Customer Satisfaction Ebook PDF
Customer Satisfaction Ebook PDF
Customer Satisfaction
eBook
Ross Beard, ClientHeartbeat.com
9/1/2013
What is customer satisfaction? We give you the run down of exactly why you need to track
customer satisfaction with five benefits your business can get out of it.
Tracking customer satisfaction is often a headache. We give actionable strategies you can
use to start tracking customer satisfaction today, so you can stop them leaving tomorrow.
Creating amazing experiences is the key to high customer satisfaction. We take you through
over 50 strategies to increase satisfaction, reduce customer churn and build ‘sticky’ loyalty.
Customer advocates are the number one source for growing your business. Learn how to
identify your advocates and build relationships with them so they refer you new business.
How To Follow Up With ‘At Risk’ Customers And Stop Them From Cancelling ......... 35
Avoid Making These 12 Common Mistakes That Are Killing Your Satisfaction ........... 55
Three Ways To Find And Convert Customers Into Advocates Using Social Media ..... 83
I n a world where customer acquisition costs are 4-5 times more than the costs of retaining
customers, companies need to focus on improving customer satisfaction and keeping
customers happy.
Qualtrics defines customer satisfaction as one of the most essential elements of customer
retention, customer loyalty, and product repurchase. The art and science of customer
satisfaction involves strategically focusing on creating and reinforcing pleasurable
experiences.
Customer satisfaction is a key indicator as to the level of customer service. Client Heartbeat
surveyed over 200 companies and their customers to identify trends in customer satisfaction.
This eBook aims to address these trends to help you increase customer satisfaction so you
can retain more customers and boost customer lifetime value.
A poor customer experience can lead to your customers cancelling their contracts and taking
their business elsewhere.
It’s no longer good enough to just send customer surveys and get
feedback. IT Companies need to monitor changes in satisfaction so
they know which customers are happy and which are ‘at risk’.
Gordon Tan, Director – Client Heartbeat & R&G Technologies
R&G Technologies, an IT Company in Brisbane, budgets $300 per lead and converts one in
five, so just there you’re looking at $1200 marketing costs, and that doesn’t include the time
of the company’s business development managers!
As different problems arise and different employees handle customer inquiries, your customer
will be receiving numerous customer experiences. With no customer satisfaction tracking,
you are going it blind and don’t know how your customers really feel about your service.
Yeah, they may love Jimmy when he comes out, but what about Tom – do they like his
service? Could his poor service be a potential reason for a customer to leave?
By ensuring your customers are satisfied, you are putting yourself in the best possible
position to create customer advocates that will send you business referrals. One thing that
R&G encourages all staff to do is go into every encounter with a customer as if they were
going to ask for a business referral at the end. By taking this approach, they are on top of
their game, offering outstanding service and striving to exceed customer expectations.
4. Our statistics show a drop in customer satisfaction is a key indicator that the
customer has a foot out the door and is looking at competitors
Client Heartbeat works with companies around the world to track customer satisfaction and
has developed a unique algorithm that looks at a customers past satisfactory scores,
combines it with industry data to identify unhappy customers before they leave. This system
has proved an essential component for companies and has shown that a drop in customer
Research by SBA found that 9% of customers will leave because they perceive a competitors
offering as better. Annie Miner from The Dunvegan Group believes that to stop this,
companies must focus on offering a ‘perceived service’ that is better than competitors.
Tracking customer satisfaction and then benchmarking it against others in your industry will
help you discover how you stack up against the rest and see if you are at risk of customers
potentially defecting to competitors.
1. Assists with identifying ‘at risk’ customers who are unhappy with your service and
potentially going to cancel.
2. Assists with finding happy customers who become your advocates that can drive new
business referrals and grow your business.
3. Enables you to identify trends in your customer service on an individual level so you can
make better business decisions to improve the overall customer experience
4. Lets you identify common problems that are happening over and over again. Use this
intelligence to proactively prevent problems happening again which leads to a better
experience for customers.
5. Lets you hold employees accountable for the level of service they are delivering. This extra
level of data can form employee KPI’s and makes customer satisfaction measurable.
Too high? Just right? How well is your staff doing on customer service, or how well
does your customer success team understand the growing needs of your
customers—and prospects? Is there anything at all about the customer experience
that turns off your users?
You might even send out a survey to figure out why customers stop doing business
with you, how you might win them back, and how you can prevent customer losses
in the future. Empower your employees to meet milestones based on customer
needs.
And, if you're developing a new product or updating an existing one, customers can
provide you with invaluable feedback about design and functionality. Oftentimes,
users will shed light on problems that would have otherwise been missed.
Source: SurveyMonkey
Traditionally, the biggest challenges you will come across when doing customer surveys is
getting customers to actually fill out the surveys. Let’s face it, your customers live busy lives
and not all have the time to fill out customer surveys.
Go. Fight. Win. Well, maybe it's more like: Ask, Listen, and Win. In addition to using
methodologically-sound questions in the key areas already mentioned, you'll also
want to follow these tips for creating a great survey:
1. Be clear. Say you're surveying on customer satisfaction for a hotel stay. Don't
make your respondents guess what you mean. Tell them. Ask if the room service
was prompt, if the swimming pool was clean, if the check-in clerk was friendly, if their
bed was comfortable, and so on.
2. Be specific. Don't ask questions about general concepts or ideas; ask about
specific concepts or ideas (i.e. being "a good person" is general; being "polite to
waiters" is specific). A question that focuses on a specific concept is known as a
"construct-specific" question ("construct" is really just a fancy word for concept).
3. Ask a lot of questions. Asking multiple specific questions instead of one general
question will not only make your questions easier to answer for your respondents,
but it will also make your data easier to analyze and act on. Did your waiter let you
know about the specials of the day? Did he take our order promptly? Was he able to
answer all of your questions? Was he able to coordinate the timing of your courses?
Source: SurveyMonkey
The goal of any customer survey is to get meaningful, high-quality responses in order to
wholly comprehend your customer’s sentiments towards you, and how you can shift their
attitudes.
There are six factors you need to think about when designing a ‘kickass’ customer survey.
You need to brand your survey, make it accessible, limit the length, write an objective, keep it
personal and track your feedback.
People respond to a non-branded survey the way you respond when a complete stranger
asks you a question. You don’t care, because you won’t see them again. You should exploit
your pre-existing relationship, display business logos, colors, high quality graphics and well
written text. Remember if your customers know who you are, they’ll try harder to answer
honestly and constructively. You’ll get meaningful, accurate data you can use to improve your
business’s customer satisfaction levels.
When a customer fills out a customer survey, they are doing you a favor. In order to get the
highest possible number of customers completing your survey, you need to streamline the
process as much as humanly possible. This means designing your survey around your
customer’s needs so you get responses from a representative sample.
Make it accessible by emailing it directly to their Inbox, and make your survey ‘responsive’, so
it is compatible on mobile and tablet devices. These days, nearly everyone on a lunch break
is on their phone, perusing the Internet out of sheer boredom. Give your customers access
by creating a customer survey, which can be submitted via mobile. Just as how you’re more
likely to reach for that second doughnut if you can see it, your customers will be more likely to
complete your survey if you make it easy for them.
Short means not exceeding ten questions and sticking to one page on a 1024 x 768 screen
resolution. I know this design sounds scarily minimalistic, but here are the reasons why it’s a
good idea:
Eighty four per cent of people don’t read information on the web, they scan it. Customers
don’t read the questions properly when the survey drags on.
If there are too many questions, your customers won’t attend to each question
thoughtfully. Instead, they’ll rush through looking for the finish line.
Tonnes of questions complicate your analysis. Asking the same question in four different
ways creates an unnecessary amount of work for your business.
Another recommendation is keeping answers options simple. A rating scale is best because
it’s quick and easy. Not only do text boxes make your survey look time-consuming, they’re
also difficult to analyze because they’re often typo-ridden and unquantifiable.
The other BIG benefit of using a rating scale on each question is you will make your life a lot
easier when it comes round to analyzing the customer data, identifying trends in the data and
finding unhappy customers.
No one likes completing surveys. Make it as painless as possible for your customerele, and
they’ll pay you back with a high volume of quality responses you can use to enhance your
business’s customer satisfaction.
When you ask customers to complete a customer survey, you’re giving them the power to
enact change within your company. People enjoy empowerment, so let them know.
At the start of your survey, display one or two sentences explaining what you would like the
customer to do and why.
‘We want you to fill out our feedback survey, so we can give you better customer service.’
The peculiar reality is most customers don’t realize a customer survey gives them a voice to
express their deepest disappointments and desires.
Explicitly remind your customers you want to give better customer service based on their
feedback, and your customers will respond with enthusiasm. In addition, knowing your own
objective helps you organize your questions toward a specific outcome. If customers see and
sense your purpose, they’ll see the survey as a worthwhile exercise, and not only will they
respond, they’ll respond well.
The argument for anonymous surveys is this: When dealing with a sensitive or intimate issue,
anonymous surveys are more likely to produce a higher response rate, and more honest,
frank responses. I’d argue given the amount of public flaming and shaming of businesses
that goes on in social media, I don’t think honesty is going to be a problem. Let me debunk
My trawl of online literature revealed a whopping one per cent difference between the
response rate for anonymous and personalized surveys. Think about whether you’re more
likely to respond when someone calls you by name, or by a generic title. In terms of honesty,
how much more truthful do you have to be, when you’re accountable to your response?
Other studies have found participants slack off when they know they can’t be identified. Not
only is your response rate largely unaffected by personalization, you avoid fake responses,
and only hear from your customerele.
Personalizing your survey is like personalizing a huge, glass paperweight for someone’s
birthday. No matter how much they want to give it back, they’ll still take it because you took
the time and effort to personalize it especially for them.
Design your customer survey so it can be released every given period. A given period can
mean quarterly, yearly or anything you wish. After a few releases, the survey will be integrated
into your customers’ routine, giving you omnipresence over your business’s customer
satisfaction levels over time.
You’ll be witness to shifts in your customer sentiments and be able to make informed
decisions about renewing, replacing or maintaining certain services. You’ll also be able to
The effort required to release a feedback survey regularly pales in comparison to the potential
gains of doing so. Not only will your current feedback be analyzed against a historical
backdrop, your investment in the past won’t be wasted because none of the old information
becomes obsolete.
Writing any old questionnaire is easy. Designing an effective customer survey, which gives
you actionable insight into your customer satisfaction levels, requires careful consideration of
the six factors we briefly delved into.
You now understand how branding, accessibility, limiting the length, having a solid objective,
personalization and tracking your data impact upon the quality and quantity of responses you
receive from your customer survey.
Implement these ideas now to make your customer survey the best tool you’ve ever had for
increasing customer satisfaction and reducing customer churn.
No clear objective. Although the survey does say, ‘customer satisfaction survey’ –
there is no context around what this is. Yes, we get you want my customer feedback,
but why? and what are you going to do with it? It’s important to make your survey
No Personalization or ability to track feedback over a period of time. These are two of
the key components to creating a ‘kick-ass’ customer survey. Both components
assist with getting more actionable feedback that you can actually use to increase
customer satisfaction and make better business decisions.
Cut the questions down. In total they are asking over 40 questions. That’s way too
many and is going to turn a lot of customers off. Your customers are busy people;
they will be reluctant to spend more than five minutes filling out a customer survey.
Make the questions relevant to customer satisfaction. The problem with Zensar’s
survey lengths stems primary from the questions they are asking. A lot of the
questions are not necessary, they provide limited value for tracking and measuring
customer satisfaction, so it’s hard to justify asking them.
Have a clear purpose. The survey lacks a clear purpose. It’s almost like they are using
the to survey to try upsell some of their other products.
To further enhance your IT investment would you be interested in any more of Zensar's range
of service offerings (Tick the service of your interest – you may select multiple service areas).
Our account manager will contact you with more details.
Make the survey accessible on all devices. The survey is impossible to fill out on a
mobile device because it is not responsive.
Saxon Fletcher, product designer at Client Heartbeat had this to say about the important of
responsive design in customer surveys.
Clear branding and responsive on mobile devices. Instantly, R&G customers can
associate the survey with the company as they have a prominent logo at the top of the
survey. Customers can also respond via their mobile devices as the page is
Customer feedback is stored and tracked over a period of time. This is a feature that
is unique to Client Heartbeat. R&G is able to track customer feedback on an individual
customer level, so they can monitor changes in satisfaction from say, three months
ago to today. These changes in customer satisfaction are indicators that help the
company follow up with ‘at risk’ customers and make better business decisions that
can help improve overall customer satisfaction for the future.
The respondents should be asked to agree or disagree with each statement using a five-
point scale, where a one indicates “strongly disagree” and a five indicates “strongly agree.”
This is an age-old question which companies have been using for decades and is also used
as a key question by Client Heartbeat. It gives a great representation of how happy your
customers are. Research and theory backs up the fact that if your customers are willing to
Use this customer satisfaction metric to really understand whether your service meets the
needs and wants of your customers. This is a great question that comes off as passive but
can give you extremely good insight into your customers.
4. Overall Satisfaction
This question reflects the customers ‘overall’ satisfaction with your service. This can be an
open-ended question and you should be looking for mentions of quality, reliability and
customer fulfillment. Scott Smith from Qualtrics believes that these three indicators are the
greatest predictors of customer satisfaction.
Affect is basically liking or disliking something. It is best measured in context of your service
benefits. For example – SLAs, response times etc. Customer satisfaction is influenced by
perceived quality of these benefits.
Cognition refers to judgment – was the product useful or not? Did it fit the situation or not?
Judgments are often specific to the intended use of the service.
Customer satisfaction can influence customers on whether they will renew their contracts or
purchase more products from you.
By asking them directly, you can gauge a good indication on how satisfied they are with your
company and see whether they will continue doing with you.
From talking to Mimi Tan, Operations Manager, I learned that one of the biggest ways R&G
Technologies retains more customers is by tracking customer satisfaction over a period of
time. They take a very personal approach to customer feedback and track satisfaction ratings
on an individual level, from one period to the next.
Example diagram of how R&G track customer satisfaction using Client Heartbeat
Using these actionable insights, they are able to identify customers ‘at risk of leaving’ and
solve their problems quickly.
Here are some key indicators that can help you identify ‘at risk’ customers by using customer
surveys and analyzing the customer feedback data.
Below average customer satisfaction scores are an alarm bell. Once your customers have
completed your customer survey, use a tool like Microsoft Excel to crunch the data into a
spreadsheet.
Here you want to work out the average rating for all your customers across the questions you
asked. Since you asked questions with a rating scale this should be easy (if you didn’t ask
Now that you have the average scores, flag each customer that is below average as ‘at risk’.
This doesn’t mean they are necessarily unhappy and going to leave (yet), but it is the first
warning sign that they might have a foot out the door.
Your job will be to follow up with these flagged customers to see why they gave you below
average scores, and identify ways to improve your service to ensure their satisfaction scores
improve for the next survey period.
Tip: Read the next section on how to follow up with flagged ‘at risk’ customers.
This indicator takes a little more work but is one that is very popular with most companies. It
involves tracking customer satisfaction scores from one survey period to the next.
Take all your customer survey data from the two survey periods, and match up the customer
satisfaction scores for each individual customer so you can see both scores.
Follow up with all customers that are highlighted in red or green to find out more about why
their satisfaction scores changed. The at risk customers will need some shoring up, while the
green happy customers are perfect candidates for becoming advocates. Ask them why their
scores changed – use this feedback and match it up against any customer satisfaction
initiatives you implemented since the last survey period. This will help you see what worked
and what didn’t.
3. Customer has indicated they would not feel comfortable recommending you
to colleagues and friends
This is the last key indicator as to whether a customer is unhappy. An important question to
ask in your customer surveys is this one:
If someone would not want to recommend your company to friends, there is something
wrong going on. There are problems going on that need to be resolved. It’s your job to find
out the problems causing customer unhappiness, and fix them before it’s too late.
Here’s a five step cheat sheet to following up with ‘at risk’ customers.
Step 1: Identify at-risk customers by digging through customer survey data and
looking at key indicators
I touched on this in the last chapter, but just to recap – here’s what you need to do.
Break down your customer survey data and look for trends in customer satisfaction where
your customer scores are below the average, have dropped more than 20% since the last
survey period, or customers that have indicated they wouldn’t feel comfortable
recommending you.
TIP: Customer Heartbeat makes identifying unhappy customers super easy. Just
jump inside your Customer Satisfaction Dashboard, and then browse down to your
customers ‘at risk’ highlighted in red. Print out these guys, and move to step two.
Once you’ve identified your at-risk customers, the next step in this cheat sheet involves
bringing together your team of account managers and employees so you can brainstorm
ideas around why they have given you a poor rating.
This step needs to be completed for each customer at an individual level. I recently sat in on
a business meeting at R&G Technologies and got to see how they handled at-risk
customers.
What they do is address all at-risk customers during their monthly company meetings. When
all employees are in one room, Mimi Tan, Operations Manager, checks off each at-risk
customer and opens up the room for discussions so the respective account managers and
technicians can join in.
By golly, some interesting feedback comes out. More times than not, just by doing this quick,
collaborative open discussion, you can quickly identify a couple of key events in the last
period that caused the sub-par customer satisfaction scores.
Without giving away the exact details, in this particular example I sat in on, it turned out that
there was a mix-up in communication between the company and R&G. This led to a delay for
the customer which ended up hurting the business.
Now that you have identified some possible problems, step three focuses on following up
with each at-risk customer with a phone call so you can try to arrange a sit-down meeting.
Yes, it’s important to show you care about your customers , so I recommend trying to meet
them face to face.
When on the phone call, I suggest you thank them for their feedback, and tell them you take
feedback seriously. Tell them that the satisfaction scores they gave you were below what you
were looking for and ask some questions to try dig a little deeper into why they gave you sub-
par scores.
From doing your little brainstorm earlier in step two, you probably know exactly why, but it’s
always better to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Your customer is always the best form of
feedback, so make sure you listen to what they have to say.
“So, Joe, I understand that one of our technicians installed the wrong program
(feedback from staff)… I can see how that has affected your opinion on our ability to
get the job done right the first time (feedback from customer). Is that the only
problem you’ve had with us?”
With this short question, you are clarifying that you have the problem identified, and just
checking if you’ve missed anything else.
Finally, it’s time to come up with a solution to reassure your customer that this won’t happen
again.
Since you’ve done some prep work prior to the meeting, you will have some ideas around a
“customer win-back” strategy – this is covered in the next step.
Before I go to step four, let’s just recap the importance of following up with at-risk customers.
Remember that you are doing all of this because it shows your customer that you care. You
care about their business and you want to win it back. You want to keep them as a customer
and you are doing everything in your means to make sure the problems causing unhappiness
stop occurring.
This is the pointy end of the stick, or the chocolate bit of the ice cream.
You’ve identified at-risk customers, nailed down the problems that were impacting the poor
satisfaction scores, and reassured your customers that the problems won’t happen again.
Now it’s time to propose a “customer win-back” plan.
This is something I recommend all companies use as a way of asking for one more chance to
regain their customers trust and re-strengthen the relationship.
Because let’s face it, you’ve let your customer down. Whether it was an inaccurate
installation, a poor service that didn’t meet expectations or an implementation that didn’t
follow guidelines, your customer is going to have a hard time trusting you again.
The initial problem that caused the customer to be at risk was a result of poor service
response times. The customer expectations in the IT Contract stated that the IT
Company would fix category two problems within four hours. For one reason or
I recommend in this example, the company’s “customer win-back” plan should include strict
SLAs and maybe even tie it to an incentive-based system. Mimi Tan of R&G Technologies
told me their company has a refund policy based around their SLAs, so when they don’t
meet them, their customer gets reimbursed.
Furthermore, I recommend telling your customer that if you breach SLA’s one more time,
you’ll personally cancel the contract – that’s how confident you are that you will not let them
down again. Your customer win-back plan might also include three to four other points as
well.
Other great things to include are additional services at no charge, free training on some new
products, or two hours of free consulting. It can be something that is not going to blow your
budget, but is a nice gesture to show that you care.
The key here is to show that you really care, show that you understand how important a high
quality of service is to you, and that moving forward, you’re personally going to do everything
in your means to make sure the level of service exceeds their expectations.
Most the time, your customer is happy to give you one more chance.
So if they do, it’s time to deliver. No more excuses, this is your final chance.
The final step in this cheat sheet involves implementing ongoing initiatives that are geared
toward earning back trust, building customer loyalty and encouraging the customer to
become a raving advocate who refers new business.
I’m only going to include my favorite four customer retention strategies here, but you can
read all nine strategies in this post.
Make sure you reset customer expectations so they are now inline with your new
service level agreement. Customers always remember negative experiences, so don’t
try and be a hero and set expectations too high. There is nothing that kills customer
satisfaction more than under delivering on your promises.
As the “expert on all things IT” you should relish this opportunity to help your
customer. By doing this, they become dependent on your services way beyond the
product you are selling. This leads to ‘sticky’ customer loyalty and is proven to help
improve customer satisfaction.
This strategy involves going out of your way to help your customer.
Additionally, you could invite them to a free training session. Put on a lunch, invite all
your customers in and give them a full demo of your new products, provide training
where necessary and just add a bit of value.
I’ve recently been reading Jeffery Gitomer’s book on customer loyalty and its relationship with
customer satisfaction and whoa, he’s got some super principles that I really connected with.
One that really stood out for me was this principle – Your Customer is your Paycheck.
With no customers, there is no money to pay you. He goes onto say that without customers,
you’re not getting paid, your business is worthless, and your wallet is empty.
I think this is a great point and really flips the angle on customer service. If we treated all
customers like they were our boss, we would go out our way to make sure their experience
with us was 10 out of 10.
Here are five ways you can impress your boss customers:
This is pretty straight forward. Be thankful for your customers continued support and
business. Without their purchases and repeat purchases, you wouldn’t be receiving your
paycheck.
Saying thank you goes a long way to showing you appreciate your customers. An
appreciated customer is a happy customer.
Jeffery mentions in his book that customer service should be renamed to customer help. If
every time you interacted with a customer and you thought help rather than service, I can
guarantee your customers would have had a better experience.
Try going out your way to help your customers. You will be surprised how thankful they will
be for your extra help, not to mention the customer loyalty it will build.
Remember every time you tried to impress your boss by going out your way for something,
or making sure you met some deadlines that seemed out of reach? Well, try doing that for
your customers. Act like your customers are your boss, and do everything you can to
impress them as if you wanted a raise.
Next time you check your bank balance after pay-day or receive your hard copy check, think
about whose money that really is. Think about your customers.
If you told your boss you would have some work done by close of business Friday, you’d
make sure it’s done wouldn’t you. Well, the same goes for your customers. If you promise to
There’s a lot of information around the web on how you can build customer loyalty and retain
more customers, so instead of reinventing the wheel, I’ve combined the best 18 strategies
from five recognized authorities in the space, and popped them all into a simple, single post
for you.
These customer loyalty strategies have been put together with thoughts from writers at
Entrepreneur.com, Jessica Malnik over at the BigCommerce blog, Mark Sunshine;
Forbes.com contributor, Jessica Nash, and editors over at Inc.com.
This can be done via a quick informal phone call or a friendly email newsletter – either way,
you want to subtlety let your customers know about all the work you have been doing for
them. For example, you may have spent part of your weekend fixing up a few problems for a
customer – you can hint about this when you follow up the next week. It’s important to realize
For long time customers, get personal. Tell them you value there business. Send them a letter
like this. “I was grabbing a coffee the other day and your name popped into my head. How
has business been for you? Are you on track to hit your targets this year?” Be genuinely
interested in their business and life, be personal.
Send regular customers birthday cards and holiday cards. Try not to be boring (like all the
other companies). If you can make these special cards/gifts unique in your own way, that will
go a long way to building customer loyalty. Use your creatively and find a way to tie the gift
ideas into your business, the customers’ business or his/her personal life.
4. Pass on information
If you read an article, see a new book, or hear about an organization that a customer might
be interested in, drop a note or make a quick call to let them know.
When you talk to your customers, they’ll probably have referrals to give you. Make sure you
take an open approach to every contact you have with each of your customer, you never
know what new business you can get out of it.
If you want to create customer evangelists, you need to hang out where they already are. If
they’re on Facebook, or Pinterest – jump on there and engage them. If they are on a wildly
popular body building forum, start contributing discussions on there.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.
Become your customers go to adviser on all things relating to your industry. For instance, if
you’re an IT Company, be their IT guy. Help them with choosing the best mobile plan, let
them know about upcoming compliance regulations. Go the extra mile.
Create a knowledge-base or FAQ section of the common questions and problems that your
customers encounter. Direct customers to specific answers – this will save you from
answering the same question 100 times, plus it will give your customer a solid response to
their problem.
This may seem pretty obvious, but I’m serious. Make a commitment to put customer
retention at the top of the list. If you spent as much time building customer loyalty and
retaining customers, as you did acquiring new customers, you’d have the world’s best
advocates and a 100% retention rate!
Let’s face it; everyone loves dealing with the business owner. There’s something about
dealing with the face of a company, the number one man, the boss in charge. As the
business owner or CEO, you should be the one engaging existing customers and building
customer loyalty. Make this your priority and not anyone else’s.
Effective marketing is about building trust and developing relationships. Too many times
people think marketing is just push a bunch of ads and they will come. Well, it’s not that
easy. Tom Asacker, marketing author, explains the purpose of marketing it to ‘create and
maintain a strong feeling with customers so they are mentally predisposed to continually
choose and recommend you’. Building customer loyalty is about building trust and
developing relationships – you see how it’s all interlinked?
By understanding what you customers actually want, you can build relationships that are
memorable and set you apart from the competition. Focus on understanding each of your
customers on an individual level and find out what really makes them tick, and why they like
doing business with you.
Integrity involves fundamental behaviors such as keeping your word, being honest, providing
a consistent level of service, and being reliable. Businesses that demonstrate a high degree
of integrity are seen as trustworthy.
Building trust requires businesses to continually put customer’s interests ahead of their own.
Customers will see this, and you will earn their trust and go a great distance to building
customer loyalty.
A successful marketing strategy will bring customers through the door, but only a successful
customer loyalty and retention plan will keep them coming back for more. Never take
customer loyalty for granted.
A successful business is about more than just selling stuff. It’s about selling experiences.
Chris Zane of Zane Cycles knows this all too well. He focuses on making his customers feel
good, and does this by not charging for every add-on, and now gives away free drinks at his
in-store coffee bar. His customers walk away with an experience, an experience that will keep
them coming back for more, and telling their friends about. This will go a long way to building
customer loyalty.
Resolving customer complaints is the best way to build customer loyalty. By handling
complaints in a professional manner, you earn the opportunity to fix the problem and regain
customer trust. In doing so, you engage your customer on an emotional level. Providing you
resolve the problem, you customer now has a very unique experience with you, and you have
shown first hand your willingness to recognize the problem and go out your way to ensure it
is fixed and won’t happen again. Customers love this.
Talk to your customers; ask for their opinion on your service. It doesn’t have to be
extravagant; a simple customer satisfaction survey will do the trick.
Whether you want to use old school punch cards or new mobile apps, a loyalty program can
go a long way to keeping your customers coming back. These programs are a great way to
engage your customers, build a relationship and drive repeat business.
You can’t learn anything if you don’t take action. If a customer leaves you feedback, make
sure you follow up with them and make sure they feel listened to. Use the feedback to create
a better experience for all your customers.
Take a holistic approach to customer feedback. Customers never leave feedback because
they want to personally attack you, they leave it because they are upset and want their
problem resolved or service improved. Learn from the feedback so you can make sure it
doesn’t happen again.
You can often set the bar way too high when trying to close a deal or impress a customer.
Make sure you set customer expectations appropriately right from the get go, so you can
ensure both your customer and your company are happy with the level of service being
offered.
Loyal customers are your biggest brand advocates. They are the customers who are telling
friends about your company, referring new business and refusing to buy from competitors.
You need to remember to maintain a high level of service for these guys, even if it seems like
they’ll never leave. One slip up and you could lose one of your company’s biggest assets (a
loyal customer).
One of the biggest customer retention mistakes a company can make is to use an automated
phone or email system. Nothing annoys a customer more than listening to long automated
recordings that keep them waiting and leave them disappointed. Remember this saying..?
All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they
know, like and trust.
No-one trusts a computer so don’t use one to automate your customer service.
You wouldn’t spend 10 minutes of your life filling out a long and boring survey at the mall
would you? So why put your customers through that? Customer feedback surveys are a
great way to get actionable insights into how your customers feel about your service, but it’s
important to make them short, quick and relevant.
You may think you’re better than your competitors, but I can guarantee they are contacting
your customers and trying to make them switch. Anne Miner from The Dunvegan
Group believes, ‘the way a customer views their competition’, as one of three key factors that
determine how strong a bond a company has with their customers. If none of your
competitors are perceived as to be better, there is a lesser likelihood the customer will leave.
Make sure you are keeping an eye on your competitors and try to ensure your perceived
service is better than theirs.
A satisfied customer isn’t a retained customer. Research from The Dunvegan Group shows
that 20% of customers who said they were ‘satisfied’ ended up switching providers to a
competitor. A better measurement of how likely you can retain a customer, is customer
loyalty. A loyal customer is one that will die before switching to a competitor, a loyal customer
will travel five miles out of their way to buy from you over a competitor.
If you’re not sending birthday emails or cards, you’re missing out on an opportunity to
strengthen a customer relationship. Strong customer relationships lead to strong customer
retention. Put a reminder in your CRM for when your next customer’s birthday comes up and
remember to send them something special. Try being creative by sending them something
that’s fun, but also links back to what your business does.
It costs seven times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain a customer. Annie
Miner found that their customer care and retention programs produced a return on
investment of 10:1 or higher. What does that equal in actual revenue? We’re talking
thousands of dollars, sometimes millions! You must look to allocate some budget to
customer retention.
Trying to keep customers by offering discounts is a short slip-n-slide to failure. What is that
telling your customers? You’re devaluing your service and basically telling them that it’s not
worth what they were previously paying. Instead of discounting, offer guarantees or added
value. For example, try offering a free month to compensate the last month’s failure, that is a
much better way to motivate a customer to stick with you.
Focus on stopping problems from happening, before they even happen. Taking a proactive
approach to customer service means putting systems in place to predict problems before
they become customer facing headaches. Predictive churn modeling can help a company
develop a better understanding of the steps and stages that create customer churn.
Well, you’d be surprised. A lot can go wrong during the sales process. Whether it’s sales
guys trying to sweet talk a close, or prospects not fully understanding the agreement,
somewhere along the way a customer’s expectation of the service he/she will receive, is
established.
It is your job to make sure that this perceived expectation of service, meets what you are
capable of delivering.
I can’t stress how important it is to set expectations right from the get go with your sales
people. There is nothing a customer hates more than a company under delivering. When your
sales guys set expectations so high and you can not deliver, that’s when you run into
problems.
A great example I like to bring up is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies. There is
such a bad rep about these guys just ripping people off left, right and center. But at the end
Comments like, ‘you’ll rank first page google’ are common practice and when they fail to
deliver, the customer is unsatisfied, complains and cancels.
Think about a particular service that you have chopped and changed providers frequently.
Ask yourself, why did I leave the last company. 68% of the time, it will be because their
service did not live up to your expectations.
Be honest, and set accurate expectations early to stop customers leaving later.
This step is particularly helpful for business owners who take a back-seat in the sales
process. If you have someone else handling all your new customer acquisition and
sales, make sure you revisit expectations with all new customers after the sale closes.
This is a great way to ensure that everything your sales guy has promised, actually is doable.
It will also give you a good chance to understand what they want and make sure you deliver
and exceed their expectations.
Everybody makes mistakes from time to time. Sometimes you wont meet customer
expectations for one reason or another, there might be internal or external factors… but lets
face it, sometimes sh*t happens.
It’s times like these you need to be honest with yourself and apologize when you don’t meet
customer expectations.
Rune Tispmeak from Stea IT speaks about this in our case study on how he saved a
$180,000 year contract – definitely worth a look and see how he went about admitting his
shortfalls and overcoming a sticky situation to re-earn a customer’s trust and further
strengthen the relationship.
Are you sick of waking up to five completely impersonalized emails every morning?
Here’s a typical scenario: you get a series of three email from a company you just signed up
to explaining how to add contacts to their system despite the fact that you have already
added contacts yesterday and have everything set up.
You can do better. It’s not difficult to track your customers’ actions and send more relevant
emails (or no emails at all, if that provides a better user experience!)
Tools like Vero help this process by triggering emails only when a customer takes a specific
action inside your app, on your website or when browsing your eCommerce store. This way,
you can make sure the emails you are sending are personalized and relevant.
Jana Fung of MixRank recommends sending a reminder email whenever there is a major
marketing event going on in your customer’s geographic location.
In a world where lots of us build customer relationships via email and never actual meet face
to face, it’s always refreshing to be invited to a live event.
The benefit of sending friendly reminders about events or other marketing activities is that it
shows your customers that you really care about them. This is even truer if you use targeting:
after all, you went out of your way to make sure they received an invite.
Other examples of situations when you could send friendly reminders include:
When an upcoming webinar or blog post has been published (that’s relevant)
Special promotions or discounts are a great way to encourage existing customers to make
repeat purchases. Email is a common channel to use when sending out these promotions to
customers. Remember to use an email marketing tool that lets you send promotions based
on specific segmentation or actions your customers take (see point two above!)
ProFlowers uses email to send promotions to customers who can take advantage of events
happening in the near future, like Valentine’s Day.
Email can be used to help educate your customers on your product or service. An educated
customer is a generally a well-retained customer as they truly understand the value of your
offering.
If you didn’t know how to work an oven, you’d probably throw it out – right?
Email is the easiest way you can educate your customers. A great example of this is WP
Engine’s e-course. As Kareem discusses in his blog post, WP Engine sends out eight
education emails over a one-month period. Each email focuses on describing a benefit of
hosting with WP Engine, then goes on to explain why it’s important to your business, and
finishes with a call to action.
That is exactly how to use email in a way to educate customers on your product. For another
idea, you should also educate your customers on specific issues within their industry.
The goal here is to become an information-source so valuable that your customer depends
on you for the latest industry trends or actionable how-to guides. They will no longer see you
While exploring this topic, I found some great research by Maritz Research Inc. They have
started investigating the power of using social media in their customer satisfaction and loyalty
research. Randy Brandt, Vice President of Customer Experience and Loyalty, found that by
combining traditional research with information found on various consumer-generated social
media websites, they were able to identify two specific action items that have now become
top priorities.
This shows that there’s much to learn from your customers on these social media websites.
So, let’s stop only using traditional customer service channels and explore five quick ways
you can use social media to increase customer satisfaction.
Companies can use social media monitoring tools like Sprout Social to track brand mentions
and engage with customers. Not listening to your customers is a common customer retention
mistake.
I recommend taking a page out of the Wells Fargo book and starting to use social media as a
customer service channel. It’s easy to get started – just set up a Twitter handle for customer
support and direct users to leave messages directly there.
For example, I work for a company called Client Heartbeat, and we would use something like
@HeartbeatSupport.
I strongly believe we are living in a world of instant gratification. This has its positives and its
drawbacks, but more importantly for you as a marketer, it has led to your customers having
short attention spans and wanting fast responses.
This has spurred the growth of sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. A customer can
quickly go on to these sites, engage with someone or a company, and expect an answer
straight away.
Tech startups do an awesome job at using social media to communicate with their
customers. They often have tighter budgets, and since their customers tend to be tech
savvy, many of these startups don’t have phone numbers listed on their sites and instead
just direct users to “tweet their support handle.”
These companies are so good at offering quick, accurate and professional responses… the
customer actually wants to use this form of communication. With that being said, it’s
important you know how to use Twitter correctly.
Respond quickly, even if it’s just to say you got the message.
Communicate using a friendly, human voice – don’t try and be a corporate bigwig.
Let me explain this for you. Your customers are now using their mobile phones 150 times per
day. So, when they are communicating with companies, what do you think they want to use?
It’s no longer good enough just to offer a support email address or a support 1-800 number.
Your customers want to reach you via their mobile, using social media.
That’s why I recommend you set up a designated social media customer support channel.
Customers are so comfortable with just tweeting out customer complaints and questions,
you can now give them an avenue to reach you, and give yourself the opportunity to resolve
any problems fast.
I agree with Reuven; there is a big opportunity for companies to use social media for
customer service. Now that everything is accessible online through social media, as a
company, you now have an opportunity to respond. You can literally solve a problem,
instantly, from anywhere in the world.
With customers paying less and less attention to what brands say about themselves, being
able to engage customers on their terms is a win-win.
If you need more convincing, a study by Simply Measured found that 32 percent of brands
now have dedicated customer support handles. The same study found a significant growth in
customer service tweets with a 63 percent increase quarter over quarter.
Celebrities are using social media to hold Q&A sessions. A great example was the US
President, Barack Obama, jumping on Reddit to answers questions from users.
Companies can do this too, but most of the time it is a senior employee or “real person” of
the company running the Q&A. We’ve seen Bill Gates, The Lonely Island, Roger Federer, and
many, many more influential people run Q&As on Reddit and other social media sites.
This is my final recommendation, and the one I think is the most powerful. An interesting
model is being implemented by some of the world’s biggest companies. It exists and is
practiced in the customer community’s space.
Let’s take a look at a real example. Over on the HP community site, a member spends
upwards of 30 unpaid hours a week responding to queries on their discussion forums. In this
case, HP is using their customers to answer HP-related questions. They empower their
members with community management tools that encourage engagement.
Another great example is the Google AdWords community group. Contributors are
encouraged to continue to answer queries and strive to become a “top contributor.” Top
contributors are recognized as industry experts, which really helps to keep them motivated
and keep the community active.
In both cases, these companies are empowering their customer advocates to assist with
customer service. This helps each company to reduce expensive customer service costs and
more times than not, offer a better experience.
How can you leverage your community of advocates to help increase customer satisfaction?
Let’s face it. It can take a lot of time and resources to acquire great customers for your
business. But with the right services, right pricing, and right approach to customer
satisfaction, many of your best customers should be with your firm for years to come!
To approach customer satisfaction and customer retention correctly, you need to have
an exceptionally good pulse on how your customers perceive your firm’s value. Client
Heartbeat is an excellent tool for staying on top of your key customer satisfaction
metrics. But what can you do tactically and proactively to increase customer
satisfaction?
Your blog can be a great tool for making this happen. While most businesses and
marketers plan their blogging strategy around attracting targeted leads to fill the top of
their sales funnel, blogging can also be a terrific way to communicate with your firm’s
value.
How do you decide what to blog about for your customers? It’s simple. Use the data.
Run reports on your most frequently requested help desk services and write blog
posts about each and every one of these problems.
When you have a batch of these related blog posts, say 10 or 20 in total, build a
sitemap or table of contents that links all of these posts together and call it an FAQs
page - which should be prominent on your website navigation and automatically e-
mailed to all new customers.
The key thing with blogging for customer satisfaction requires most of the same best
practices as blogging for lead generation:
Use a keyword tool to select a related keyword phrase that you can then very
lightly optimize (SEO) that post with, so it has a chance to get found.
Add social sharing buttons to the top of the post to make it easy for customers to
spread your great content.
Re-purpose the blog post into visual content assets that expand your reach to
different audiences. Approached correctly, an image, screencast, slide deck, or
infographic can be extremely effective at driving greater customer satisfaction.
Embed the newly-created visual content to make the post more “sticky” and less
likely to result in a bounce.
Build internal anchor text links from other already search indexed pages on your
website.
Announce the new blog post to relevant segments of your in-house contacts
database.
Add the new blog post to any automated nurturing messages that trickle out to
new customers following sign-up.
Many marketers spend most of their blogging resources creating content for the top of
the sales funnel. And for good reason: targeted lead generation is extremely important.
Businesses must meet and surpass rising expectations to turn customers into advocates,
according to Janine Modaro, Telstra director of integrated service management, network
applications and services.
Modaro talks about customer advocacy as a step beyond satisfaction. “It’s the advocates
that are actually going to make out businesses succeed and make our businesses grow”.
Dig through your customer survey data and find out your average satisfaction score.
Once you have your average, any customers that are scoring more than 10% above the
average are your potential customer advocates.
It’s a popular question used by the Client Heartbeat and intelligently identifies customer
advocates. Anyone that answers “I would go out my way to recommend your company” – is
considered a potential customer advocate.
They are living in a world where social media is still for kids and the real business gets done
over a phone call or at a business conference.
Well, they couldn’t be further from the truth. Social media is BIG and it’s here to stay.
Why? Simple - there are strong fundamentals that are driving the growth of social media. For
more on this I strongly recommend you read Michael Brito’s presentation at the 2013
Marketo Summit – Social Media + Stroytelling = Awesomesauce (or watch the video here).
Social media is just an extension of our lives. It’s enabling storytelling to be distributed to our
close friends and colleagues quicker than we’ve ever done before. It means content and
stories can now be shared and distributed around the world in minutes.
So how can you leverage social media to find and convert customers into advocates?
Even if your customers are not mentioning you in their social media posts, you should be
following them and listening to their conversations. As Orwellian as this sounds, this is the
new era of market research. People are publicly sharing their purchases and opinions on
social channels, so leverage that data. Use it to improve your products and engage your
customers in a conversation about how you can serve them better.
People follow your company on social media for a reason- to get something they otherwise
could not get. Maybe it’s a special discount on your product. Maybe it’s to be notified of
product releases before anyone else. Maybe it’s just to read your great content. By
connecting with your customers on social media, your advocates will naturally come out.
They will be the one’s ‘liking’ your Facebook posts, ‘retweeting’ your updates and sharing
your blog articles. Keep these conversations going, keep engaged with your customers, and
you will begin to turn them into advocates.
Customers who are positively talking about you on social media are your advocates, whether
they know it or not. You can leverage these customers into ‘raving advocates’ by rewarding
them. A great example is Scotty’s Brewhouse in Indianna. They recently noticed a couple of
people talking about their restaurant on Twitter, discussing what meal they wanted for lunch.
This was brilliant! A great way to recognize customer advocates, reward them, and turn them
into raving marketing ambassadors who will continue to refer new business in the future.
Jeremy Williams discusses more about this in his article titled, Social Media for Customer
Retention.
The simple act of rewarding customers for their loyalty (or, in this
case, just for talking about the restaurant) ensures an even more
fervent fanbase for his restaurant. Scott will see that $50 investment
returned many times over because he was listening to his
customers.
- Jeremy Williams, Social Mediarology
Here’s some strategies you can use to help nurture your potential custoemrs into advocates.
Put a lunch on for your most valuable customers. Show them that you care and even offer
some free training on new products/services you are offering.
I’ve seen this done really well at R&G Technologies. For their most valuable customers, the
company invites some representatives to the offices and puts on a free lunch, while also
giving them training on some new products.
This is a great way to build customer loyalty and strength the relationship. It shows your
customers that you are willing to go the extra mile, and that is reflected when they start
talking about your company to business colleagues and friends.
A monthly email with valuable content is a great way for you to connect with your customers
and strengthen your relationships.
Any industry news or updates that affect your industry (think government regulations, new
industry requirements.
Company updates
This isn’t the same as a lunch. This one im talking about inviting them to specific industry
relevant events that are geographically located. For example, you might have some
customers in the accounting vertical. Your company has decided to sponsor a local
accounting converence and you have three extra tickets to give away. Give them to some of
your potential advocates that are in the accounting space!!!
This shows them that you care about their business, willing to go the extra mile to help, and
gives you an opportunity to spend some more time and cement the business relationship.
This is often the hardest step for many companies. In reality, it’s the easiest. Neil Patel wrote
an article on how to effectively use testimonials which has some great discussions in the
comments. One reader asked, but where do you find testimonials?
Here are two ways you can ask and get more testimonials:
Ask! Give your customers a call and ask if they would be happy to write a testimonial.
Use Client Heartbeat – a tool that automates the testimonial gathering process by
including it in the customer surveys.
So you’ve taken the leap and actually asked your customer for a testimonial. They then hit
back with, well what do you want me to say?
Heck, some may even ask you to write it for them and send over for approval (these are my
favorites).
Richard Tubb, former IT Business owner and now Business Coach, wrote a great piece
on customer testimonial mistakes. He goes through some great tips on being specific when
asking for testimonials. Here’s a bit from what he had to say:
It’s at this stage you need to have a story in mind. If your customer
testimonial simply says “Joe’s MSP are really good guys”, well,
that’s nice – but it isn’t very compelling is it?
- Richard Tubb, IT Business Coach, Tubblog.com.au
You should be asking your customer to specifically write about the benefits they received
from your service. Testimonials with benefits make an extremely valuable sales tool.
“We have been very impressed at the outcome of all projects, and have seen
productivity increase and IT headaches drop dramatically”
– Lynn Card, CEO of Xavier.
Note here the two big benefits R&G is pushing through this testimonial:
Increase productivity
Reduce IT headaches
Guess what – these two benefits are the focus of R&G Technologies’ marketing strategy.
A good customer testimonial that is displayed in the right way, can increase trust in your
company. When displaying testimonials on your website and in your marketing material, it’s
important to consider the three following questions:
Do you have a customer photo? Richard Tubb recommends including a customer photo
to reinforce the genuineness of your testimonial. Customer testimonials that don’t have
photographs are considered much less believable than customer testimonials that do.
Do you have a video? Video is going gangbusters and video testimonials are something
you should look into. Denise Wakeman talks about using video testimonials for more
visibility on the web.
Are you using the right images/icons/graphics? When you see a speech bubble or a
quotation mark, you know it’s a testimonial. When displaying your customer testimonials,
make sure you follow these general guidelines. Learn more about the guidelines by
reading this blog post on five ways to display testimonials.
If you’re like me and find it hard to get testimonials, I recommend trying Client Heartbeat. This
tool can automate the testimonial process for you.
You get the testimonials on publically accessible pages that can be shared with anyone,
including your new prospects
Inbuilt sharing functionality which gives you the ability to share testimonials via LinkedIn,
Facebook and Twitter.
These customers are helping you grow your business by drawing potential leads away from
the dark mass of your competitors and towards your bright light of hope.
Jeff Bezos, famous entrepreneur and investor once said, ‘If you do build a great experience,
customers teach each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.’
Researchers have backed up Jeff’s thoughts with research finding word of mouth (WOM) has
a greater impact on consumer behavior than traditional marketing methods. In other words,
customers are more likely to listen to their mates recommendations, than a stranger on the
web, TV or radio trying to sell them something.
It’s an undeniable truth the person who cares most about growing your business is you. So
why should customers care about generating you business referrals?
Customers feel valued when you give them the best products, exceptional customer service,
and blow their expectations out of the park. In addition, researchers have found interpersonal
relationships between employees and customers are significantly correlated with WOM
behavior. So if you build a rock-solid foundation of efficiency, empathy and good service with
your customer, they’ll trust you and want to help you.
The key here is to outdo the customer’s expectation of you that it makes them want to
recommend you to their network of peers as a solution.
Many businesses know ‘who’ to ask, but they don’t know ‘how’.
The best way is to integrate the notion of referrals into your business relationship right from
the beginning, so customers are already thinking about your best traits before you have to
ask them. Then, once you’ve completed a job well done, you’ve build trust and know they
are happy with your service, politely ask if they would know anyone interested in your
services.
When asking for the referral, don’t limit yourself by saying, ‘Do you know anyone else who
might want my product?’ Instead, reword your question and focus on the problems you are
solving, i.e. ‘Do you know of anyone who has similar issues to you, which I can help with?’
Mention you’d be happy to reciprocate, and don’t be afraid of looking desperate.
See also: Client Heartbeat is a tool that surveys your customers, asks them for testimonials,
and shares them across LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
As soon as a customer notifies you of a problem, plead forgiveness. Then work tirelessly to
fix the problem and send regular notices regarding progress to keep your customer in the
loop.
If you want WOM, make every experience a positive one. Counter your customer’s
disappointment with out of this world customer service
People trust friends and family more than any other information source, and pay 2x more
attention to recommendations that come from friends than other sources.’ This is why social
media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are such an asset to your customer
acquisition strategy.
Many customers would happily write a business referral, but don’t know how to go about it.
According to American Express, 48 per cent of Internet users tell other people ‘all the time’
about a good customer service experience with a company. You can make these testimonies
timeless by setting up a social media page and having them ‘share’ how much they love you
with their friends. Not only does this provide you with a permanent, published list of written
business referrals, you also get a throng of free salespeople selling your product for you.
Maritz Research found 85 per cent of customers were delighted to receive a public response
to their comments on social media regarding a brand. Remember to stay in touch with these
customers because you never know when they’ll need additional services. It’s basic stuff,
follow through with every business referral, and contact your customer to say thank you to
keep those new leads pouring in.
Business referrals can be explained with this simple analogy. Customer service is like a steak.
If you go to dinner and have the best damn steak you’ve ever had, you want to take your
friends. Deliver the most exceptional service your customer has ever had the pleasure of
experiencing, and no doubt you’ll be seeing your customer’s friends after the steakhouse.
This results in happier customers that will continue to do business with your company, plus
tell their colleagues and friends about your service.
These happy customer advocates then become the main source of new inquires for your
business. Picture a world where you don’t have to spend any money of marketing.
Well that world is a reality, as you continue to strive for high customer satisfaction, you in
turn, create more customer advocates. That is the key to business growth.