Six Reasons for Customer Satisfaction

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Discuss and illustrate the important considerations in maintaining customer satisfaction, taking University of Economics and Finance (UEF) as given example. How has UEF been maintaining and expanding its loyal customer community, as well as to attract future students?

Customer satisfaction is a marketing term that measures how products or services supplied by a company meet or surpass a customer’s expectation. Customer satisfaction is important because it provides marketers and business owners with a metric that they can use to manage and improve their businesses.  Six reasons why customer satisfaction is so important:

• It’s a leading indicator of consumer repurchase intentions and loyalty

Customer satisfaction is the best indicator of how likely a customer will make a purchase in the future. Asking customers to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1-10 is a good way to see if they will become repeat customers or even advocates

• It’s a point of differentiation

In a competitive marketplace where businesses compete for customers; customer satisfaction is seen as a key differentiator. Businesses who succeed in these cut-throat environments are the ones that make customer satisfaction a key element of their business strategy.

• It reduces customer churn

Customer satisfaction is the metric you can use to reduce customer churn. By measuring and tracking customer satisfaction you can put new processes in place to increase the overall quality of your customer service.

• It increases customer lifetime value

Satisfaction plays a significant role in how much revenue a customer generates for your business. Successful businesses understand the importance of customer lifetime value (CLV). If you increase CLV, you increase the returns on your marketing dollar.

• It reduces negative word of mouth

Customer satisfaction is tightly linked to revenue and repeat purchases. What often gets forgotten is how customer satisfaction negatively impacts your business. It’s one thing to lose a customer because they were unhappy. It’s another thing completely to lose 20 customers because of some bad word of mouth.

• It’s cheaper to retain customers than acquire new ones

Customers cost a lot of money to acquire. You and your marketing team spend thousands of dollars getting the attention of prospects, nurturing them into leads and closing them into sales. Why is it that you then spend little or no money on customer retention?

For present customers, UEF has supplied for them a lot of service like:

• Classroom is wide, colorful, light, clean - stimulate students' creation.
• Most classrooms have air-conditioner.
• The 14 floor is for students work out.
• The 4 floor is for relaxing after working hard.
• The 5 floor is library.
• The 16 floor is for events, press conference, ...

The study at UEF is so hard and reality. The school always meets students needs, but in limit. When I study here, I must to give a presentation a subject that I'm studying. The teachers always encourage students work in group, make plans, think about new idea. In short, encourage the student' creation. Most of students is satisfied about UEF. The parents of students also follow the studying of their children. Every time finish a semester, the school send transcript, learning outcomes and give you their advices and their children in the next semester. This make some students uncomfortably but their parents totally agree with school.

Every year, in about May, June, UEF goes to some high school to give the explanation about industry, subject, job, ... Most of pupil who are studying at high school worry about their future. Maybe they always wonder that they will have a good job if they study  at this university, or they can make a lot of money but do nothing.

UEF always ensures with pupils and their parents about quality of studying, also about job in the future. Besides, there are a lot of activities for students to relaxing, and this also makes the future students feel interesting. There are some other service for the future students when they join to UEF.

1. What is customer loyalty? How to maintain customer loyalty. Take examples from the case of UEF.

Customer loyalty is both an attitudinal and behavioral tendency to favor one brand over all others, whether due to satisfaction with the product or service, its convenience or performance, or simply familiarity and comfort with the brand.  Customer loyalty encourages consumers to shop more consistently, spend a greater share of wallet, and feel positive about a shopping experience, helping attract consumers to familiar brands in the face of a competitive environment.

According to a report from Flowtown, it is 6 to 7 times more costly to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer. Therefore, it’s equally important, if not more, to cultivate and maintain loyal customers while attracting new customers.

• Make customers love your products

Product is typically the base of a business. It’s not only an important factor that can distinguish you from your competitors, but also a key reason to keep customers coming back repeatedly. Products loved by customers often have something in common:

• Realize promised value
• Deliver a pleasant user experience
• Provide dedicated support

• Build a customer health scoring system

You may find it helpful to set up a scoring system that can incorporate feedback from new and old customers such as the NPS system. With the employment of NPS, you can discover the challenges both new and old customers are facing, and then evaluate each customer with a unified health standard: Good health, Average health, Poor health. Only when you have a deep understanding of each customer’s health can you solve the customers’ issues in an effective way and without harming old customers’ benefits.

• Nurture your paid customer base

Either products or customers have a life cycle so it’s important to treat customers differently according to their phases in the life cycle. There are two basic principles: Firstly, once a customer starts to pay, never give up on him/her. Secondly, do not treat every customer in the same way. Use different methods and service standards to treat different customers.

• Learn from lost customer

When customers stop using your products, you lose them. Do you know why each of the customers leaves you? No, because they may even never respond to you. It would be helpful to create a lost customer database which includes the following: