The Importance of Listening to Your Customers

The Importance of Listening to Your Customers

We all want to be heard. More specifically, we all want to be understood. Brands that fail to hear what their customers need are not only leaving dollars on the table, but they’re also risking existing customer relationships. In fact, one in three people report that they’d ditch a brand after just one negative experience, with that number rising to a massive nine in ten people walking away after two to five poor experiences.

Fortunately, thanks to today’s ubiquitous tech solutions, hearing what customers want is much easier than going door to door or conducting focus groups. Now, you can tap into the combined forces of your contact center, sales platform, web analytics, and social media monitoring to make sure you’re really hearing your customers and responding accordingly.

What We Mean by Listening to Your Customers

First things first: what do we mean by listening? Look, listening to your customers isn’t just the act of picking up the phone and politely agreeing with what they have to say. It goes way deeper than that. It’s about understanding their pain points and figuring out their goals at a given moment so that you can help solve an issue. Sometimes, it’s about reading between the lines or piecing together customer information to anticipate an issue and get ahead of it.

Listening to your customers has benefits, including:

  • Reduced customer churn. Stop the churn by delivering what your customers need at the moment. Poor customer service is a major factor behind customer attrition, so proper listening can be a game changer.
  • Increased customer loyalty. Listening shows that you care about your customers. When you show that you’re about more than going through the motions, you’re more likely to build relationships that lead to long-term brand loyalty.
  • Increased business and sales opportunities. Listening to your customers lets you identify opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, or even identify gaps you can fill with future product or service offerings.

How a Contact Center Can Help You Listen

There are numerous ways your brand can win at the listening game. At the top of that list is an integrated contact center platform. An all-in-one customer contact platform provides a 360-degree view into your customer interactions – and ideally connects with your other business functionalities as well. Listening becomes far easier when you upgrade from a receptionist manning a phone to a cloud-based contact center. Here’s how.

  • Omnichannel contact options. When you offer omnichannel inbound options, information travels across every part of the platform, meaning nothing gets skipped, lost, or doubled up on. Your reps will have every previous contact at their fingertips, and they’ll be able to pick up where the last person left off.
  • High-quality reps. A two-pronged customer contact system like ACD’s offers the ability to loop in trained, experienced reps who know your brand inside and out. You can easily scale your cohort up or down with demand, ensuring that no one goes unheard.
  • Integrated analytics. Record and analyze every call in real-time to monitor customer sentiment and agent effectiveness. This data can be used to train reps or update support strategies and handbooks.
  • Request customer feedback. Quick surveys following an interaction are a great way to gauge customer sentiment in the moment and quickly remedy a situation if the customer raises an issue. Use surveys to make things right, gauge agent effectiveness, or inform future business plans.
  • Integrate with other departments. A contact center that connects with sales, marketing, shipping, or business development departments makes it easy to identify pain points and opportunities. This information can be used to improve your service offers – and deliver an experience that will keep customers coming back.

Ready to Listen? ACD is Here for you.

Listening is everything. At ACD, we know the power that comes with truly hearing your customers or donors. Our all-in-one cloud-based contact center makes it a breeze to listen, analyze, and problem-solve via your customers’ preferred channels. By integrating with your other business functionalities, such as marketing or business development, we can help inform your organization’s next moves. Ready to see the difference listening makes? Talk to ACD!

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