Retain customers
Delie quickly realized that the customers they currently had were priority No. 1. Repeat business is vital no matter what state the economy is in and attention to customer satisfaction is what keeps them coming back.
“It’s one thing to build your customer base, but you have to maintain what you have,” Delie says. “Going through a very disruptive period like we just went through, keeping in touch with your customer base, making sure that you’re serving their needs, making sure that you’re listening when they’re bringing up issues or they have concerns about the industry or a particular product is critically important.”
Implementing ways to gain feedback from customers is an important way to find out what they like and don’t like about your company and your service. Retention rates will not rise if you don’t know how or where to address problems.
“You have to put in a way to measure the satisfaction of your customer base,” Delie says. “That has to be built into your incentive comp planning. It has to be built into the culture of the company. You have to have a way to measure it.
“We came up with a methodology for measuring satisfaction across a bunch of customer areas so we could benchmark ourselves against a baseline result. You have to be able to measure that and ingrain it into the culture. Making it an important factor is critical to gaining success.”
Having a system in place that can tell you exactly where improvement needs to happen will greatly increase your customer satisfaction. If customers are not satisfied, change needs to occur.
“You have to get to the root of what’s causing that dissatisfaction,” Delie says. “That requires reaching out to customers. You should also sensitize your employees and incent them to bring forward process change that creates a better environment for providing the service. Those are the things you need to do to drive change.”
