Credit: Photo by Yan Krukov
Ensuring your customers have a satisfying experience engaging with your business can make or break your company’s success. This is especially true for online businesses where there is generally little to no human interaction involved. The eCommerce industry is crowded with different businesses fighting for the attention of customers, and one poor experience with your business can be enough to encourage a buyer to find an alternative. However, the opposite is just as possible. Providing your customers with a satisfying experience is an easy way to build customer loyalty. This article will cover why it is important to monitor customer satisfaction and a few strategies that can improve customer satisfaction rates for your business.
Why is it Important to Measure Customer Satisfaction?
Assessing your company’s customer satisfaction is important because it can give your business data on how it can improve. Measuring customer satisfaction is a fairly common practice for businesses across industries for this exact reason. In fact, roughly 93% of high-performing service organizations track customer satisfaction. Measuring customer satisfaction can tell you specifically what segment of the user experience is performing poorly so that you can fix it directly.
Use These Strategies to Improve Customer Satisfaction
- Use Customer Satisfaction Surveys
The most common way for companies to gather data concerning customer satisfaction is through surveys. Customer satisfaction surveys enable companies to collect real-world data about what specifically makes customers happy and what could be improved. For instance, a customer survey might reveal that a company’s products are priced reasonably, but that its website is too slow and inconvenient to deal with.
When making surveys it is important to keep them short. If your survey is too long, then it will likely be ignored by the majority of your customers. Your survey should also be mobile-friendly because of how prominent mobile devices are in search traffic. There is a good chance that customers are engaging with your business with their cell phones, so your survey should be formatted for mobile devices as well. Remember to start your survey with the simpler questions and move on to the more complex queries towards the end of the survey.
Credit: Photo by Negative Space
- Anticipate Customer Needs
Another way to improve customer satisfaction is to anticipate customer needs and meet them without being asked to. Imagine that you are a potential customer engaging with your online business. What are the steps you would take to make a purchase on your website? Is your website intuitive to navigate? Asking yourself these questions will provide you with a good idea of what customers expect from your business. For example, if your business ships a great number of products then it would be wise to offer multiple shipping options. Offering both USPS flat rate boxes and standard mailing options will ensure that your customers can choose their preferred shipping method.
- Experience Your Customer Service Firsthand
The best way to get an understanding of your business’s customer service model is to experience it yourself. Register a complaint and record the turnaround time. Take note of how your customer service representatives speak with customers who have an issue. Once you experience everything firsthand, you’ll be in a good position to identify the weak points of your customer service model and how to improve them.
- Offer Help Through Multiple Channels
The issues customers face with your business likely cover a wide range of issues from simple to complex. Ideally, your customers would be able to solve the simpler issues themselves and reach out to customer service for the more complicated problems. This is where multi-channel help comes into play. Offering your customers resources on how to solve common problems can save them time that would otherwise be spent on the phone with customer service. Here are a few different methods for providing your customers with multi-channel help.
- Frequently asked question boards (FAQ boards)
- Customer self-help forums
- Instructional videos
- Monitor Social Media
Social media is more to businesses than a modern marketing tool. It can also be used as a means of discovering public opinions about your company. Not only that, but it gives your company an opportunity to publicly address the issue and improve your business’s reputation. This is a fairly common practice, especially for businesses in the technology industry where user experience issues can appear frequently.
