No matter how amazing you think your brand is, there will always be someone better than you. The corporate race is not a sprint, in fact, it is a marathon where you must keep running if you want to stay ahead.
This fact is not something you should be afraid of. You must strive with the best of your efforts. However, if someone is better than you at something, don’t deny that out of jealousy. Embrace it, and learn from them.
Your competitors are living case studies that you can consult to improve your customer satisfaction. Here is a list of 8 such things that you definitely can learn from your competitors.
1. Interacting better with customers
If you know a brand that is running ahead of you, look at how they treat their customers. It is no longer a hidden truth that a nice and friendly behavior with the customers yields higher conversions. If you think your customers are more fascinated by the way your competitors talk to them, it is probably time for you to sit down with your customer service department.
More so, you can also directly learn a thing or two about customer service from your leading competitors in the industry.
2. Reaching customers better
Today, almost all the organizations have moved on from just reaching out to the customers via mainstream media. The world is evolving so rapidly that by every passing hour, it is getting very difficult to get in front of your target audience.
What is the reason you ask? Well, “market saturation” is the answer. Every firm out there is constantly experimenting with new ways to be where their customers are. So, if you could just have a keen eye on how your top competitors are tackling these problems, you may find a better solution for yourself.
3. Taking new approaches
Keeping track of new trends and technologies that are prevailing in your industry is a hard task. You constantly need to collect industry data by analyzing tons of white papers and attending various webinars. However, most organizations forget to look at a free source of solid information; their competitors.
So, you should always be on the watch for any new technique your competitors are using to boost their business.
4. Exceeding customer’s expectations
Here, let us explain to you the general phenomenon behind customer satisfaction. When you don’t deliver what you promised to your customers, they get dissatisfied. But when you successfully deliver what you promised to your customers, they get satisfied.
However, if you want to lead the market, that is not what you should aim for. Customers today want more than just a product or a service. They need you to add some extra value to your offerings. Customer delight is the intention here and it can only be attained if you exceed customer’s expectations.
Furthermore, if you see your competitors successfully gain customer delight, it is advisable to learn from their practices.
5. Learning from their mistakes
Just like we mentioned above, your competitors are living case studies of the industry. You should always keep an eye on where they did great and where they went wrong. From their triumph stories, take notes of necessary techniques that you need to implement in your system. Whereas from their mistakes, mark out strict boundaries that your team must not cross.
One thing that we want you to understand is that you should never be afraid of taking risks. However, those risks must be well calculated and you should always watch out if any of your competitors failed while doing something similar.
6. Recognizing your strengths and weaknesses
Where on one hand your competitors are your source for learning new trends and techniques, they are also a benchmark for your internal analysis. When you hover through the profiles of your competitors they can help you recognize your strong and weak points.
In this way, you can easily understand which part of your processes you need to treasure, and which parts you need to revamp. Moreover, your competitors can also teach you how to show-off your strengths to the customers and how to hide your weaknesses from them.
7. Putting customer feedback to better use
You cannot fix an issue when you don’t have a clue what the issue is. Customer feedback, although, is the right tool for implementing just the kind of change you need. Your competitors are smart and they understand the importance of customer feedback for their businesses. That is why you need to improve your customer feedback management as well.
For the record, some of your close competitors might be using the advanced services of TrustedExpert for collecting customer feedback. It is about time that you also give it a thought.
8. Improving your online content
You must have seen that some of your competitors have really great online engagements. Their content is the reason behind that. Oh, and yes, you can definitely spy on their content as long as you’re not doing plagiarism. However, we also don’t recommend you to reproduce what they published by slight rephrasings in the text.
A good approach is to look for their most appreciated content and then try building on it. Make it more engaging and helpful for customers by finding and adding on the missing details. In this way, you can have a more attractive content that can help you stand out online.
Your competitors are your biggest source of motivation, you just have to see it rightly. There are numerous things that your competitors can teach you, mentioned above are just the major ones. If you strategically capitalize on them, you can easily convert a material advantage into a won game.
Make sure you also give a look at our previous blog for “5 Insightful Quotes About Customer Satisfaction“.