In a recent straw poll conducted among VirtlX’s LinkedIn following, 80% of respondents said that they were finding it harder to gather customer feedback as a result of the Covid-19 restrictions.
Customer experience is the most important metric for any business. Why? Let me tell you a story.
I was recently researching a project for my garden and found, on the website of one of the UK’s most revered horticultural institutions, a recommendation and a link to a private company that sold what I was after. So I clicked the link and placed my order.
Within two days it arrived… but it was the wrong size. To cut a long story short, I spent the next week trying to get them to send me the right sized order but kept coming up against a customer service adviser who seemed to think I was having him on. Eventually, I lost patience and went on the warpath.
Almost amusingly, they had sent me an automatic email within days of my order asking “How did we do?” and asking me to leave a review on their Google profile. So I did, with great relish. I then wrote to the horticultural institution that had pointed me to this company in the first place, suggesting they remove the valuable link to their website.
With those two admittedly vitriolic actions, I wreaked significant damage on their company profile and cost them a valuable endorsement from a hugely popular organisation. I’m not bragging. I’m just making the point that the digital revolution has given customers unprecedented power to hit back when treated badly and that is why customer experience management is so important.
The story doesn’t end there. Within seconds of posting my review, at 11 o’clock at night, I received a personal email from the company’s digital team manager. He apologised for the poor service I had received and promised to call me in the morning. I was impressed. He duly rang at about 8am and organised for my order to be sent out that day. He also refunded the delivery fee.
On a sixpence, my impression of the company had turned from outrage to bonhomie. This guy was my confidant. He had my back. He was taking care of me. We talked about my garden project. We laughed.
And when I put the phone down, I went back and edited my Google review and changed my star rating from one to four (no-one gets a five). Now they had me as an endorser, a positive marketing asset. And this exemplifies how good customer service can turn a negative customer experience into a very positive one, for both the customer and the organisation.
Ignoring customer experience is a recipe for disaster, while attending to it is a recipe for success. But what if, like many businesses, you don’t have time to manage customer feedback or to train everyone in your customer services team to give a consistently high level of customer response?
VirtlX has been developed to solve this problem. It comprises three platforms for managing customer feedback and analysis, employee performance and wellbeing and employee training and development.
VirtlX Perceive is a cost-effective and time-saving platform for sending out customer surveys, receiving feedback in real-time and presenting the data in a clear graphical format. VirtlX Reflect manages pulse surveys, employee wellbeing feedback, 360° reviews and line manager upward feedback in real time. And the VirtlX Enrich platform gives your employees ready access to third party training materials, as well as enabling you to create your own, and monitors their progress.
So, for a monthly subscription that is within the means of any SME, and can scale up as your business grows, you can make sure there are no rotten apples in your customer services team and see to it that you’re keeping all your customers satisfied.
Click here to register for a free VirtlX trial.
