ShivaniToday, customer satisfaction is the most important aspect of every business. Therefore, if you cannot satisfy your precious customer, it will hamper your business. It has been rightly said that
if you have satisfied customers, they will work as your best salespeople. According to research, around 80% of people have had positive experiences with organizations in the past year.
Moreover, keeping your existing customers happy is good business in the long term. Conventional business intelligence shows that obtaining customers is 5 to 25 times more costly than keeping current customers.
A poor customer experience or bad customer service is also a leading sign of customer churn (which is massively damaging to growth).
To demystify customer satisfaction and perform Measurably actionable for companies of any size and type, we have prepared a complete guide that ranges from customer satisfaction definitions to tools and tricks to make sure you’re collecting data accurately and using it to improve your business.
What is Customer Satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction is a measurement we apply to quantify the degree to which a consumer is satisfied with a product, service, or experience. It estimates how a customer thinks about a brand interaction.
Many terms in business are vague and misunderstood. Customer satisfaction is one of those terms.
Sometimes, we accumulate these measures right after a sale or at a fixed date in the customer relationship. Sometimes we use a five-point Likert scale, and sometimes we use a net promoter score survey.
It is vital to note that the focus shouldn’t be on providing an average experience but rather on building shouting promoters for your business.
Why Measure Customer Satisfaction?
If you don’t measure customer satisfaction, you can’t recognize unhappy customers. If you don’t know who is unhappy, you don’t understand who will churn, and you can’t find why they’re unhappy. If people churn quicker than you can obtain new customers, your business will decline.
Without communication or feedback from the customer, we confine ourselves in a sort of bubble.
The truth is that even the best, most innovative, top-performing businesses all have flaws and opportunity areas. These organizations are elite because they measure things like customer satisfaction and work upon the data.
If you’re welcoming to the idea that you could upgrade, it’s worth spending the time it takes to set up estimation solutions and manage the data. You might spot problem areas that are worth huge amounts in terms of ROI.
Customer retention is the most critical factor in long-term business growth. You can get customers as quickly as you’d like, but you don’t have a sustainable business if they aren’t holding around.
Retention influences every part of a business, from customer procurement to customer lifetime value to word of mouth and customer loyalty. The ratio of these metrics (CAC/LTV) is necessary, too: You can pay more money to acquire customers if they engage for longer and are worth more. It’s one business tool that positively impacts every other.
If you’re still not satisfied, check out these two data points:
- 82% of businesses admit that retention is more affordable than acquisition.
- A repeat customer consumes 67% more than a new customer.
Retention is great for business.
6 Best Strategies to Improve Customer Satisfaction
Now that we’ve explained the value of customer satisfaction, now the obvious question is, “How to improve customer satisfaction?”
However, there are amazing guiding principles and evidence-based tactics that can make you some quick wins.
1. Ask for customer feedback.
Make it more straightforward for your customers to complain.
If your consumers can’t give you feedback or complain to you straight, they’ll do so on social media or to their friends. They’ll be twofold frustrated — first with their bad experience, and second with their absence of an outlet to fix their poor experience.
This means spending on customer feedback tools and customer support is important.
Usually, if you have a well-placed tool to get customer feedback and respond in real-time, you can stop a user from becoming a critic in the first place. If you can respond quickly, you can turn the circumstance into a positive one.
There are several methods you can do this. One way is with live chat. This technology is quickly advancing in its scalability and targeting capability, as well as reporting. Another method is with feedback forms.
The vast majority of unhappy customers will walk away unhappy, and you’ll never know. They’ll then narrate their friends, and your reputation will worsen. Negative word-of-mouth is no remedy for a company. Getting customer feedback is important in itself, and not just businesses do it. But it can be difficult, and companies manage to make common mistakes.
To enhance the feedback process further, consider incorporating QR codes into your customer feedback system. QR codes can provide a quick and convenient way for customers to access feedback forms or surveys. By using QR code generators, you can create personalized QR codes that link directly to your feedback platform, making it easier for customers to share their experiences and concerns.
2. Educate customers and provide solutions.
All customer inquiries should be easily answerable, either manually, within your interface, or with documentation.
It’s especially frustrating when you can’t get an answer to a question or concern while utilizing a product or browsing a website. How many times have you encountered that and tried, to no avail, to get a live chat or some way to get an answer? It’s far too common.
First, conduct practical UX research guidance. If you manage a few user tests and view some session replays, you’ll discover tons of UX problems that you would never have marked otherwise. It’s both alarming and insightful, but it’s inarguably useful.
Second, look into smarter content and documentation. When you’re handling support inquiries — or any customer touchpoint — make sure you’re writing down, classifying, and quantifying general questions and complaints (and where they occur). This data will be your building ground for a compact help documentation plan.
Where are users grappling, and with what? How can you acknowledge that with content in real-time, so users don’t even require to reach out to you?
Lastly, look into more active digital customer service tools. In addition to presenting your contact information prominently, live chat is a necessary site element to have.
3. Educate customers and provide solutions.
All customer inquiries should be easily answerable, either manually, within your interface, or with documentation.
It’s especially frustrating when you can’t get an answer to a question or concern while utilizing a product or browsing a website. How many times have you encountered that and tried, to no avail, to get a live chat or some way to get an answer? It’s far too common.
First, conduct user experience (UX) research. If you manage a few user tests and view some session replays, you’ll discover tons of UX problems that you would never have marked otherwise. It’s both alarming and insightful, but it’s inarguably useful.
Second, look into smarter content and documentation. When you’re handling support inquiries — or any customer touchpoint — make sure you’re writing down, classifying, and quantifying general questions and complaints (and where they occur). This data will be your building ground for a compact help documentation plan.
Where are users grappling, and with what? How can you acknowledge that with content in real-time, so users don’t even require to reach out to you?
Lastly, look into more active customer support options. In addition to presenting your contact information prominently, live chat is a necessary site element to have.
4. Use focus groups.
It’s one thing to offer customers various channels for sharing feedback; it’s quite another to seek (and pay for) feedback proactively. Focus groups gather a number of your target audience members or active customers to collect constructive criticism.
Focus groups allow for honest responses. Not only does it create a space for you to ask a variety of pointed questions without the risk of losing interest, but it encourages your audience to answer candidly. When writing reviews or feedback, people often edit or “clean up” their answers. Focus groups happen in person, allowing you to gather unfiltered feedback and criticism, including body language and nonverbal responses.
These responses can be some of your best tools when understanding how to improve your customer satisfaction.
5. Leverage social media.
Customers frequently use third-party avenues like review sites and social media to share their experiences.
When you track and observe your customers’ social media activities, you can understand your brand’s positive and negative feedback. You can also feel fully equipped to address this feedback and increase your overall customer satisfaction.
Whether or not you utilize social media as an active customer service tool, your business should be poised and ready to acknowledge feedback within 24 hours. This could be on Facebook Messenger, Twitter, or Instagram, or LinkedIn comments. A social media listening tool can help with this.
You can also employ social media to collect customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction proactively. Consider offering live chats or Q&A sessions where customers can ask pressing questions, express concerns, or merely connect with your service or sales team.
The great thing about social media is it meets your customers wherever they are, allowing you to improve their satisfaction.
6. Check out your competitors.
When customers are unhappy, they take their business elsewhere. So, where would your unsatisfied customers go? Take a look at your competition to understand how they may be making their (and your) customers happier.
Your competitors are doing right and wrong and can teach you a lot about your customers, industry, and products. Go to their website to understand their online customer journey. If they have physical store locations, visit those to understand how they engage customers in person. Contact their sales and service teams to see how they interact with potential and current customers.
Find yourself, delighted? Odds are, your customers are, too. Incorporate some new ways to boost your customer satisfaction.
Wrapping it up
In this blog, we have the importance of customer satisfaction and how you can improve it. The most important aspect of customer satisfaction is the interaction with the customers.
