Customer satisfaction has a significant influence on your business’s success. Low levels of satisfaction mean that your customer loyalty and retention levels will likely below as well. In addition, low customer satisfaction levels also indicate poor customer service, a big problem that costs businesses more than $60 billion a year!
In this article, we’re sharing 6 practices and advanced tips that can improve customer satisfaction regardless of your company’s size and industry.
1. Rely on Data and Databases
By utilizing advanced data analytics, brands can create a fast and easy customer experience. The right database gives organizations real-time insights that can increase productivity and efficiency in sales, marketing, and customer service departments. It can also help deliver personalized experiences that make your customers feel valued and appreciated, which is what a great customer experience is all about.
Through tools such as MongoDB, companies can collect, store, and analyze customer data in order to improve the experience at every stage of the customer’s journey. You can make a Tableau MongoDB connection to seamlessly create the Tableau dashboards and visualizations that will help you extract and analyze the insights from your multi-structured data.
2. Build a Mobile App
Nowadays, companies are looking for innovative ways to improve customer experience and, in turn, boost their customer satisfaction levels. They’re increasingly using multiple channels to communicate and interact with customers and mobile is definitely one of the channels that deserve special attention.
Being easily accessible via smartphones has become a priority for many brands and mobile apps have become a powerful marketing and consumer engagement tool. Providing your customers with a tech-smart option is a great way to increases your brand’s popularity, boost customer loyalty, collect valuable feedback, and much more!
If you’ve been wondering how to create an app that will make your business stand out from the crowd, you should know that this is not nearly as complicated or as expensive as it sounds. By using an app builder, you can easily create an app without coding. There are platforms out there that provide a ready-made structure with examples. Depending on the platform, you can start from scratch or use ready-made templates for specific app types or niches and finish the app within hours.
3. Provide Effective Customer Support
When customers face an issue with your products or service or they want to ask a question related to your brand, they expect you to be easy to reach and respond quickly offering a decent solution. This makes sense, considering the fact that people today don’t have much free time, so forcing them to spend an hour dealing with ineffective customer support can significantly impact your customer satisfaction levels.
According to Forrester, more than 70% of Americans claim that the best thing a company can do to offer excellent customer support is to “appreciate their time.” In order to achieve this, consider offering omnichannel support, i.e. make sure your customers can reach you via multiple channels like email, phone, and live chat. You should also respond on time on social media and provide self-help options on your website, such as a FAQ page and/or a knowledge base.
4. Use Customer Communities
These communities offer valuable insights into customer expectations, desires, and needs and they can help you significantly improve your approach to customer service. Today more than ever, the most advanced companies are leveraging their customer communities to test new products, generate product ideas, and improve their customer service.
Research data confirms the importance of using a customer community:
- Nearly 70% percent of brands use customer communities to gain customer feedback on products or services, which leads to increased retention and engagement;
- More than 25% of community managers said that customer support is the single most important benefit that people get out of their community;
- About 65% of consumers trust online reviews, which makes collecting and promoting customer feedback crucial for your company.
5. Reward Loyal Customers
According to research, 75% of customers would switch brands for a better loyalty program and more than 50% of them will prioritize the brands where they have points and rewards in their account. Running a loyalty program not only enables you to provide your customers with a personalized experience but also makes it easy for you to collect relevant customer data.
If you put customer needs at the center of your marketing efforts and execute a loyalty program well, customers will feel good about buying from you and that will give your brand a competitive edge against your competition.
6. Measure Customer Satisfaction Regularly
Studies have found that companies with a customer-centric mindset drive 4% to 8% higher revenues than their competitors. If you want to know where you stand when it comes to customer satisfaction, measuring your customer satisfaction scores can give you valuable insights into what works well and what areas need improvement.
The three most important customer experience metrics are:
- CES (Customer Effort Score) – measures how much effort a customer has to exert to get a request fulfilled, an issue resolved, etc.
- CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) – measures how satisfied a customer is with a particular interaction or overall experience.
- NPS (Net Promoter Score) – measures the willingness of a customer to recommend a company’s products and services to others.
Final Thoughts
While there is no single universal solution for improving customer satisfaction levels, it is vital to develop a customer-centric mindset that will help inform your company’s direction and business decisions. The above list of tips and practices can serve as a great starting point but the possibilities are endless.
