There are several factors why a business flourish or flops. One of the critical determinants of a business’s future is how well the company satisfies its customers. With low customer satisfaction, your business is doomed to fail.
Especially now with steep competition among businesses across different industries as the pandemic continues to cause upheaval, keeping your existing and also your potential customers happy should be the number one priority.
According to studies, obtaining a new customer is five to twenty-five times more expensive than keeping your current ones. Even the majority of businesses agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition.
Before delving into the different pointers in increasing customer satisfaction to your business, let us know more about why customer satisfaction is crucial for your business’s success.
Why Customer Satisfaction Is Important
The idea of customer satisfaction we have known today came into being back in the 1950s. It was the time when business marketing incorporated psychology and behavioral science principles into its practices. From then on, customer satisfaction has increasingly become more significant.
There are several reasons why customer satisfaction has become an important concept in the business world.
For one, dissatisfied customers are likely to cause collateral damage to your company. A single customer who has a bad experience with your business would post a negative review on your social media page and talk about their experience with their close friends and family. This would significantly tarnish your brand’s reputation, and you are likely to lose a lot of potential customers.
Secondly, customers are more likely to do repeat business if they find your customer service excellent. Various surveys have shown that the main reason why customers do not want to buy from you again is not because of the expensiveness of your product but how your staff treats people purchasing from your store.
Lastly, having hundreds, even thousands of options to choose from, consumers would want to feel confident in their product choice. Consumers, particularly millennials, would want to stay loyal to a brand. By offering excellent customer service, in turn, your customers will be more satisfied and are more likely to select your product among competitors.
Ways to Improve Customer Satisfaction
Treat Them With Courtesy
Whether your business provides products or services, offering an excellent and courteous way of handling customer concerns is a must. Instill on your staff that customers should see your business in a positive light. Customers are not necessarily always right, but you still have to be polite in addressing their issues.
Provide Omnichannel Support
We live in the digital age where everything is accessible on the tips of our fingers. With this in mind, customers would want to reach out to your business across multiple channels such as social media, chat, email, and phone calls. Customers would want a prompt response to their queries.
Most often, customers would not proceed with their purchase if you cannot reply on time to their questions. Other than that, customers expect a seamless transition between these multiple channels. Streamlining your company’s communication channel is a must to meet this demand.
Ensure Employee Satisfaction
Happy employees result in happy customers, as they say. Ensure customer satisfaction when your business works its way from the ground up. How you treat your staff plays a much larger role in how well they also treat and interact with your customers.
Make it a company culture to give appreciation to your employees, especially when they deserve it. Shower them with praises from time to time and give out incentives. Employees are surely eager to do their job well when their efforts are appreciated.
Provide High-Quality Self-Help Options
Sometimes companies overlook that the most cost-efficient way of providing customer service is through FAQs, tutorial videos, and manuals.
The majority of customers expect businesses to provide self-service options. By providing self-help support portals, not only will customers have ease in resolving their queries, but you help save more money for your company.
Be Human
With automation saturating the marketing world, putting a human touch to any business transaction is a warm welcome. Instead of using boring templates in addressing customer concerns, address your customers using their first names. Learn to speak their language and try to put yourself in their shoes.
Whether talking on the phone or live chat, make your customers feel that they are also talking to a human who understands their concerns and not to a robot. There is plenty of help online, such as new customer onboarding solutions, that could assist you in improving your customer service concerns.
Customer satisfaction is essential for the health of your business. By taking note of these pointers, you can help your business survive and reduce churn problems in the long run.