Improving customer satisfaction is by far the best way to create a loyal fan base for your brand and grow your business. Satisfied customers are more likely to share their experiences with friends, family, and the world, which helps your brand immensely.
If you want to improve customer satisfaction, you’ll need to do more than just create an awesome product or service. To be truly satisfied, your customers have to be happy with what you sell and who you are as a company. This requires focusing on several different areas of your business.
1. Focus on improving your customer service
How strong is your customer service game? Do people walk away satisfied with the help they receive from your company’s representatives? Do customer concerns and issues get addressed quickly and fully? If there’s room for improvement in these areas, it might be because your efforts are disorganized.
In an effort to centralize customer service efforts, many businesses are now using a Contact Center AI to manage their customer interactions. The main benefits of this approach are improved agent productivity, an enhanced customer experience, and deeper insights about customer-related issues.
Having a unified, cloud-based tool makes it possible to automate routine, mundane, repetitive agent tasks and increase response times. It also eliminates the need for customers to explain their situation again and again each time a new agent takes over the request. All of the important information related to a request gets documented and is easily referenced by all agents.
Although customer service plays a significant role in customer satisfaction, it’s not the only factor.
2. Get up close and personal on social media
If your company doesn’t interact with people on social media, you may want to reconsider posting in the first place. People expect brands to interact with them after making a post. They don’t expect brands to reply to everyone, but they do expect to see some kind of interaction that demonstrates you care about your customers.
Consider hiring a dedicated social media expert to reply to comments on your posts. You don’t need to get too detailed, but at a minimum, you should be addressing all questions, concerns, complaints, and compliments.
It doesn’t hurt to reply to general comments, but prioritize the comments from people who have something pressing to say.
3. Care about how your customers feel
What are your customers left with, feeling-wise, when they interact with your brand? This is something you’ll want to pay attention to because it impacts a customer’s willingness to buy from you.
According to statistics, 70% of the customer journey is rooted in how customers feel they are being treated by a brand. Customers who don’t feel like they’re being treated well leave the funnel quickly.
So, the question is, how can you make customers feel like they’re being treated well? First, you need to care about how they feel. Then, you need to bring your customer interactions in line with a high level of concern for their satisfaction, which can be accomplished through applying the remaining points in this article.
4. Listen to your customers
The foundation of creating satisfied customers is listening to what they have to say. It requires listening to all complaints, compliments, and everything in-between. Then, take action based on all feedback.
Although you’ll get comments on social media, the best way to gather high-quality, actionable feedback is to ask for it directly through customer satisfaction surveys. Send out a survey after every purchase and ask customers to rate their experience with your product or service, and their experience with customer service when applicable. Your surveys don’t need to be long. In fact, short surveys have been proven to elicit more responses.
If you haven’t already, look into using three important metrics: a Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score for generating feedback.
5. Personalize the customer experience
There are many ways you can personalize a customer’s experience with your brand. This can be as simple as using a person’s name when you send them emails or sending them birthday messages. It can also involve segmenting your audience to send emails that target their specific interests and segmentation also allows you to send personalized product or service suggestions based on past purchases.
Creating satisfied customers takes work
There’s no way around it – it takes work to create satisfied customers, but it’s worth the effort because when you have satisfied customers, your business is more likely to succeed.