The goal of customer satisfaction with best practices

Why should you care about your user satisfaction/customer satisfaction?

That’s an excellent question.

“Go the extra mile”.

“Collect reviews”.

We have all heard about that. This is very common jargon.

But it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

In this article, I want to dive deep into the nitty-gritty of customer satisfaction. Why it matters. How to deal with it, and what are some of the best practices.

Customer satisfaction basics

What is the purpose of customer satisfaction?

As simple as it sounds, customer satisfaction metrics refer to how happy customers are with the service they receive.

But happiness is subjective, it is related to how I feel about the product, service, or experience. Thus, it is fair to say that customer satisfaction is closely related to customer experience.

Customers are willing to pay more for an upgraded experience. They want you to go the extra mile and provide them with a better service.

Yes, better experience and thus better customer satisfaction help you price up your product or service.

It not only does that but also brings you more inbound customers.

So, we can’t talk about customer satisfaction without examining the customer experience.

“Customer experience is the sum of your customers’ experience with your brand across all touchpoints on the customer journey; from initial discovery through conversion.”

Back to our question. What is the goal of customer satisfaction?

1. Improve loyalty and reduce churn

First and foremost, the happier your customers are, the more likely they are to buy again from your brand/company. Happy customers build your customer loyalty. This ultimately reduces your churn rate and improve your revenue figures.

2. Grow your customers base

These delighted customers will not only spend more but also spread the word and tell their friends about your brand. You are ultimately growing your customers base with an initial pool of happy customers.

3. Build social proof

90% of consumers say buying decisions are influenced by online reviews.

The more satisfied your customers are, the easier it gets for you to nudge them to leave you a review.

As a matter of fact, reviews also impact your SEO ranking. Google considers that the more reviews and testimonials you have, the more relevant it is for them to feature your brand on relevant search terms.

4. Reduce spending

Happier customers mean easier customer support. In other words, dealing with fulfilled people on the support line is easier. They cause you less hassle and your customer support agents are more efficient.

Aside from that, upselling existing customers becomes a no-brainer, and you increase profitability.

5. Build employee happiness

If you’re able to achieve great customer satisfaction, you’ll eventually cut down your number of bad reviews, and bad comments from the customers.

This, in turn, contributes to your overall employee happiness and helps you build a trustful company, on the path to success.

Good.

We know why we should care about customer satisfaction. But how do we measure it?

How to measure customer satisfaction?

There are tons of satisfaction metrics you can be looking after. But you don’t have to keep track of all of them.

At Feedier, they are advocates of using an overall satisfaction ratio that goes well beyond the usual Net Promoter Score.

The NPS is an efficient and well-thought metric, but it is not always enough. It can be very hard to effectively measure customer satisfaction as you’re asking someone the likeliness of him/her recommending your brand in the future, which can vary a lot from one day to another.

The customer experience is omnichannel. You have to be present everywhere and measure customer happiness at each point of the journey.

Here are some of the common interaction where it is important and interesting to ask for feedback and measure customer satisfaction:

• After an online or in-store purchase (using tablets or using CRM automation)
• After an interaction with your customer support team
• A few weeks after the purchase (it highly depends on your product/use-case)
• When you notice activity changes in your user’s account

With the growth of marketing automation tools and the progress of customer feedback tools, it gets easier to get the ball rolling and automate the process all the way.

Creating a closed feedback loop, automating the feedback request but also informing your team about what is going on is a piece of cake these days.

Customer satisfaction best practices

Being able to fulfill your customers with a great experience contributes to the overall customer satisfaction performances.

One of the themes we see among companies that are really excelling is that customer experience is a key part of their business strategy. It’s not viewed as sort of a cost, but rather it’s an opportunity to differentiate their product and service. And so the conversation isn’t, “How do we support our customers?” But it’s rather, “How do we constantly improve the experience for our customers so that we can increase loyalty and drive incremental value for our business?”

In a nutshell, it comes down to creating a feedback-friendly culture, and educating your customer success team about some of the best practices:

1. Be proactive

Integrate your tools together and implement notifications so the team gets alerted whenever something is worth looking at. For instance, when bad feedback comes in.

2. Omnichannel-first

As it was mentioned before, measure customer satisfaction at different touchpoints: support, in-app, after purchase, etc.

3. Be personal

One trend we have seen recently in terms of user personalization relies on personal video.

Customer service software, such as LiveAgent has a feature called Video Chat. You can basically have this video chat button on your website available to your customers. Therefore, creating a personal experience and assistance. Moreover, your agent or the customer can share their screen. Thus, the agent is able to detect and resolve the issue faster.

4. Handle bad comments and negative feedback with kid gloves

The HEARD framework inspired by Disney’s approach is a good start. It basically states that you should: Hear, Empathize, Apologize, Resolve and Diagnose.

That’s how Walt Disney Company is dealing with its 135M people passing by every year.

5. Get deep into the why

It actually goes beyond proactivity, it’s also about understanding the why and going deep into the hidden aspect of the problem.

You want to understand the true pain points of your customers in order to properly satisfy them. There are different methods to go about that; from customer feedback survey (SurveyMonkey) to customer discovery call or interview.

6. Be original

The icing on the cake you asked? Being diverting, original, and timely!

Wrap up

All-in-all, there is no winner takes all. But it’s fair to assume that the success remains for those who succeed in customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction can be considered as one of the biggest differentiators between brands these days. Perhaps, even bigger than the price point.

Would you like to learn more? Then, check out our in-depth article about Customer service theory.

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