FAQs – Customers

Being in a business, where customers use products for more than 5 years, there are specific reasons why it is important to invest in customer experience and loyalty:

• Your customers expect you to provide after-sales service.
• They expect to be recognized in a consistent manner.
• If happy, they can even recommend your brand to other prospects by providing referrals.

If you are a company in the Consumer Durables space, you need to have the ability to tie together information (about people and interactions with them) across social and traditional channels. This means integrating customer information on CEM, where all the interactions with your customers across channels such as email, phone and so on, are stored.

The focus needs to be on what customers need, not what they want. Customers don’t know what they want, which leads to unreasonable demands, because that is the only way they can express what they need.

Going back to Henry Ford’s quote - “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.'' However, at that time and age, where the concept of an internal combustion engine was not well known, a faster horse was the only way customers knew to express the increased speed of transportation.

CX programs need to look beyond the emotions expressed by the customer and gain actionable insights by identifying the underlying needs.

When it is said that Indians rate lower, the first question is lower compared to what? If the company is an MNC running a CX program, which finds that the NPS it receives in India is consistently lower than other regions, then you could say that Indian consumers are likely to rate lower. However, that should only be concluded when no other alternative exists to explain the difference, such as weak business operations or a lack of regional focus.

For a company operating only in India, just because Indian customers rate lower does not mean the scale is relevant. As we’ve covered before, it’s not about the score itself, but the improvement in the score that drives a CX program forward. If awareness is the concern, information on the NPS scale can be incorporated in the design to inform the customers (by colour-coding for example). Care must be taken however to ensure that the measurement methodology is consistent.

Our platform receives more than a million responses per month across brands and touchpoints. Customers do respond to feedback invitations when they have something to say.

While they are more likely to respond to complaints about a bad experience, we have seen positive comments coming from customers as well, appreciating the service provided by the brand.

In our experience, the problem is not of consumer fatigue, but of consumer cynicism on surveys. Consumers don’t respond because they are tired of filling surveys, but rather because they feel that responding will have no impact as the business will not do anything about it.

Just measuring experience is not enough. Brands need to act on the experience to engage customers effectively and demonstrate that brands are responsive to feedback.

Collecting data not only helps you know your customers as individuals but also as members of larger segments. This data helps inform strategic marketing decisions. Following are ways to collect customer information:

• Purchase Transactions
• Loyalty Programmes
• Always-On link on invoice / creatives around the store to gather feedback and customer data.
• Sign-up Forms/ Newsletters (ecommerce).