Happy Customers Are The Best Measurement For Your Success
There is an old saying that goes: “If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.” For centuries, the greatest thinkers have suggested the same thing: Happiness is found in helping others.
At TripSpark Transit, this deep sentiment extends to our relationships with our valued customers. It's all about customer experience – the better served our transit agency customers are, the happier they feel. And if they're happy, we're happy – because delivering a great customer experience, just makes great business sense.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience is your customers’ perception of how your company treats them. These perceptions affect their behaviors and build memories and feelings to drive their loyalty. In other words: if they like you and continue to like you, they are going to partner with you and recommend you to the others. It's pretty simple!
For your customers to like you and become loyal, you must get to know them and their preferences, to be able to deliver personalized experiences across their entire customer journey. For transit agencies who offer paratransit service, this is especially important and slightly tricky, as paratransit riders are sometimes limited in their choices. Agencies that have invested in paratransit technology, in order to automate their paratransit operations, communication and eligibility, as well as offer on-demand service, drive greater efficiency, and superior customer experiences.
Happy customers save you money
It's a fact – keeping loyal customers is less expensive than getting new ones. Even in the B2C world, it costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. This is especially true in B2B markets, where we work with drastically fewer customers, and we have so much to lose when a customer parts way with us.
According to a study by the Harvard Business Review, an increase of 5% in customer loyalty can boost profitability by 25-95%. How is that possible? Between advertising, marketing, and follow-up, it costs five times more to acquire new customers than it does to retain the ones you already have. Forbes confirms that “acquiring new customers is important but retaining them accelerates profitable growth.”
Satisfied customers become devoted buyers when an organization is trustworthy and provides great customer service. And no one knows this better than TripSpark Transit's Cary McQuitty, Manager Customer Care:
“Customer support is not just about making sure your software is working, but that it is working FOR OUR CUSTOMERS. We are constantly working to provide our best support to keep the software working as our customers need it to, so that their staff can provide the best support to their customers.”
We're (really) not like the others
Day in and out, TripSpark Transit's dynamic customer care team helps us distinguish ourselves from other transit software providers and it gives us a measurable advantage over our competitors. The team comes with many years of industry experience, often in working directly with our products. And our customer care team members are nothing like typical “front line” reps. They live, breath and speak “transit” fluently.
Each customer interaction is less about our software widgets, and more about solving problems, gaining trust, and putting “people” back in the people transportation business. And everyone wins – our agency partners, their riders, and ultimately, us.
Measuring happiness
Customer centricity is a rising trend in the transit industry, and happily, it's here to stay. However historically, customer satisfaction took a backseat to price and product when evaluating a company's overall success. Today, companies are finally understanding the value of keeping their customers satisfied, and they are even measuring that rate of happiness.
By carefully monitoring, and constantly improving on customer response times, and issues resolution rates, TripSpark's customer care team keeps elevating the customer satisfaction bar higher, and higher. And while statistics don't lie, there's nothing more effective than the personal touch. One final thought Cary McQuitty shares about his team, is that they have what it takes to keep their customers truly happy:
“No matter if we're resolving an issue, hosting a training class, performing an upgrade, or just answering a simple question about what a field on a screen is for, our customer care team's goal is to make sure our customers are well-informed, and able to provide the best possible care for their own customers.”