The way customers feel towards your business is customer satisfaction. This includes whether they had a positive experience and if they would recommend your business to others.
Customer satisfaction is important because it tells you what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Knowing this helps you to improve your business and make sure that you always meet customer expectations.
This article provides tips from HubSpot service experts on how to ensure and increase customer satisfaction.
What is Customer Satisfaction?
How content your customers are with your company’s products or services The way they rate your business and whether they refer it to their friends or families reflects how they feel about it.
Making your customers happy is important for keeping or improving your relations with them. This reflects how well you have done in providing a customer experience that meets their expectations.
Customer service satisfaction is determined by how customers interact with your brand and feedback collected through surveys using different channels. You can get information about how satisfied your customers are by using satisfaction metrics such as NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), or CES (Customer Effort Score).
Why Increasing Customer Satisfaction Is Beneficial for Your Brand
- Reduce customer churn – When you resolve customer queries proactively with the help of self-service options or by real-time engagement tools, customers are more satisfied and there is a reduction in the churn rate.
- Increase customer lifetime value (CLTV) – The satisfied customers turn out to be your loyal customers and are associated with your business for a longer time. By understanding the customer experience and measuring feedback across all touchpoints, you can increase your CLTV.
- Improve branding – 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family over any other type of advertising. Happy customers turn out to be your best brand advocates and share their positive experiences with positive word of mouth that enhances your branding.
- Boost customer loyalty – Repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers. When customers are satisfied with your product and services they eventually become your loyal customers.
Ways to Increase Customer Satisfaction
The first step to providing a better customer experience is improving customer satisfaction. As competition gets stronger, it becomes more expensive to attract new customers rather than keeping the ones you have.
Understand your customers.
To ensure customer satisfaction, it is most important to understand your customers. You can’t satisfy your customers if you don’t know who they are. If you are unaware of what your potential customers need or what their pain points are, it will be difficult to create a product or service that assists them in resolving their challenges.
Understanding your customers begins with customer profiling, where you identify their purchasing behaviors, pain points, demographic information, and critical characteristics to get a better sense of who they are. After gathering this information, you will be able to give your customers the best service possible, based on exactly what they need.
The needs of customers should be the main focus of every business, and delivering a better experience will help to meet those needs. When businesses operate with the intention of anticipating, identifying, and meeting customer needs, you can expect quick positive results.
If you know what your customer likes and is interested in, you can have more personalized conversations with them that will help improve your relationship. Almost half of customers expect to be treated specially for being a loyal customer. When customers are satisfied, they often become brand advocates and share positive experiences with others.
If you can provide what your customer needs before they even ask for it, you will greatly improve their satisfaction with your service.
- Customers feel valued, listened and cared about their wants and feel assured that the same will not be repeated in the future.
- Understanding customer behavior and emotions help to provide a higher level of intuitive support.
- Knowing the concept helps you build your products & services to match customer needs and interests.
Create a customer-centric culture.
In a customer-centric culture, every team and department work together to create a positive customer experience. When everyone does their job with the customer’s best interest in mind, they are always finding ways to improve the customer’s experience and meet their needs.
For customer support, this means that all of your support practices are centered around the customer and providing satisfying experiences, like:
- Offering customer loyalty programs that are based on actions customers commonly take with your business so they don’t have to take extra steps to meet loyalty tiers
- Creating help-desk articles that use clear and easy-to-understand language so the customer can understand instructions
- Acting on customer feedback when they directly tell you their level of satisfaction with your business and provide areas of opportunity for improvement and growth.
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes.
Rebecca Wong, the Senior Customer Support Specialist, demonstrates empathy by trying to view the situation from the customer’s perspective and trying to anticipate follow-up questions that they may have. This helps her to answer FAQs before they are even asked!
According to Wong, if she needs to explain a solution that involves exporting contacts, she will provide a gif or short video to illustrate the steps that the customer needs to follow.
It’s important to understand your customers and what they need. Putting yourself in their shoes will help you empathize with them and ensure their satisfaction.
Lead with empathy, always.
Empathy is a key element of customer service and satisfaction, as it shows the customer that you are trying to help them achieve their goals.
If you want to demonstrate that you care about your customers, it’s important to be empathetic during tough interactions. This way, you can show them that you understand and support them. According to Jessica Garcia, Customer Success Manager, empathy is key when a customer is upset or needs help. If the situation gets worse, she reminds herself that people will forget what she said but they will remember how she made them feel.
This means that if 50% of customers say they would switch to a new brand after one bad experience, leading with empathy is the best way to go.
Always ask for feedback.
Ensuring customer satisfaction relies on asking customers for feedback.
The only way to know how customers feel is to give them the option to provide feedback, according to Chloe Christiansen, Customer Success Manager. Christiansen believes that feedback is essential to understanding customers’ experiences with her, other internal teams, and the company’s product.
Christianensens entwickelt sich praktisch, indem er Umfragen, Beta-Gelegenheiten oder Besprechungen nutzt und sagt: “Initiative wie Voce of the Customer oder Product Roadblock helfen dabei, sicherzustellen, dass die Stimme der Kunden gehört wird.”
A survey by BrightLocal found that 68% of customers are willing to provide feedback, so it is worth asking for it.
Act on customer feedback.
If you don’t analyze the feedback you receive, it’s not worth anything. You need to use it to understand your successes and shortcomings. Giving and acting on feedback is equally important.
When you understand your customer’s experience, you can improve your operations to ensure customers are satisfied.
Almost half of all shoppers believe that their feedback doesn’t go to anyone who can act on it. Show them that you’re different by proving them wrong.
Give your support teams everything they need to succeed.
Making sure your support teams and reps have what they need to satisfy customers is key to ensuring customer satisfaction. When they have the resources they need to help, they have the resources they need to show up for every single customer, regardless of their issue.
This includes providing new employees with on-the-job training during onboarding, opportunities for further development, and performance feedback, as well as the everyday resources they need on the job, like access to a phone to answer calls or roadmaps for escalation protocols if a customer gets frustrated.
Respond to customer reviews.
Increasing customer satisfaction can be done by responding to customer feedback. This shows customers that businesses care about what they have to say and that they are not just another number. You care about what they think about your business and you talk to them about it.
Customers are more likely to visit your business if you respond to negative reviews, despite how nice it would be to ignore them.
Make it easy for customers to get in contact with your business.
The more accessible you are to your customers, the more satisfied they will be. If a customer can easily find a returns page on your website, they will be more likely to return a product and be satisfied with a refund or exchange.
Offering omni-channel customer support is one of the best ways to make it easy for your customers to get in contact with you.
How to increase customer satisfaction by delivering Omni channel support:
- Streamline all the conversations and manage them under a single platform.
- Connect with the customers in real-time and reduce the average response time.
- Improve customer satisfaction with a high first contact resolution (FCR) rate.
- It helps to gain valuable insights into the customer profiles by analyzing their journey.
- Businesses can build trust and credibility through consistent experience across all channels.
- Oasis’s Instagram account is an excellent example of a social engagement point of view. It created a special gallery of user-generated Instagram content, substantially encouraging customers to model the clothes they have bought from the Oasis store.
Provide instant response with live chat
If a customer’s questions or concerns are not addressed quickly, they will usually leave your site. Waiting for sales or support assistance and being put on hold for a long time are the two most common customer service frustrations.
The speed at which a company responds to customer inquiries is important for maintaining customer satisfaction. Almost nine out of ten consumers say that having their issues resolved quickly is the most important factor in having a great customer service experience.
How does live chat help businesses increase customer satisfaction?
- Personalized triggers – Your agents can figure out that the customers are having some queries and assist them before they make any support requests with personalized triggers.
- Route chats automatically – You can automatically route your chat request to the right agent or department for an expert solution and reduce the wait time.
- Start a proactive conversation – Live chat allows you to initiate a proactive conversation with customers and help them throughout their journey.
Tools that are powered by AI are the best for providing instant responses. You can start a free trial of the chatbot to respond quickly to customer queries.
Maintain customer service etiquette
A new report from Global State says that poor customer service experiences have caused 62% of consumers worldwide to stop doing business with a brand. Each business should have specific guidelines for communicating with its customers. Increasing customer satisfaction and developing long-term customer relationships is what helps businesses grow.
Here are some customer satisfaction tips you can follow:
- Use positive words & phrases – Choosing words while interacting with customers determines the impression it creates. By using the right words you can win customers. You can use words like my apologies, you’re welcome, etc.
- Listen actively to your customers – Listening is one of the best ways to start to serve your customers. It helps to identify what exactly your customers want, their opinions, feedback, etc.
- Offer gratitude – A sincere thank you goes a long way. Train your customer support team to offer gratitude at the end of the conversion as a core principle of customer service etiquette.
- Maintain transparency – You should always impart authentic information about your product or services to avoid future confusion. Make sure that you don’t make fake commitments and set customer expectations that will break their trust and loyalty.
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