Raise your hand if you are a business owner and don’t crunch numbers. It’s okay, don’t be shy.
Anyone? Bueller?
That’s what I thought.
All of us eat, sleep, and breathe data. In business data drives our decisions. We analyze it over and over in hopes of furthering our understanding of what our customers do and don’t want, as well as how we can make our product and services better. We use sophisticated software to follow the trends of customer support information, incident tickets, and reoccurring issues.
Such information is vital to the survival of our individual companies. We are able to help our customers by tracking those particular things. Nonetheless, we can always do better. We can always take one step up to improve our service, and in order to do so, we must find what information we haven’t been tracking.
One piece of information that you might want to consider tracking (if you aren’t already) is… what you are doing right. By tracking the incident tickets and complaints, you can easily track what you are doing wrong, but you also need to know what you’re doing right because if you don’t know what you’re doing right then when you try to correct what is wrong, you might inadvertently destroy all that you’re doing right.
Did that make sense?
The upshot is if you ruin what you are doing right, you can lose life-long customers.
Tracking what you are doing right is actually fairly easy. Just take a look at your forums and other social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Customers talk about their experiences, both good and bad. You also need to ask your customers directly why they chose to do business with your company, why they choose to stay with your company, and then thank them for staying with you. Let your customers know they are appreciated. It’s great public relations and it’s just a good practice all around.
There are other things that you can and should track, but I’ve thrown in my two cents, let’s see what you come up with. Get creative and then try it on your customers. Let us know what happens by leaving a comment.