Every brand strives to increase customer satisfaction, and it’s likely your company is no exception.
After all, achieving high rates of customer satisfaction is key to sustaining long-term success. Therefore, as a business owner, it’s important you know effective methods your brand can use to increase customer satisfaction and overall customer experience. Thankfully, we have compiled a list of eight highly effective ways to do just that… increase your customer satisfaction levels.
What is Customer Satisfaction?
Before looking at some actionable changes you can make in how you interact with customers and more to improve your customers' satisfaction rates, it’s important to first consider what you are hoping to achieve. In other words, what is customer satisfaction? In short, customer satisfaction refers to how your customers feel about your business and whether they are satisfied with the service or product you provide.
Why is Customer Service Important?
The overarching reason that customer service is so important is that customers will eventually stop coming to you as a business if they repeatedly leave unsatisfied. In fact, it can just take one incident of dissatisfaction to make them move to another company. On the other hand, a happy, satisfied customer will transform into a loyal customer who frequents your business and tells others about your brand, leading to increased revenue! Suffice it to say, when customers are happy with your service or product, they will gladly come back and will likely let others know.
Customer satisfaction or service is also the bedrock of your business and the decisions you will make going forward. It’s a way for you to separate yourself from competitors that are perhaps offering similar services or products. You can stand out and gain loyalty by providing heightened customer service and focusing on customer satisfaction overall.
Now that we have considered the importance of customer satisfaction and why you would want to improve it, consider the following eight ways to go about accomplishing this goal of an increased customer experience:
1. Listen to Your Customers and Act on Their Feedback
It might seem simplistic, but one of the easiest ways to increase your customers' satisfaction is by asking customers what they want or even what they don’t like. This will give you the information you need to improve measures that leave customers unsatisfied. You aren’t inviting criticism, but instead, asking customers how you can serve them better.
You can do this by prompting reviews or by sending out surveys on how you did as a brand. You can also install some on-site analytics to reveal how your customers are using and interacting with your website and such. It can look at facts like how long a customer views a product or an article and similar data. There are a variety of non-intrusive ways to invite feedback, either negative or positive that you can then use to improve your overall customer satisfaction numbers.
2. Provide Your Teams With Everything They Need to Succeed
If you provide your employees with the tools they need to succeed, you will in turn be able to provide a better customer experience for your clients. This means providing training, performance feedback, technology, support, and more for your employees, ensuring they can do the job you ask them to do. There is nothing more frustrating for customers than dealing with an employee who hasn’t been trained properly or who isn’t equipped to provide the service or product the customer desires. This is setting them up to fail. Instead, try to create an environment of success that will in turn help your customers feel appreciated and valued by properly equipping your employees to do their jobs.
3. Make it Easy for Customers to Contact You
It’s important to ensure customers have easy access to you as a business owner or manager. To do this, make sure you have several points of contact with multiple channels. Offer a good email, phone, and text number that can be reached, and make sure to respond in a timely manner. It’s also highly effective to add social media contact as well. This gives customers a way they can initiate a conversation on whichever platform they are most comfortable using. Keep in mind that some 6.65 billion people use smartphones and 60% of customers read texts within one to five minutes of receiving them. Therefore, this showcases the value of having several ways for customers to contact you and then for you to message them back in a timely manner.
4. Respond Quickly
Speaking of timely manner, we already touched on it a bit, but it’s worth emphasizing even more. Make sure that you respond to customers' messages in a timely manner. This will show that you do care about what they think and their satisfaction. If you are struggling to stay on top of your messages, you can add a chatbot for 24/7 customer support. It’s worth noting that 82% of all consumers expect an immediate response when they have a marketing or sales question, and another 90% expect immediate follow-up regarding customer service issues. In addition, ideally, you will never leave a customer sitting on hold or waiting for a response as this communicates that neither their time nor their concerns are valued.
5. Provide a Personalized Customer Service Experience
Get to know a customer in terms of their individual history, and their needs and even just learn a bit about their daily lives. This will help you build a relationship with your customers and offer more customized and personal experiences. After all, no one wants to feel as if they can easily be replaced, they don’t matter, or even worse, they are just a dollar sign. Therefore, when you can, offer personalized services and products that will show customers you do care about them and know what they like and don’t like.
6. Research the Market
When it comes to your industry, you should become an expert. To do this, keep track of how your competitors approach customer satisfaction and determine if they are doing well or leaving a bit to be desired. Then, implement positive changes based on customer behavior that you ascertained through data research. Knowledge is power in terms of how to create the best customer satisfaction numbers possible.
7. Set Clear Expectations
Another way to promote increased customer satisfaction is to set and maintain clear expectations regarding your role as a business and what service or product you will provide. As a result, your customers will feel more comfortable reaching out to you because they know what they can expect back from you. It will also prevent any unnecessary expectations that simply aren’t reasonable or obtainable from forming, leading to certain disappointment.
8. Take Ownership of Mistakes
No matter how hard you try to create positive customer satisfaction numbers or to address concerns or issues, there will still be times that you simply mess up as a business. When this happens, it’s important to take responsibility and ownership of your mistakes. This will not show weakness in any manner. Instead, it will reveal an authenticity that your customers will likely admire. Overall, even when errors happen, when you are honest and forthright about the problem and do what you can to make it right, this can build trust and satisfaction.
Continue to Focus on Customer Satisfaction
There is likely no other more important aspect of your business that will affect your long-term success than your customer satisfaction rate. While you can offer a superb product or service, if your customers are frequently let down, or feel dissatisfied for whatever reason, there is little you can do to keep your company thriving. Therefore, customer satisfaction is immensely important.
Thankfully, by keeping the eight surefire ways to improve your customer satisfaction numbers listed above in mind, you are well on your way toward improving your company’s future and longevity.
