Four Strategies for Improving Customer Satisfaction

In today’s globally connected world, markets are more competitive than ever before. To set your brand apart, you need to focus on creating positive, memorable experiences for your customers. One of the best ways to achieve this is to focus on collecting customer satisfaction feedback. This can provide powerful insights to guide your organisation’s efforts in improving the customer experience.

Read on to discover four key ways you can build a stronger relationship with your customers.

Research shows that customer satisfaction is very important. In fact, 84% of companies that find ways to improve customer satisfaction see higher revenue. And higher customer satisfaction levels leads to higher levels of repeat customers.

Someone happy with their customer experience is more likely to remain a loyal customer. Happy customers come back again and again. They also often share their positive experience with friends, family and colleagues. This not only leads to customer loyalty but increased customers overall.

Improving the experience for your existing customers should be a top priority. The following section details four ways to improve customer satisfaction.

Listening to feedback from your customers can give you powerful insights into their behaviour. You can ask customers to take surveys or leave reviews of your customer service. As you do so, there are a few things you should know about listening to customer feedback.

There are many benefits to collecting and listening to customer feedback. When customers feel listened to, they feel valued. Which means that they are more likely to stay loyal to your brand. It is also a great way to get word-of-mouth advertising, as happy customers often recommend products or services to others. Customer feedback also provides critical insights that can improve your products and services.

There are several ways to gather customer feedback. These include customer satisfaction surveys, emails, text messages, focus groups, social media, and analytics. Whichever avenue you choose, cast a wide net and try to get responses from as many customers as possible. Once you have gathered the data, your next step is to analyse it. You can then create goals based on the responses, and create an action plan to meet those goals.

It is important to acknowledge negative feedback from customers and take these reviews seriously. In fact, negative feedback can be more helpful than positive feedback in that it clearly highlights areas for improvement.

Is there a recurring pattern in the negative feedback? Is it about the product, billing, customer service or something else? Separate the feedback into categories so that it can be distributed to the appropriate teams and fully addressed.

Personalised experiences can go a long way to show that you care about the customer. There are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to personalising the customer experience.

Customers want to feel heard and valued. Offering personalised experiences is one of the best ways to accomplish this. This benefits both the customer and the business. When done properly, the customer receives service that feels like it is tailored toward them, making them feel valued. And in return, the business receives brand loyalty.

There are several different ways to personalise the customer experience. You can do this with customised emails or newsletters. These customised emails can mention their previous purchases. They are also great for recommending future purchases. If a customer has a poor experience, empathise with the customer. Make them feel that you understand their issue. If an issue is reported, take action. Consider offering the customer rewards or benefits that would pertain to their specific needs or interests.

An example of great personalised customer service is from Chewy, the pet food e-commerce company. When a woman’s dog sadly died, she asked if she could return the food that she’d purchased. Chewy immediately gave her a full refund, told her to donate the food to charity and even sent the person flowers, with a gift note signed by the customer service rep.

The customer was so moved by this, she tweeted about it. This created a huge amount of positive goodwill toward Chewy and created many loyal customers through word of mouth. It just shows that one small act of kindness can really build a strong relationship between a brand and a person.

You can easily improve customer satisfaction by using technology to your advantage. When using technology to improve the customer experience, there are several things to consider.

With the aid of technology, your customer service team can work smarter, not harder. When implemented properly, technology makes customer service easier and faster for both customers and agents. For customers: reduced wait times and quicker resolution of problems. For agents: less repetition of simple tasks.

There are several ways in which you can use technology to increase customer satisfaction. One way is including a live chat feature on your website. Another example would be phone support. Having a modern contact centre provides a great way for customers to get in touch with you directly, especially for organisations such as financial services, insurance and other high-sensitivity products or services. Allowing customers to contact you through social media is also important, especially for lower-value services such as e-commerce.

First of all, find out what your customers’ priorities are. How old are your customers? Do they prefer to speak on the phone or over social media? Where are they located? How long are they happy to wait for a response? Once you know these things, you can find the right technology to assist your team.

For example, including a chatbot on your company website or mobile app is a great way for customers to speak to you if they don’t want to pick up the phone. Chatbots make it possible for customers to access self-service help even after hours when the customer service team is not available.

Having a customer support team to handle customer phone calls is one of the best ways to increase customer satisfaction. When customers call you, it’s important that they don’t have to wait long to speak to an agent, so a flexible IVR system is key in pointing customers to the right self-serve help for simple queries, and routing more complex calls to live customer support agents. This reduces overall wait time for your customers and keeps everyone happy.

Customer satisfaction is not a set-and-forget metric. You need to be continuously evaluating and improving your customer experience. As you make changes, some will be successful and others will not. With continuous evaluation, you can preserve the modifications that work and get rid of those that don’t.

One metric that is used across all industries is the Net Promoter Score, or NPS, which measures the loyalty of your customers and how willing they are to recommend you. However, there are many different KPIs for measuring customer satisfaction.

One example of measuring how your customers feel over the phone is through conversation intelligence. Instead of having to listen to lots of calls, the best systems will analyse your call data for you and identify trends. Allowing you to focus resources on the highest priority areas for improvement.

Customer satisfaction data gives you valuable insight into what is going on with your customers. You can use this information to quickly make decisions that keep customers loyal. For example, say you make a change to your product, and your customers don't like it.

If you have current and accurate data, you’ll learn quickly that there is an issue and can resolve it. You should look at customer satisfaction as a journey, not a destination. It is something you should be continuously