Even if Don Draper himself fleshed out your latest ad campaign, nothing can replace the incredible value of providing customers with the best possible customer experience. Think about it, if you went the fanciest restaurant in town and everyone treated you poorly, would you go back?
With peer-to-peer reviews carrying even more weight thanks to the power of Facebook, Twitter, and the barrage of other social media channels rising in popularity at breakneck speed, it’s never been more important to invest in customer service. Because, hey, bad news travels fast. It’s one of the reasons why we recently introduced our Customer Satisfaction Ratings feature, so organizations have a proper tool for measuring how happy their customers are with their customer support (and taking the appropriate corrective actions ASAP when required).
Still unconvinced? The infographic below might change your mind:
Tiffany –
I very much enjoyed your recent blog, and can easily suipport some of the points you made. However, I’ll take issue with you on two key points:
1. As dynamic and powerful an influence on future behavior as word-of-mouth and brand impression, resuilting from customer experience, advertising can’t, and shouldn’t, be shoved aside in the communication mix. Research by Keller Fay, and others, repeatedly demonstrate that it’s the effective combination of peer-to-peer communication, advertising, and promotion that will drive business results.
2. As a metric, satisfaction has some overall value; however, customer advocacy (brand impression, informal communication activity, and continued purchase intent) correlates much more closely and consistently to actual business results (see my CustomerThink article, which has had over 6,500 views in the past year: http://www.customerthink.com/article/marketing_case_customer_advocacy_measurement. My new book, The Customer Advocate and The Customer Saboteur, explains this in more detail. On the Zengage page which presents the reasoning behind customer satisfaction measurement, the CEO of Wildfire Interactive even identifies customer advocacy as an end goal.
As a passing note, doubtless some of the stats quoted in your blog come from work I did while a SVP of Stakeholder Relationship Consulting for Harris Interactive, and also work partnered on with RightNow Technologies.
Regards.
Michael Lowenstein, Ph.D., CMC
Executive Vice President
Market Probe (www.marketprobe.com)
Very nice article and infographic. You are totally correct. Advertisements are created basically as a fantasy that lures the customers to the product but real people and good service will lead to their loyalty.