The Most Important Metric of Your SLA – Customer Perception
Revenue growth in the existing customer accounts is key to exceptional profits.
To get exceptional revenue growth, you need to deliver excellent service, but do you have rules and a process in place for the governance of initiatives and programs? Providing the services that customers sign up for is critical and must be perceived by the customer as receiving exceptional results.
Customer perception is just as important as meeting the service level agreement. Perhaps there is a subjective, “hidden” thought from your customers that need to be included in your search for exceptional customer service; these may consist of unspoken about thoughts like:
- Am I getting real value out of their product and services,
- Am I happy with their support teams that always irritate me even though they get the jobdone,
- Their attitude on the phone and onsite annoys me,
- I hate it when they give me feeble excuses when their products and services are notdelivered on time.
- If I were not locked into this contract, I would find someone else.
Why is Customer Perception Important?
A happy customer is one who is satisfied with the experience that he has with a product or a service.Customer perception is built around the experience that a customer has with a product.
Consumer perception can make or break your brand. When customers had a pleasant experience of getting their products delivered on time, they form an impression. Getting the products that were as described in the product description also creates a positive customer perception. When customers experienced a tremendous after-sale service, it is going to develop a positive opinion about the brand.
But when customers had a bad experience such as defective products, no returns, no after-sales service, etc. the customers build a negative perception about the brand.When companies work towards strengthening the bond between customers and the company, customer perception improves, and this gives way for a better competitive edge.
Customer perception is also important to determine the kind of image a brand wants to build.
For example, if you are a business to business service provider and your staff arrive on site in a dilapidated vehicle and the driver and service people look as if they were dragged through the bushes backwards, your customers get a perception that the company is a low-quality brand. But When the same crew arrive in a clean vehicle, smartly dressed overalls and greet everyone politely,the customers build a different perception about professionalism of the brand.
Customer perception or consumer perception plays a significant role in buying behavior. Hence companies are going the extra mile to create a pleasant and happy customer experience for its customers. Companies must be ready to spend money and effort to influence customer perception and drive profitable consumer behavior.
Next, always look for ways to deliver the services more efficiently, documenting all your processes, looking at root causes of issues that surface, continuously analyzing the data, and make recommendations on how to deliver more efficiently. Do you want to keep the same revenue stream for the services you are offering, or do you need to find additional ways to streamline the process so that you can pass some of these savings back to the customer? Think about it, when was the last time your customer was given additional budget dollars to perform the same service the following year? So, the burden is to find ways to deliver the services better and cheaper than was done previously and why doing data analytics is key.
Let’s Give Our Customers Unimaginably Good Service!
P.S. “Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once.” – Drew Houston, founder, and CEO of Dropbox.
