Happy and satisfied customers make one of the most important assets a company can ever hope to have. For instance, in a recent survey, 61% of small and medium business owners stated that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat business. Furthermore, loyal customers will, on average, spend ten times more than first-time buyers and are more likely to recommend your products or services to their social circles.
So, it should be very clear that, if you want to make your company competitive, customer satisfaction should be one of your top priorities.
This, however, is a very complex issue and requires a conscious effort in a wide variety of different business areas. Let us take a look at how supply chain management factors fit into the whole story and how to use it to your advantage.
Helping You Comply with the Deadlines
This is, by far, the most basic and the most obvious way supply chain management affects client satisfaction. Be that as it may, supply chains are very complex systems where a lot of things can go wrong. In this set of interconnected cogs, even the smallest discrepancies can bring the entire thing to a halt. As a result, companies usually fail to deliver their items on time which can have a devastating impact on customer satisfaction. If companies don’t know how to leverage clients’ expectations and handle PR crises with gifts and discounts, these instances can blow up into massive branding problems.
Template for Effective Communication
Effective and transparent communication makes one of the main pillars of client satisfaction. But, how can you hope to ever put correspondence between you and your loyal clients on a healthy foundation if you have a poor understanding of the inner workings of your internal processes in the first place? The supply chain is by far one of the most important structures you need to keep an eye on. A firm grip on the entire supply chain infrastructure and detailed insight into all of its processes sets up foundations for effective and transparent communication, and, as a result, more positive client experience and client satisfaction.
Overcoming the Financial Obstacles
Engaging in comprehensive client engagement and creating customer satisfaction is not cheap. It is good to know then that collecting the operating capital necessary for these efforts is nowhere near possible if your supply chain is not operated efficiently. If you are not able to move the items efficiently, keep your inventory full and overcome temporary supply chain bumps with trade finance services or similar short-term loans, you will never be able to make your deliveries. That means failing to collect the invoices in time to reinvest the money in client satisfaction. Such issues can completely destroy your cash flow.
Identifying Sources of Dissatisfaction
The sources of customer dissatisfaction can often be elusive to consumers just as they are to the people running companies. That makes identification of the said issues very complex and taxing. Fortunately, devoted supply chain management can go a long way in making this problem far simpler. Namely, any sort of supply chain management leaves behind robust data trails that can help owners to identify some of the historical problems within their companies that may have an influence on client satisfaction. Also, such pools of data are necessary for engaging in analytics and long-term client satisfaction management.
Managing Clients’ Expectations
In one of the previous sections, we mentioned expectation management in the context of the PR crisis response. However, this issue is too complex for such a narrow interpretation. As a matter of fact, we would go as far as to say that expectation management makes the backbone of any client satisfaction process. Establishing a solid supply chain infrastructure and closer integration of stakeholders upstream and downstream does make this critical task far simpler. Only when they have full control over these processes, the companies can engage in client satisfaction strategies with greater confidence.
Creating a Customer-Centric Culture
Last but not least, we would like to point out that, keeping in mind all the facts we have covered in the introduction, creating a more customer-centric culture should be one of the top business priorities moving into 2023 and beyond. Maintaining an efficient supply chain makes up an incredibly important part of this effort. With only a couple of slight touches and a greater focus on customer satisfaction KPIs, this entire robust infrastructure can be repurposed to serve as a giant client satisfaction tool. That doesn’t change the very nature of supply chain processes – it only gives them a goal and a sense of direction.
We hope these couple of pointers gave you a general idea about the role of supply chain management in terms of broader customer satisfaction efforts as well as presented some of the ways to use this relationship to the benefit of your company. The present-day business environment is very competitive and harsh. Going out of the way to make your clients happy and encourage them to keep coming back for more is the only way to stay afloat. Effective supply chain management is one of the most critical parts of this process.
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