The importance of customer retention cannot be understated. It’s ultimately five times more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain current customers. Prioritizing customer satisfaction can help businesses improve their margins and increase their bottom line.
2023 is a unique year in consumer behavior and customer service needs and will likely have lasting impacts.
Top 12 Amazing Tips to Improve Customer Satisfaction
1. Treat Your Employees Well
The crux of great customer service is ensuring every touchpoint is a positive experience. As employees are the frontline workers who interact with customers, treating them well has a ripple effect.
Create a positive company culture that offers employee training and development opportunities for growth and self-care within the organization. Taking the time to listen to employees and empowering them to make decisions and providing feedback will pay dividends. A happy employee will be more productive and engaged when interacting with customers. This experience will help customers get the outcome they desired while having a positive interaction, leaving them satisfied.
2. Value Their Time
One of the best things your business can do to improve customer satisfaction is to value the customers’ time. Use apps like Talkdesk that can streamline the communication process, such as a callback request or an autodialer that has resources outlining how to use these tools efficiently. If you run an eCommerce business, you can also use the BigCommerce App, where your customers can search for and buy products in a more simplified way.
Additionally, exploring the possibilities of headless BigCommerce introduces advanced flexibility and customization to your online retail experience.
Use data analytics regarding call times and wait times to determine where there’s room for improvement. This information could indicate whether the issues your business faces are a result of improper staffing or something deeper.
3. Be Accessible
Many companies are taking an omnichannel approach to customer service so that customers can reach them in the manner they prefer. However, improving your accessibility means more than having text, social media, and email options— it means being responsive and timely. You can also use AI in e-commerce to enhance your customer experience.
Consider how your company can be more accessible and what resources you need to make it happen. Hiring a virtual assistant to manage your social media eg. Facebook comment moderation can help improve customer communications on that channel. Putting call center software in place can create a centralized, streamlined, omnichannel data bank. In addition, setting up a customer service chatbot will help increase customer satisfaction and improve their experience.
When in doubt about how to communicate with customers, ask them what they prefer.
4. Use Clear Messaging
Much of customer satisfaction comes down to managing expectations. Businesses can do this by using clear messaging. If your Facebook page is unmonitored, add a pinned post that tells concerned customers how to reach you. You can use an automated response for your DMs as well.
The point is to direct customers through the proper channels so that they don’t feel ignored or valued. The clearer and more concise your messaging, the less chance of miscommunication.
Lastly, for businesses aiming to enhance their online presence and customer satisfaction, leveraging agency-level SEO tools can be invaluable in optimizing their messaging strategies.
5. Collect Feedback
Reach out to your customers regularly to collect valuable product feedback about their experience. Include a brief survey after customer service calls, order deliveries, and other key touchpoints. The feedback collection process is a fantastic way to determine what your company is doing well and where improvements should be directed.
Don’t hesitate to ask leads and unconverted customers why they aren’t purchasing your products or services. Doing so may present an opportunity to evaluate new payment plans or identify friction in the transaction processing process. This is just a basic idea of how to manage customer feedback. If this concept is used effectively, you might see an improvement in your overall customer satisfaction score. Incorporating a Customer Satisfaction survey can provide the necessary data to pinpoint areas needing attention. Effectively utilizing this feedback will likely lead to a notable improvement in your overall customer satisfaction score.
QR Codes are an excellent way to collect feedback from your customers. Use a QR Code generator that allows you to create Google Form QR Codes to collect feedback easily. With QR Codes, you can easily keep track of all your customer data and implement necessary action.
6. Limit Escalations
Another friction point that limits the potential for customer satisfaction is the experience of being passed around from one agent to another. Companies should put processes in place to avoid escalations so that customers can get the help they need from one person.
While there are a few ways to limit escalations, one powerful strategy is to empower employees to handle a problem themselves. Put a checklist in place to ensure the employee has tried everything in their power before passing a customer along to someone else— preferably while reducing time spent on hold. Callback options are a complementary strategy for reducing escalations.
7. Manage Online Reviews
Online reviews play a powerful role in modern consumer behavior. In fact, some studies show that 92% of online shoppers take online reviews into consideration before completing a transaction. These reviews act as a form of social proof in a world dominated by fly-by-night operations that leave customers battling with PayPal for a refund.
Take a strategic approach to manage your online reviews. Respond to all reviews— both positive and negative. Responding to negative reviews is an effective way to fix the error and have the review removed or to correct issues within the business. Either way, this exercise improves customer satisfaction. Positive reviews in today’s world are crucial for every size eCommerce business. Be it a Flatiron school review or an Amazon review, it’s equally important. One bad review if escalated online can cost millions to any established business.
Companies should also take a proactive approach to collecting customer reviews by creating a streamlined follow-up process. If you are interested in how to get more reviews in general, then you should take a look at this guide: How to Get Reviews.
8. Be Proactive
Managing customer reviews isn’t the only opportunity for being proactive. Companies should strive to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to customer service.
Create a proactive outreach program that encourages customer service representatives to reach out to customers after they’ve made a purchase. The outreach efforts can include free training or TCPA-consent support calls to help mitigate a learning curve or give the customer a voice to highlight any struggles they’re experiencing. They can also leverage email outreach to the right targeted database. By being proactive, companies can solve a problem before a customer gets upset about it.
Read More: How B2B SaaS Companies Can Scale Up Their Customer Experience?
9. Use Personalization
People want to feel special in our technology-driven modern world. The simple act of using a customer’s name can spark a connection that improves customer lifecycle, and their satisfaction. Create robust customer profiles that outline their likes, birthday, loyalty anniversary, cart abandonment objects, etc. to create curated experiences that cater to their wants and needs.
10. Reward Loyalty
Now more than ever, customer loyalty is of the utmost importance. 75% of consumers have changed brands during the pandemic, opting for better value during trying times. The businesses that survived this shift are those that prioritized customer loyalty and giving back to their engaged community during the height of the pandemic. Implementing subscriptions, the ability to sell products on a recurring basis, can also be a strategic way to retain customers and ensure a steady revenue stream.
Now is the time to shift your business’s marketing focus to customer retention and reactivating churned customers. Offer rewards and incentives to showcase what value you bring your customers, keeping in mind that many are experiencing financial hardship. Showing your customers that they matter will improve satisfaction and keep them around for the long haul.
11. Use Social Listening
Social listening is a powerful way to see what your customers are saying about you online, even when they don’t use a review. You can practice social monitoring & listening using tools like Hootsuite and Google alerts to notify you when someone mentions your brand, product, CEO, etc.
Social listening is often more reliable than reviews when trying to understand brand perceptions and what consumers want. Using these insights to shape a path forward can help improve customer satisfaction over time.
12. Turn Analytics Into Action
Many companies look at customer analytics to get a better understanding of what’s happening in their business. The challenge is executing change based on those findings.
Set your business apart by turning your analytics into action. If you see that a significant percentage of your website traffic bounces on a certain page, make updating that page priority one. If your call center quality assurance analytics indicate that problems aren’t getting solved during the first call, target that area for improvement. Collecting data is one thing; using it effectively is another.
With these strategies, you can improve your customer satisfaction and the continuity of your business.
