Ensuring Growth Through the Ultimate Customer Experience

Customers have more choices than ever for alarm services and thanks to the Internet they also have a wealth of information at their fingertips about your company – and your competitors. Online reviews – whether critical or complimentary – influence consumers’ purchasing and impact your sales and marketing. Giving your customers a great customer experience not only affects your ability to attract new customers, it’s also critical to keeping the customers you have. Attrition is costly. It negatively impacts your revenue and the value of your accounts in an acquisition. Generating new customers is also much more difficult and costly than keeping the customers you already have.

Here are some tips for delivering the ultimate customer experience that will earn you rave reviews from your customers.

Know and stay in contact with your customers

No matter how big or small your company and how many customer accounts you have, your customers are more than just the RMR that they generate. They are real people with real concerns. Creating a customer feedback process or procedure to gather information about your customers’ experiences with your company at every stage of the relationship, from sales, through installation and service, to cancellation – enhances the customer experience by showing that your company is paying attention to your customers’ concerns. You can even use social media as part of this process. Creating one or more customer feedback processes also provides you with real-time, valuable information you can use to take quick action to remedy lapses in the customer experience or other issues before they turn into problems that significantly impact your bottom line. Periodic customer surveys are also a great way to get a big picture view of your company’s strengths and weakness, and your customers’ overall experiences and opinions.

Empower Your Employees to Deliver Excellent Customer Service

Your employees, especially the ones who deal directly with your customers in the sales, installation, customer service and billing functions, are not only vital to the day-to-day running of your business, they are your company’s brand ambassadors. Empower them to deliver excellent customer service for you. Give them the right tools and procedures, including standard operating procedures like a step-by-step process for receiving customer feedback and resolving customer complaints, and policies for handling sales, installation and service calls. To learn more about the benefits of SOP’s, read our white paper. Give them the proper training from the beginning of their employment, and offer regular refreshers and training on new processes and procedures. Make an outstanding customer experience part of the culture of your company and communicate your expectations to your employees from the start.

Your employees are also excellent sources of information and ideas. Enlist their help and listen to their feedback. Build an atmosphere of teamwork and communication in and among your departments to catch and remedy recurring problems.

Act Early and Often

While listening to your customers is important to making them feel valued, it’s only the first step. Acting on the information you get from them to make real, customer-friendly changes ensures the ultimate customer experience. And once you’ve made changes or improvements to your products, services or processes, let your customers know their information and suggestions were the reason. It’s another great opportunity to connect with your customers and demonstrate you are listening to them and value their feedback.

In 2013, ACA launched a customer experience initiative lead by Lightswitch CX, which allowed ACA to streamline operations in order to provide even better customer service.