Customer satisfaction is the main driver of business growth and longevity

The balance between customer satisfaction and profit making often presents a delicate matrix that most enterprises must solve for business success. So, what is the customer satisfaction magic bullet and how can companies use it to transform their businesses?

Customer satisfaction is a measure of how people feel when they interact with your product, service, experience, and other representations of your brand. It fundamentally draws from customer experience, which is a real-time measure of the impression left on a customer at their most recent touch-point with a product or service.

Companies must always strive to give their customers an experience that will either make them buy more or come back – a great customer experience is inextricably linked to customer satisfaction, and almost always leads to more sales.

Deliberate steps

For players in the insurance sector, the goal is to have customers tell others about your brand, in a positive way, and to engage with your products longer. This kind of organic growth has been proven to drive long-term agency value, linked to a reduction in the cost new customer acquisition, and an increase in life-time value for those that are signed up.

Important to note, however, is that customer experience and satisfaction is a journey that must be undertaken in slow and deliberate steps. You must strive to understand each one of your existing and potential customers in candid ways.

Data, thence, becomes a key component of this understanding, because by building data profiles, you get future leverage that allows you to tailor your products, services and messaging in ways that spark your target clientel’'s interest

Overall industry leadership can only be maintained by pre-empting customer needs and creating products that respond to those needs. Flexibility, especially in terms of the willingness by companies to go back to the market and study the needs of their clients is critical in creating the data profiles that define the company’s direction in terms of product creation and marketing.

Tech investment

Another key determinant of success in business is the prudent use of technology and digital platforms to enhance a company’s customer experience. Automated self-service, prioritised callbacks, live-chats, and personalised recommendations are some of the tech-driven tools for a seamless customer experience, and which, if well implemented, can completely transform the organisational outlook.

The embedding of technology and digital solutions into business operations is especially critical now when 73 percent of millennials prefer to shop online - the number is even higher for Gen Z and Zoomers.

Using artificial intelligence, companies can personalise services for such groups to high levels of accuracy, improving both their efficiency in customer response and managing their staffing requirements.

Companies must prioritise investments in technologies with potential to tremendously increase their customer loyalty.

In conclusion, it is important to reiterate that no business worth its name operates without prioritising customer experience and satisfaction. The approaches to success may be different, even for players in the same industry, but at the end of the day, the adage that ‘customer is king’ remains a foundational definitive of the course to take.

Ms Sogomo is the Group Head of Customer Experience for East Africa at Old Mutual Investment Group