negative review, respond to it in a positive manner.
- Be a part of community social media groups.
- Create content on your website that is helpful and relevant
Interactions with your customers
The interactions with your customers happen every day. Take what you learn from shared feedback and upset customers and apply it to the way you interact with your clients. For example, utilize training sessions to talk to your team about better ways to handle angry customers. Share insights about failed appointments or mistakes so every member of your team can learn and grow from it.
Marketing messages
Tailor your marketing messages around pain points. If your customers consistently complain about late technicians, make changes to your operations to focus on improving those areas. Then, let them know in your marketing that you’ll be on time. Tailor your marketing around the complaints customers have about your competition, too.
Sales promotions
When creating your next sales promotion, consider these strategies:
- Tailor your offerings and message to address customer struggles. What is their real problem?
- Don’t overpromise. Customers want accuracy in what they buy. If you don’t have the team to be at their house in 24 hours, don’t make that a promise.
- Ask for feedback. Sometimes, the best way to encourage a sale is to ask your customers how you can help them and then tailor your next promotion to reach them.
There’s a lot of work involved in this process, but there is a clear return on investment in nearly every case. Listen to your customers. Use what you learn to build better relationships and meet customer needs more consistently. Then, those reviews will be all positive for your company.
Do You Need Help? Let Surefire Local Offer a Solution
The voice of the customer strategy for small businesses matters. Everything you do is to draw customers into your business and keep them coming back. To do that, you have to listen to your customers to know what their needs and pain points are.
It is a lot of work, especially when you have dozens of appointments and tasks to manage. That’s where Surefire Local can offer help and hope for you. Utilizing our tools, you can easily listen to phone call records with prospective and current customers to identify how you can better support their needs. How do we do this?
We currently help over 3,000 local businesses gain visibility on Google, get more quality leads, and have more control over their entire digital footprint. To do this, we offer an all-in-one platform designed to help you manage your customer experience from that first contact to long after the sale happens. That ensures customers get the 5-star experience they desire, and you get the social benefit from it.
It’s easy to get started, and there’s no pressure. To get started, attend a Surefire Local demo.