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If you think that your needy friends are hard to satisfy, wait til you meet some of the customers out there.
Of course, some customers are just hard to satisfy because they are unreasonable. But for the rest of your more reasonable customers, why do they continue to be dissatisfied?
Most of the time, the problem lies with your processes. If you are not actively listening, if you are not communicating genuinely, you probably come off as a company that doesn’t really care about its customers.
A whopping 76% of customers use the quality of customer service as a gauge to determine how much a company values them. And poor customer service actually cost businesses $75 billion back in 2018!
How then can businesses improve customer satisfaction metrics scores? We’ve identified four main areas of focus. Let’s delve right in!
Contents
Improve customer satisfaction by focusing on Customer Success
1. Set up a dedicated Customer Success (CS) team
Yeap. You read that right. Customer Success (CS) and not Customer Service.
What is the difference you ask?
First of all, a CS team is more proactive in nature. Instead of waiting for a customer to contact them whenever they have an issue with the product, CS teams actively reach out to customers to conduct post-purchase service.
CS teams are also more focused on helping customers achieve their goals rather than being the go-to person for a one-off quick fix. These goals can range from revenue-generating to simply even providing advice on optimal software settings.
Check out this table for a quick summary of the differences between Customer Success and Customer Service:
2. Instil the CS spirit across all business functions
Having a dedicated CS team isn’t enough to provide excellent customer service and support. The CS spirit of being proactive in providing genuine support should not only be practiced by one team. In fact, all your departments should embody this philosophy.
Your content marketers should think about how their content can help your target audience achieve their goals. When designing your payment plans, you should think about the best prices to offer based on the company size of your target audience. When you conduct sales outreach to target foreign markets, pay attention to cultural nuances in your messaging.
It’s easy to assume that the CS team is the only one that should embody the CS spirit. When in reality, it is a company effort. Emphasize the importance of this and watch your customer satisfaction ratings go up!
3. Assign dedicated CS team members to your customers
To make your customers feel even more valued, you can assign a dedicated member of the CS team to one account. This makes it easier for the CS team member to have a better idea of your customers’ problems right from the start.
This can make the customer feel like your business is there for them throughout the entire journey. Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) and Co-Founder of Parcel Perform Dana von der Heide agrees with this emphasized the importance of customer engagement.
At Parcel Perform, Key Account Managers are assigned to each customer.
They serve as direct points of contact between their customers and Parcel Perform. Customers can direct whatever questions they have to the Key Account Manager. This satisfies the customer by streamlining and facilitating communication and easing the ability to approach Parcel Perform for any queries.
Having a dedicated account manager attached to them will also feel like their unique needs are being heard and taken care of. This makes customer service even more personalized.
Dana added that “it’s important that both new and existing customers feel like we are by their side and understand their business needs”.
4. Be genuine in your communication
Building on the previous point, it is also essential that you be genuine in your communication with your customers.
Being genuine means that you do not treat them as a mere statistic is genuine in wanting to help them grow.
Many businesses fall into this trap of forgetting the humanity of their customers and treat them as mere statistics or as a means to an end.
Neal Taparia, a serial entrepreneur and founder of classic gaming site Solitaired, explains that transparency also means acknowledging your shortcomings. “We thank our customers for pointing our bugs out, apologize, and explain how we missed this in our quality assurance process. We then give them an honest timeline in which we hope to solve the problem in our game. Our users really appreciate this openness.”
Automated messages sent lack a personal touch, email content pieces sent are irrelevant, and your customer support team often forgets what the original issue was because there is no dedicated account manager. Don’t do this.
5. Be transparent and open in your communication
You should never hide important information from your customers. For example, if you’re launching a product update or a brand new feature, tell them.
You should also provide them with information on how they can find out more information about the update.
You should also be open in your communication. Tell your customers that you are open to feedback and comments. Make them feel comfortable reaching out to you to seek clarification.
Engaging in genuine, open, and transparent communication is essential to improving customer satisfaction.
6. Don’t be afraid to ask customers if they are satisfied
One thing that businesses often overlook is the need to be proactive in seeking feedback from customers. Just because you put in so much effort into ensuring that the CS spirit is embodied by all your teams does not mean that your efforts are felt by your customers.
Take the initiative to ask your customers if they are satisfied with your product, service, and support. And this brings us to our next point.
Improve customer satisfaction by focusing on the customer experience
7. Build strong communities
A community is an online space where people get together to discuss certain issues. These spaces can be set up on online forums and social media groups.
Customers can go to these pages to post any questions they may have. For example, they can post questions with regard to software settings or how to use the product in a particular way.
This helps create a sense of support between a business’ customers and makes them more satisfied with the experience of being a customer of a particular brand.
8. Make it easier for them to get in touch with you
Very often, businesses take forever to reply to queries from their leads and customers. 42 hours. That’s how long most businesses take to reply. On top of that, many leads and customers end up trapped in endless threads of back-and-forth emails just for the purpose of agreeing on a date and time to schedule a meeting.
Never make your leads and customers wait too long. Never make it difficult for them to reach out to you. To address this issue, you can use software to automate the process.
For example, Novocall is a Click-to-Call widget that automates a callback between a lead/customer and your sales rep.
Your leads can even select the available timeslots which are listed based on your sales reps’ availability. This eliminates the need for endless email threads to complete the simple task of scheduling a meeting, making the scheduling process so much faster and easier.
9. Respond quickly to your leads and customers.
As your leads and customers browse your website, they’re bound to come across things they’re curious about and have questions.
But of course, most people out there are impatient. A great way to showcase that you value you’re their time is to quickly respond to them directly via your site
To do this, you can try using live chat plugins. Receiving a response from your company quickly can really help improve their customer experience and make your brand appear favorable in their eyes.
Improve customer satisfaction by focusing on measuring success
10. Actively measure customer satisfaction
If most business activities are using metrics to measure success, we don’t see why you shouldn’t measure your efforts to improve customer satisfaction. There’s no point in asking your customers for feedback on your customer service and support if you’re not recording any information down and tracking your performance.
There are a variety of customer satisfaction metrics out there to help you with that. But one of the most important and most common metrics is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). it measures how willing your customers are to recommend you to those in their network.
To measure NPS, you need to ask just one question. “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”
Based on the responses, you can divide your customers into 3 groups. Those who gave 0 – 6 (detractors), 7 – 8 (passives), and those who gave 9 – 10 (promoters). You can then calculate the actual NPS with this formula:
With NPS is the most common customer satisfaction metric out there, let’s not forget that there are others such as Customer Effort Score (CES) and Customer Service Satisfaction (CSS). Use other metrics to come up with a tailored and comprehensive customer satisfaction measurement scale.
11. Routinely review customer satisfaction metrics scores
Let’s not simply measure your efforts and not do anything with the results.
If you received a low NPS score what is the follow-up action you will take? If you received a low CES, indicating that your product is hard to use, what are you going to do to identify the core issue and fix it?
You can come up with surveys to ask follow-up questions. From there, work your way to identifying the core issue and fix it.
What's next?
We hope you found our tips helpful! Remember, it’s all about making your customers feel good. Whether it is the way you communicate or the presence of a streamlined communication process, making things easier and more comfortable for your customers is a sure way to improve customer satisfaction.
Also, never forget to ask for feedback and measure the success of your efforts to improve customer satisfaction. Analyze the results and act on them!
To learn more about how a Click-to-Call widget can help you improve your customers’ experience, get started with us today!
We have also prepared other sales-related content just for you! Check out our blog to read more!
Nigel Seah
Nigel is a Digital Marketing Executive at Novocall where he specializes in SEO. Prior to this, he had written for several SaaS companies including Workstream and the now defunct Hatchme. In his free time, he engages in strength training and is a lover of languages.
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