Customer satisfaction is still the yardstick that measures just how happy customers are with a company’s products, services as well as how you deal with any queries or complaints they may have. Read our 10 tips on how you can improve customer satisfaction and empower your business to succeed.
Businesses traditionally use tools such a customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), net promotor scores (NPS), customer retention rates, customer churn rates & online reviews to understand how their businesses is performing overall.
By investing time into understanding whether your customers are satisfied or not, you’ll start to understand what’s working well within your business & what needs improving & why which will lead to a better customer journey & ultimately a much more rounded customer experience.
Read on for our 10 tips on how you can improve customer satisfaction.
Truly understand your customers
Take time to really understand who your customers are. Look at their age groups, their occupations, understand what they are buying from you & why they are buying it from you? What do your customers expect from you? Create buyer personas for each of these groups.
Use the available data across different touch points in the customer journey, start conversations on social media & tailor offers to your customers individual buying personas.
Create a customer centric workplace
If you’re hiring, put the time & effort into making the right hires, hire people who are truly customer centric, have a strong background in customer service & understand the importance of ‘customer first’.
Create a culture of sharing ideas & feedback to drive positive changes. Some of the best ideas come from the very people doing the customer service role.
Remove silos between your different departments, you can do this in several ways. Internal webinars are a great way of sharing information about the role & responsibilities of your different departments, it will give a great insight into.
Create clear next steps & guidelines
This is where a lot of businesses fail. It’s an important part of the that customers journey so they need to feel that they are always informed & supported.
If you’re a service-based business, after signing up a new customer, it’s important to make sure they are aware of everything that happens next. Clearly detail your onboarding process, if a follow up call is needed, give the customer options so it’s convenient for them, to avoid missed appointments.
If you’re an e-commerce business, be sure to send the customer their order information, returns information & set up an automated process to keep them informed of the delivery timescales.
Follow phone calls up with a ‘next steps’ email that details everything that will follow including payment dates etc & don’t forget to include all the different ways your customers can reach out if the need you. You an even add in a link to the FAQ’s section on your website.
Read more tips on how you can improve your overall customer satisfaction and empower your business to succeed.
Always show empathy
Customers want to feel heard & valued when they contact you with any issues they may have.
It’s important that your staff members lead with empathy, allowing the customer to speak, asking them for clarification on anything they are unsure of to make sure they have fully understood.
It’s useful to put yourself in the shoes of your customers, understand how you would feel on the receiving end of similar service. Taking full ownership of a customer’s issue until the matter is resolved.
Taking ownership makes them feel valued & less likely to have a need to ring back for the same issue or make a complaint.
Listen to your customers
On the phone, via feedback, social media, or online reviews. What your customers say about your brand matters.
Customers always share their experiences with family & friends. For examples a happy customer will tell around 9 people about your services. Whereas a dissatisfied customer will tell between 9 and 15 people about their experience. Therefore, listening & learning is a vital component of customer satisfaction.
Around 70% of brands ignore negative twitter reviews which shows a blatant disregard for how their customers feel about them. Don’t be one of those businesses!
Act on all customer feedback
Customers appreciate being considered & being heard, within any business’s mistakes will inevitably happen, no business is perfect & customers make allowances when things are dealt with properly.
By acting on customers feedback you are giving your customers to message that you really do care about their opinion.
By implementing any changes, you will develop & improve parts of your products or services as you go along, refining your processes & ultimately improving your overall customer experience across the board.
Read more tips on how you can improve your overall customer satisfaction and empower your business to succeed.
Always respond to customer feedback
When a customer gives you feedback, thank them for taking the time out to leave feedback, if it’s over the phone, advise them you will investigate this & get back to them with a resolution once you have completed an investigation.
If its email feedback or an online review, always take the time out to ask them for further information if needed, giving them a direct contact, they can liaise with further & once you have investigated, make sure you respond detailing the outcome.
When it comes to online reviews, transparency builds trust, customers will be more likely to overlook recent negative feedback if you have replied in detail.
Create a culture of coaching & training
Regular staff coaching comes with so many benefits, from making staff feel valued & supported to making sure customers get the best possible customer service when the need arises.
In a lot of organisations, agents can feel anxious around being coached as coaching has previously been reserved for underperformers.
In a call centre or any customer facing businesses that provide customer support, everyone benefits from regular coaching regardless of experience or performance so come up with a coaching plan that means everyone gets extra coaching & support.
Make call listening part of your team or departments training, break down good calls & discuss what went well, how the call could be improved. Always encourage group participation & praise & implement good suggestions.
Stick to a regular coaching schedule to people know when they will be coached so it doesn’t impact their workload, this will take some of the pressure off.
And don’t forget to always share best practice between teams & departments.
Read more tips on how you can improve your overall customer satisfaction and empower your business to succeed.
Provide omni-channel customer support
Make it easy for your customers to contact you, when its convenient for them. Just because your business operates from 9-5pm doesn’t mean your customers can fit their lives around your schedule & nor should they have to.
Customers want to contact you on the channel they are most comfortable with. For some customers, they have time to call you up & deal with things immediately, whereas others, may be busy at work, or have their hands full with family.
By making it easy to contact you, you take away some of the stress when they need to get through.
Voice – Make your IVR simple to navigate, announce wait times & offer call backs.
Live Chat – Have your agents who are great with written communication available to talk with customers via your live chat.
Chat Bots – Have intelligent AI chatbots set up on your website to deal with anything from simple FAQ’s to more complex queries, chatbots are a great way to provide out of hours customer service.
WhatsApp – Have a WhatsApp number dedicated to customer service so that customers can send you any images, videos or documents you may need to look at.
Social Media – Make it easy for customers to contact you via social media, if they are avid Facebook or Instagram users they may reach out whilst they are already online.
Omni channel technology allows you to communicate with customers through all your channels, but it also speeds things up, by linking all your contact channels up & connecting to your CRM or an inbuilt CRM (depending on the service) This saves so much time when communication as everything is done from one screen, plus it makes switching channels easy with no loss of communication.
Create customer loyalty rewards
Customer loyalty rewards are a great way to measure customer satisfaction & repeat business. They make customers feel valued & feel good about returning to your business.
However, you want to make sure your benefits are generous & not just a scheme designed to get your customers to spend more.
Put effort into it & make it as personalised as you possibly can.
Get feedback from your customers around your loyalty programmes & tweak where necessary as you go along, remember, customers love to be a part of the process.
If you’re looking to improve your customers overall experience of your brand & would like to discuss how QContact can help you can improve in any of the above areas, get in touch or book a demo.
