6 Super-Powerful Ways to Increase Customer Satisfaction

According to a 2017 report from Microsoft, 56 percent of customers will stop doing business with a brand if they have just one unsatisfactory encounter with the brand’s customer service. Think about that for a minute: brands are losing 56 percent of potential revenue just because their customer service sucks.

The good news is that if you have great customer service, you’ll be way ahead of the pack. If you run a business and are looking for proven ways to keep your customer happy, this blog post will help you do that. 

Listen to and Understand the Customer

You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s the first thing you need to do. One of the most frustrating things that customers often have to deal with is explaining the same issue to multiple people on a company’s support team. 

In fact, it’s so bad that 72 percent of customers consider this a sign of bad customer service. And when people have the perception that your company has poor customer support, they will avoid your brand. 

Act Fast on Customer Complaint and Encourage a Speedy Resolution

It’s important to be able to address negative reviews and complaints about your brand, particularly when it’s made on third-party review sites like Yelp. This can easily lead to a bad reputation, particularly online, and can cost you a ton of business if you don’t act fast.

To do this, you’ll need to have a way to track and monitor all brand mentions. This is where tools like Google Alerts and Buzzsumo can help you. With both tools, you can set up alerts with your company and brand name so that when anyone says anything about your brand, you’ll quickly get the notice and attend to it quickly. 

This is a super-effective way to do damage control and sort out particularly damaging reviews or complaints with minimal damage to your brand. Plus, it’ll prevent customer churn if you’re able to resolve the issue properly the first time.

Meet and Engage With Your Customers Where They Are

This means providing omnichannel support. It’s not just enough to set up a chatbot on your website and have a support desk. You need to meet your customers wherever they are. 

This includes social network sites, email, phone, and much more. Have a support team in place to handle all of these. If you don’t have a dedicated social media account, set up one on multiple popular social networking sites immediately. 

Use one email account to receive notifications from all these channels. This way, you’ll be able to track and follow up on every issue that customers might have very quickly. 

With 12 percent of consumers getting frustrated because companies are too slow to answer their queries, your speedy responses will make you look really professional when clients and customers can talk to you or a knowledgeable rep on almost all available channels.

Always Follow Up

Let’s say you own an electrical supply business, and you just supplied electrical materials and did the wiring of the house. What’s the next step? Move on to another project without ever getting in touch with the homeowner or the contractor who hired you for the project? 

The truth is if you did this, no one would think twice about it unless there’s faulty wiring or you did a bad job. But you’ll be placed in the same category as other artisans or contractors. 

However, if you went out of your way to follow up with the contractor or homeowner to see how their wiring is, and ask if there are any faults, you’ll automatically move to their top 1 percent of contractors. 

This means that when next they have a project or need to recommend someone to do the same job, they will be recommending you because you made an impression. And many customers are often willing to support any brand that provides awesome customer service like this. 

Train Staff to Always Go the Extra Mile for Customers

There’s an old story about a Warby Parker executive who found a customer’s lost glasses and sent it back to the customer alongside a new one for free. 

The new one was accompanied with a note that said the company noticed some scratches on the old one and felt that replacement glasses would serve them if the old one failed. The customer was so delighted they wrote about this event on Twitter, and the story went viral and boosted Warby Parker’s reputation positively.  

That is a great example of “going the extra mile” for customers. Another good example is Ritz Carlton’s $2,000 a day allowance to employees to “spoil” their guests. You don’t need to have a huge budget to replicate results like this. 

You just need to train your staff on how to always go the extra mile to keep customers happy. Fewer companies are doing this nowadays. So if you do, you’ll be automatically one of the few gems in your industry. 

Consider Building a Tribe

In essence, we’re talking about a community of happy consumers who inadvertently become your “brand evangelists”. An online community can also double as a great way to build a bond of loyalty with your customers. 

Plus, it provides you and your company with the elusive attributes of “like, know, and trust” that most companies can’t seem to achieve these days. 

When customers feel like there’s a way to always reach you or someone in the community, it engenders a fierce sense of loyalty and creates a movement. This takes a lot of effort and requires extreme transparency, but if you’re doing something right, there’s no need to fear building a tribe. 

You will reap the rewards in multiple folds and make a lot of money as they’ll always choose you over the competition. For example, tribes can serve as a great source of new product ideas, a testing ground for new products, and product features that you may have missed.

Final Thoughts

The truth is customers are now more discerning and impatient more than ever. Customers cannot be kept waiting for too long these days. In fact, consumers have been known to leave order pages and abandon their carts just because they didn’t get a response from customer support quickly enough. 

That, plus the fact that there’s a competitor around the corner, means that you really have no choice but to up your customer satisfaction game if you intend to be around for a long time.