Aim for customer satisfaction

Are your customers truly satisfied?

You may go to a customer, pick their orders, deliver them on time and assume that the customer is satisfied. However, what you did was fulfil the customer's needs, which might not necessarily equate to satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction is a measure of how products or services provided by your company meet customer expectations.

Measuring customer satisfaction should become your daily habit – not something you do from time to time and only if you’re about to face crisis management.

Why Customer satisfaction is important

1. A Loyal Customer is a treasure you should keep and hide from the world

Not only is it more expensive but also much more difficult to acquire a new customer than to keep current customers. 

On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase.

Banks or telephone service providers know it best, so they don’t have any problem with going the extra mile for a customer who is not quite satisfied and often offer him something special. 

2. They can stop being your clients in a heartbeat

Nowadays clients easily switch brands. You need to continuously look after your customers: talk to them, ask questions, offer constant support, send personalized messages or offers.

When you take care of each and every one of your clients’ needs, you’ll be rewarded with their gratitude and loyalty.

3. Customer satisfaction is also reflected in your revenue.

Customers’ opinion and feelings about your brand directly affect essential metrics – such as the number of repeat transactions, customer lifetime value or customer churn and referrals.

Happy customers won’t look at your competitor’s offers – they will happily interact with your brand again, make a purchase and recommend the product further. If you meet all of their requirements and answer their needs while delivering the best quality of your services, they will be fully satisfied.

4. Great customer experience can take your brand places

Satisfied customers are more likely to keenly interact with your posts, share your content, and leave some delightful and admirable comments across social media. You can later leverage these as the source for your case studies and success stories. 

5. Retention.

Customer retention is arguably the most important factor in long-term business growth. You can acquire customers as rapidly as you’d like, but if they don’t stick around, you can’t have a sustainable business.

6. Customer satisfaction is a factor that helps you stand out of the competition

If you provide your customers with amazing customer service, you will gain arguments to convince those uncertain of your services.

How to Improve Customer Satisfaction

1. Ask for customer feedback.

Make it easier for your customers to complain.

If your customers can’t give you feedback or complain to you directly, they’ll do so on social media or to their friends. They’ll be undoubtedly frustrated, first with their poor experience, and second with their lack of an outlet to fix their poor experience.

This means investing in customer feedback tools and customer support.

Often, if you have a well-placed mechanism to catch customer feedback and respond in real time, you can prevent a user from becoming a detractor in the first place. If you can react quickly, you can turn the situation into a positive one.

2. Educate customers and provide answers.

All customer questions should be readily answerable, either manually, within your website or App interface, or with product documentation. It’s incredibly frustrating when your customers can’t find an answer to a question or concern while using a product or browsing a website.

You should also look into smarter customer support options such as live chat in addition to displaying your contact information prominently.

3. Leverage social media.

When you monitor your customers' activities on social media, you can better understand any positive and negative feedback about your brand. You can also feel better equipped to address this feedback and improve your overall customer satisfaction.

Whether or not you use social media as an active customer service tool, your business should be poised and ready to respond to feedback within 24 hours. This could be on Facebook Messenger, Twitter, or in Instagram or LinkedIn comments.

You can also use social media to proactively collect customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction. 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 in the process.

4. Make things easy to accomplish.

We think about the features and benefits of our products and what you can accomplish with it, but we forget that users have to learn how to use them — that it’s often not an intuitive experience.

The easiest-to-use products are the most addicting. Companies like Facebook and Amazon know this, and so does every other app on which you spend too much time. They make things so frictionless that, when you receive a trigger to use the app, there’s no difficulty in doing so. 

5. "Wow" your customers.

Satisfy your customers? That’s a good start, but you should really be aiming to delight your customers.

Whether it’s something simple like sending gifts to your best customers, something remarkable like patiently staying on a call, or something thoughtful like writing handwritten thank-you notes to your marketing partners, delighting your customers can bring about amazing business results.

6. Use focus groups.

Focus groups gather a number of your target audience members or active customers with the intention of collecting constructive criticism. 

Focus groups allow for honest responses. They happen in person, allowing you to gather unfiltered feedback and criticism, including from body language and nonverbal responses. These responses can be some of your best tools when understanding how to improve your customer satisfaction. 

7. Check out your competitors.

What your competitors are doing right and wrong 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 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.

8. Provide a Perfect Product

Customers want defect-free products and services. You need to design your product or service so that it can be expected to function perfectly within foreseeable boundaries. True, things will sometimes go wrong. Your products, and people, will sometimes fail due to unpredictable circumstances. But sloppy or incomplete product or service design is, from a customer’s perspective, intolerable.

9. Timeliness

In our world of smartphones and instant Google searches, your customers get to decide what is and isn’t an appropriate timeline. A perfect product delivered late by friendly, caring people is the equivalent of a defective one. On-time delivery standards continue to get tougher all the time so it has to be  continually improved.

10. Have the Support of an effective Problem Resolution Process

Service breakdowns and other problems experienced by customers are crucial emotional moments in a business relationship. Therefore, solving these problems will have an outsized impact on your business success. That’s why you need an effective problem resolution process.

Resolve a service problem effectively and your customer is more likely to become loyal than if they’d never run into a problem in the first place.  Because until a problem occurs, the customer doesn’t get to see you fully strut your service.