10 Ways To Boost Customer Satisfaction
Now that you’ve persuaded a prospect to buy your product or use your service, your job is not over. Your job now is to ensure customer satisfaction. The way you boost customer satisfaction is by offering the best products, services and customer care that you can reasonably offer, while still profiting.
Customer satisfaction informs customer loyalty. Their satisfaction or lack thereof is the first thing you’ll notice if there is an issue with the product or the service. When you have a high level of reported customer satisfaction, you’re less likely to experience customer churn, complaints, returns, or other problems.
Free Guide: How To Build Customer Loyalty and Retention
1. Develop or Recommend Only the Best Solutions
As you create products or find them to recommend, always recommend the right product at the right time. Ensure that it really solves the problems you say it does in the way you claim, and your customers will be happy.
2. Know What Your Customers Want and Need
The easiest way to please a customer is to get to know them. When you know what keeps them up at night and how that aligns with your expertise, you’ll be able to recommend what they want and need with confidence.
3. Create Measurable Benchmarks
Look at what the industry says about the satisfaction averages of businesses like yours but make your own benchmarks against where you currently stand to improve.
4. Check Your Numbers Periodically
Once you have developed benchmarks, use that information to study the numbers you generate from your actions. It’s best to pinpoint why something happens rather than assume. This way, you don’t make any decisions without data.
5. Listen to Your Customers
Find ways to listen to your customers throughout their buying journey and then put the information to work. Survey them, create communities for them, and engage with them as much as possible to get more listening opportunities.
6. Improve User Experience
As technology improves, you’ll need to keep yours up to date too. Ensure that the user experience is what your audience is expecting, and they’ll believe it’s perfect.
7. Focus on Retention
Instead of focusing all your marketing needs on getting new customers, put some of those resources into focusing on customer retention. An existing customer is more likely to be your best buyer. In fact, studies have shown that 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers. Product quality, ease of use, how it looks, and how easy it is to get help will all help you retain more customers and clients long term.
8. Provide Top-Notch Customer Care at Every Channel
Don’t make it hard for your customers to get their answers. Let them ask questions on any platform at any time. Consider using chatbots to help.
9. Build Community and Relationships
Set up customer service communities using Facebook groups or discussion boards or forums. Set up a place where your community of customers can ask questions and help each other in the process.
10. Act on the Data
As you set up metrics to capture, don’t just collect the data and do nothing. Instead, act on the data. When you collect data and act on it, your customers will think you’re reading their minds.
Free Guide: How Best In Class Companies Boost Customer Satisfaction
Good customer service is different from company to company, but the key characteristics of good customer service include a rapid response time to service requests, responding to all customer feedback (positive or negative), self-service help documents, and a frictionless process for getting in touch with support.
For more actionable steps to improve your customer relationships and increase retention, download this free guide from Calendly and HubSpot, How Best In Class Companies Build Customer Loyalty.