Over the last few decades, a shift has taken place in the world of business. With the invention of the internet and the ubiquitous nature of mobile phones, customers now have more power than ever before. Due to this growing trend of customer-centric marketing, strategies for keeping customers around like customer satisfaction and relationship marketing have become even more important.
Whether you are the owner of your own business or just starting out with a company, the way you treat your customers matters. In this article, we are going to walk you through how to increase the satisfaction of your customers, thereby making a difference for your overall audience. Without taking up any more time on the “why” of customer satisfaction, let’s get into the “how.”
Hire the right people
The first step you can take in maximizing customer satisfaction for your business is to hire the right people. By this we mean people who are not only dedicated to the success of the business, but the success of your customers as well. Since your employees will likely spend countless hours communicating and dealing with your customer base, it’s important to find people with the right mindset going in.
The second part of this step is to treat your employees well once you hire them. Far too many companies are relying on marketing automation to get the job done, but you can never put a price on the personal touch offered by a capable employee. Seek out talent in the area you are looking for and then hold onto them for dear life once you have them.
Surveys, surveys, surveys
The next thing you should do upon striking out on your customer satisfaction journey is to create a survey for your current customer base. This is the best time to set a benchmark with which you can measure your customer satisfaction metrics as time progresses. This can offer you insight into user engagement that will be hard to come by later, so make it a focus early on.
However, it’s no longer enough just to do this at the beginning. Throughout your campaigns you should be sending regular customer satisfaction surveys in order to collect data on your customer’s attitudes. From this along with your original benchmark you will be able both explore new ideas as well as see your campaign working in real time.
Read also: 7 Best Practices for Collecting Customer Feedback
Manage customer expectations
Part of providing your customers with the best possible experience means managing customer expectations. Far too often, companies will set expectations well out of their reach, setting themselves up for inevitable failure. However, if you can take an age-old approach to under promise and over deliver, your customers will be much more satisfied.
By no means should you set very low expectations simply to overcome them, as this is not an environment for growth. Instead, set expectations within your grasp but still far enough out to give you something to shoot for. When you manage customer expectations well, you can retain more customers simply by getting the job done.
Perfect the onboarding process
So far, we have only been talking about current customers and retention techniques. While these are definitely important, one of the biggest customer drop-offs happens right at the beginning. This is why perfecting the onboarding process is vital to the overall customer satisfaction of your audience.
The onboarding process can be a stumbling block for many customers as the monotonous process of filling out information can give them enough time to get cold feet. However, if you are able to guide them through this process and offer them reassurances at every point, they will feel more secure in working with you. Although this is the most common area of churn for many companies, it can actually be a huge opportunity when done correctly.
Collect data whenever possible
Along with providing customer satisfaction surveys through the process, you should also be collecting data on customer interactions whenever possible. Whether it is your email click-through rates, your SMS open-rates, or simply the number of people in your customer loyalty program, this data is priceless when trying to better understand your audience.
That being said, it’s not enough simply to collect the data, you need to use it as well. For instance, you can learn a lot about your audience by which blog posts are gaining traction from your newsletter. You should use this information to segment your audience, which allows you to provide more tailored content for each portion of your audience.
Personalization
Now, once you have collected all of that data, what should you do with it? Although there are many answers to this question, one common use of customer data is personalization. You can personalized emails, SMS marketing messages, and even chatbots on your website to give your customers a tailored experience at every turn.
It turns out that this isn’t just a marketing gimmick, but consumers really do want personalization. This is indicative of a larger request from consumers to be treated with above and beyond service, otherwise they can take their business elsewhere. As customer satisfaction marketers in 2018, it is our job to meet their needs and provide the best experience whenever possible.
Clearly define your standards for success
The last aspect of improving the customer satisfaction of your business is to set the proper expectations for yourself as well as your customers. Once you have collected data from your customers, you need to set rational, achievable goals for your business so that you know whether or not you are being successful.
In the same way that none of your customers are alike, your measures of success will be different from others. Instead of focusing on your competition, learn from your previous success which KPIs to measure and how to set the proper standards. This is very important to do early on as to not get lost in a focus on customer satisfaction with no way of knowing whether you are meeting your goals or not.
Customer Satisfaction and You
As you begin to put together your customer satisfaction campaign, it is important to remember that you are a customer yourself. Outside of your business, you are a customer just like the rest of us and you deserve to be treated well. This should be the first consideration in your efforts: as a customer, how would I want to be treated?
From there, along with the different mobile marketing tools at your disposal, you should have no problem satisfying your customers and retaining them for years to come. All we have lef to say is ‘Good luck!’
Get the full story here: