Shaping Business Growth Through Customer's Feedback
In this interview, Ronni Gaun, Director of Customer Experience at Sensera Systems, talks about the importance of listening to customer feedback. She also shares critical insights to consider during the customer journey and how to improve it.
Business rules and mindsets have changed
If you don't learn anything about your customers, you're going to have a hard time continuously communicating value beyond the obvious of your products and services.
With the rise of the subscription model, things have changed from solving problems to building lasting relationships. This shift in mindset means approaching customer relationships to create a partnership where there is a mutual commitment to what success looks like for them and how your company can partner with them to deliver on their goals.
Ronni says Customer Success is a combination of customer experience and business outcomes. Hence delivering a reliable and consistent experience will pave the best path for goal achievement.
She notes that delivering on the brand promise is NOT the only strength of a healthy relationship, although it adds to the business value. The most significant aspect of a successful relationship is establishing and maintaining customer's needs even as those needs inevitably expand, evolve, and often disappear.
"Knowing what it means for them to be successful is a must." Part of gaining an advantage over competitors beyond product features and capabilities is truly understanding the customer's expectations and articulating your differentiators successfully.
Businesses should proactively exercise foresight, stay well-informed, engaged in the customer's world, and ensure that they are willing to be actively involved in contributing ideas to solve their needs.
Meeting customers' needs and demands
Receiving an excellent customer experience is much, much more expected now than ever before. It can often be the key differentiator when products and services are very similar. It is important to note that a customer's success isn't the sole responsibility of customer success and experience teams.
Success means working together internally with the authenticity that customers can see and feel, Ronni says.
Organizations need to understand that to deliver value fully, a change to a business mindset is necessary (or required). Ultimately, across the entire organization. Remember, when the customer uses or engages with your product, they create and generate information that can be used and leveraged to make critical business decisions.
Therefore, the sharing of information helps customers and organizations to (1) meet customer needs and demands (2) provide the organization a closer look at how their solutions assist the customers with achieving their goals but also understanding how the achievement of those goals can impact their business.
Understanding the company's power core (the value your product commits to deliver)
It is essential to know and understand that it's difficult to improve something if you don't know what areas to improve.
Remember, behind every business is a human being -- a person who seeks fulfillment in his/her job, a person who wants to make his/her business improve, and someone who has a genuine need. The key to building a healthy relationship is to focus on customer expectations and managing them.
Organizations should know (and realized) that a large percentage of their success will come from their existing customer base. Therefore, having clear goals is essential to achieving business growth while at the same time keeping abreast of the challenges its customers are facing.
Remember, when a customer signs up in any SaaS products, they're looking for an outcome or business result based on the needs they'd like to fill in or resolve. Success takes a long term commitment, and it all starts with understanding customers' needs and pain points at the start of the relationship.
