It’s important in any line of business to know how customers feel about your product or service. Did they have a good experience? Was it what they expected? And if not, why not?
To get a better understanding of this customer sentiment, brands often look for answers in online reviews, surveys, ratings, and more. But as recent research from Bain shows, it may not represent the full picture:
80% of organizations believed they delivered a “superior experience” to their customers; however, only 8% of customers felt the same way.
Though this is a wider snapshot of the industry at large, it’s still a troublesome fact for connected device brands because it represents a larger trend that could be impacting your business without your even knowing it.
So why, with such unlimited access to customer sentiment, is there such a gap between what brands think they’re delivering and what customers think they’re getting?
You’re not actively looking for feedback.
If you aren’t regularly monitoring customer reviews and sentiment, you’re not going to know what they’re saying—so of course, it’s easy to believe every experience is a great one.
What to do: Make sure you’re monitoring as much customer feedback as possible in order to fully assess the ISP customer experience—from post-support surveys to online reviews and more. Use this feedback and WiFi diagnostics tools to establish a baseline to improve the customer’s overall experience.
Your customers aren’t telling you they’re unhappy. They’re just leaving.
Part of the problem with customer sentiment is that if they don’t tell you why they’re unsatisfied, there’s no way you could know. And in many cases, after a bad experience, customers will churn from a company without a word. You’ll just know the device came back; you won’t know why.
What to do: The key here is to make it easy—and appealing—for customers to tell you about their experience, even when it wasn’t great, through strategies like quick surveys, giveaways, and net promoter score questionnaires. Adopt the mentality that if customers have a good experience, you want to know; and if they have a poor experience, you really want to know.
Your customers have high expectations.
You can’t control what customers expect from you, your devices, or even your marketing materials. But ultimately, it boils down to the fact that the customer wants their device to connect perfectly on the first try—and when it can’t, they’re going to lose faith in the brand.
What to do: This may seem like an intimidating issue, but the key to managing these expectations is customer education. By giving your customers access to information that helps them accomplish what they expect (and that helps them when it doesn’t go how they expect), you can match their expectations to their experience.
To do this, your support team will be your best resource. Look to agents to provide insights on the most common issues, as well as what they’ve found to be the simplest and most effective resolutions, and use those scenarios to build a strategy for educational and troubleshooting resources your customers can access.
