In today’s marketplace, customer satisfaction is not enough to ensure your customers will stay.  There are too many good choices to tolerate something that just meets our expectations of good quality, fast delivery and fair prices:

Customer satisfaction is a necessary foundation for building customer relationships, but is not a good predictor of future customer behavior.  (Gallup)

Up to 80% of defecting customers describe themselves as “satisfied” or “very satisfied” just before they leave.  (Business Week)

There also appears to be a wide gap between how a company perceives their relationships with their customers and how their customers actually feel.  This disconnect in perception versus reality can lead to a lack of trust and have harmful consequences on relationships:

56% percent of vendors perceive themselves as being extremely customer-centric, but only 12% of customers agree. An overwhelming majority of vendors—85%—are convinced that they are getting better at responding to customer needs, but 45% of customers disagree.

More than half of customers surveyed described their relationships with vendors as “dependent and captive,” “struggling for common ground,” or “combative and adversarial.”

62% of customers would scale back existing engagements and over 30% would terminate their relationships with vendors who fail to build customer trust.

(CMO Council)

Attitudes, beliefs, likes, and dislikes are hard to capture - especially when you ask customers on your own.  However, knowing and taking action on these insights can mean the difference between growing your business or losing out on opportunities.   So why have your customers grade you?  Simply put, it provides the opportunity to dig deeper into how customers really feel about you.  Armed with that knowledge, you can then put strategies in place to provide the A+ service required to keep more customers, grow relationships, and generate more positive word of mouth.

Committed customers are 83% more likely to recommend your company. Plus, those with strong rational and emotional bonds, share several characteristics:

• Spend More
• Can be counted on for repeat business
• Will go out of their way to purchase
• Are less price sensitive
• Remain loyal in the face of competitive plays

(Harris Interactive)

Working with Green Compass can shorten your time to providing and maintaining A+ service with your customers, which allows you to have longer, more profitable relationships.