Customer satisfaction stands to be one of the key business performance metrics. It validates the effort that goes into crafting a company’s customer experience and determines the success of any business.
Due to the rise in competition and the unpredictable changes in customer behaviour in recent times, it requires a more nuanced approach to improve customer satisfaction. This is because, beyond providing a great product and service, customers are more inclined to appreciate a great customer experience.
Though many companies tend to focus on providing great products and services, a good customer experience largely increases customer satisfaction. In fact, the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer Report shows that about 8 out of 10 respondents say that the customer experience they have with their brand is equally as important as the products and services they offer. Also, about 80% of the respondents affirm that they are more likely to patronize a brand again if their customer experience is great. These customers also spread the word about their experience and invite others to join them.
This shows that improving customer satisfaction goes beyond building a great product and service; it’s crafting a great experience that matters. So, how do you craft a great experience for customers that exceeds their expectations and improves satisfaction? Let’s find out more.
The process of improving customer satisfaction is a journey of understanding customer behavior, needs, and pain points and crafting an experience that both meets and exceeds their expectations. You cannot assume what satisfaction means to your customers; hence, you need to find it out through a tailored market research approach, which helps you get a better perspective and understanding of the market. As much as there are generic actions to take that contribute to improving customer satisfaction, the surest way to improve customer satisfaction is to understand your customers, know what they want, and do it. How do you find this out? Through market research methods such as surveys, customer interviews, community forums, etc.
Aside from these, the following are general methods that must be regularly improved to keep your customers satisfied with your services:
In your customer’s perspective, they want you to always be available for them through the most accessible channels to them. They expect 24/7 availability because they can decide to use your product at any time of the day and encounter some glitches, for which they might need to reach out to your customer support for help. Therefore, make efforts to satisfy your customers by ensuring the availability of multiple channels fir communication, such as live chat, phone calls, chatbots, etc. A single channel of communication may not always work. For instance, there are some issues that cannot be solved on the phone and need to be solved through proper guidance in a live chat. In some cases where human customer service cannot be present all day, automated systems such as chatbots should be made available to meet customer needs.
The only way to know what customers really want is to listen to them as often as possible and act on their feedback Ask for your customer’s opinion, read their reviews of each product or service, and organize interviews to get a qualitative perspective on their wants. The beauty of seeking feedback is in the continuity and the action taken in response to it. Listening to customer feedback should be frequent and done with intentions to understand their behaviour and tailor improvements to suit their needs.
In this highly competitive business environment, it takes more than meeting customer’s expectations to satisfy customers; instead, you have to exceed customer’s expectations to constantly improve customer satisfaction. So many businesses are striving to meet customer’s expectation. So, to stand out and gain customer’s interest, you have to do it differently by constantly exceeding their expectations.
Employee satisfaction has a direct impact on customer satisfaction because employees are oftentimes in direct contact with customers. To make your customers happy, simply start by making the employees happy. Alongside that, empower your employees with the knowledge, training, and tools necessary to meet and exceed customer’s expectations. Also, give them access to customer data and customer management tools to help them better manage customer relationships.
One could affirm that happy customers make a successful business. Improving customer satisfaction is so advantageous that it determines a significant portion of a business’s success. In fact, a business could be considered to have failed if it records a frequent decline in customer satisfaction. A frequent improvement in customer satisfaction leads to long-term customer loyalty and prompts customers to increase their word-of-mouth marketing for the brand, so that your customer base increases daily with quality customers who are ready to support your business. This automatically leads to high business profitability and a sporadic increase in brand reputation. A satisfied customer cannot help but preach the good news of a brand to other people. All these add up to give you a competitive advantage in this business world of increasing competition.
The world is getting so competitive that only those who have mastered the art of improving customer satisfaction and doing it consistently will stay ahead of the competition. Though there’ll definitely be challenges with customers who are not straightforward in their approach and have unrealistic expectations, the outcome of striving to satisfy customers will always speak to the success of the business. In a nutshell, the secret to constantly improving customer satisfaction is to regularly listen to customers to know what they want, understand their behavior, preferences, and pain points, and then tailor your products and services to both meet and exceed their expectations.
