A successful business is not solely dependent on the products or services you have to sell. Rather it is a complex mix of your products, your marketing, and ultimately your customer experience.

But how can you improvise your products, build constructive marketing strategies, and better your CX at the same time?

It’s simple really! Listening to your customers has more benefits than you anticipate.

Here’s how formal listening can help your business expand

Why do you need to listen to your customers?

 1.  To know what your customers want

Fun fact: No amount of research, groundwork, or consultations with experts can be 100% accurate in determining what your customers want. The only person who can give you a complete idea of customer expectations is the customer himself. 

That makes Listening to your customers extremely important!

There are many old-school ways of listening to your customers. But the growing technology has created tools that eradicate the limitations of informal customer communication, and leverage the data gathered through formal listening.

One of the best tools for formal listening is NPS (Net Promoter Score). An NPS survey is an excellent indicator of new or repeat business. This survey primarily asks customers whether they would recommend your brand to others.

Listening to your customers and receiving their inputs and suggestions may give you the exact representation of your product/ service in the consumers’ eyes. Listen to improve.

It immensely contributes to reshaping your offering, you may re-analyze the way you market and sell. It also contributes towards the betterment of your customer service strategies that ultimately improve your customer experience, loyalty and retention.

 2.  To Get a Multi-dimensional Point of view

You may view your product/ services, selling and marketing process, and customer experience to be the best out there. But, your customers may view it in a completely different light.

To connect with your customers, talk, and listen to them. Aside from NPS, you can also use a process called  CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score).

As the name suggests, the CSAT focuses on the level of satisfaction your brand provides & is a good measure to predict the quality of your relationship with your customers.

It generates a feedback mechanism that helps your company maximise its customer communications and sales efforts. It may seem like a simple feedback tool but the right use of it may gain you some crucial insights into the minds of your clients.

 3.  To Build your Brand

Brand Building is considered to be one of the top priorities of rising companies. In the internet age, where buying is no longer linear, branding has become a comparatively multi-media, multi-touchpoint process.

But, firstly companies need to understand that building a brand is a two-way process. You need to listen to your customers to build a successful brand. Here’s when Online Reputation management comes into play.

It is critical for companies to constantly and structurally interpret and improve their online reputation. Online Reputation management software allows brands to track customer reviews and over time, create a positive image on social and review platforms. 

Additionally, these platforms also help brands in reaching potential clients by helping brands improve, based on popular customer opinions. The credibility of real customer reviews is far higher than any form of advertising.

Brands that are fabricated around customers’ demands and suggestions are always deemed to do much better than their competitors. As customers see a reflection of themselves in such brands.

4.  To Prevent Customer Churn & Increase Retention

According to research, 42% of customers are unlikely to report a complaint against a brand or a company if they had an unsatisfactory customer experience. They simply exit the relationship.

A recent survey indicates that for almost 50% of customers, one “poor” experience is all it takes for your loyal/ potential customer to turn to your competitor. This percentage could be as high as 75% for millennials and Gen Z.

On the other hand, there are 60% more chances of a second purchase if the customer had a satisfactory first experience.

For the overall improvement of your brand and to provide a positive customer experience, you can adopt a CES (Customer Effort Score) methodology. This CX metric indicates how much effort customers put into interacting with a brand. The motive is to find if customers have difficulty reaching, engaging or transacting via various touch-points

Simplicity is the name of the game as more brands create effortless, seamless, convenient ways of engaging using new platforms based on AI, speech recognition, RPA and so on.

Ultimately a good CX will shrink customer churn over some time.

5.  To Increase Revenue through Upsell and Cross-sell

Increasing Revenue per customer and enhancing Lifetime value, are extremely important aspects of the business.

A successful upsell or cross-sell strategy is only possible when with sufficient customer data, personalization and ease of transaction.

Adopting formal listening techniques and collating them with data insights, helps segment your customers, and predict needs & behaviours, which form the basis for specific actionable sales opportunities with them.

Eventually acquiring and retaining customers is essential for the very survival of the business! It is a business imperative.

Various Formal listening techniques have their own set of benefits. Each one is designed with a certain objective in mind. Every company is unique, hence the suitability of the apt tools and processes must match the needs of every company.