The Strategic Way to Improve Customer Satisfaction
Posted January 20th, 2018
In today’s digital world, a single misstep with a customer can become infamous, traveling across social media at shocking speeds. Similarly, a great moment can also go viral, showing the world that you truly focus on customer satisfaction.
Often, truly gauging how our customers feel about your product or service is challenging, even with the mountains of data that is typically available. And that makes figuring out how to improve customer satisfaction just as mysterious.
Luckily, there are methods designed to help you make significant strides. Here are some strategic ways you can improve customer satisfaction at your company.
Start with Your Employees
Ultimately, your staff has a significant impact on customer satisfaction, particularly since they are often the ones speaking and interacting with customers. If you want to improve the customer experience, then you need to hire workers who will make it a priority, and train everyone to find opportunities that allow the company to shine in the eyes of all of those with which they come in contact.
Similarly, you need to align your employees’ actions with the company’s vision or focus. For example, if you see your business as a source of innovation, then you need to determine if your staff are presenting it as such as well as whether the customers believe that to be true. This creates a cohesive vision for all actions performed in the name or your organization, which ensures everyone stays on the same page.
Gather the Data
You won’t know whether your customers are generally satisfied unless you ask. While it’s true that some unprompted input will certainly come in, random posts on social media tend only to reflect the most positive and negative experiences, not necessarily the average experience.
Often, this means you’ll need to develop a customer satisfaction survey and ensure that it is provided to everyone who makes a purchase. Ideally, it needs to be easy to use, relatively concise and focused on the proper attributes. In some cases, you may need to offer customers something in return, such as a coupon code, to entice them to take part, especially if you went to get data from those who may otherwise be reluctant to participate.
Know Where to Stop
While it may seem counterintuitive, investing in customer satisfaction can lead to diminishing returns, depending on your product, service or industry. Not every offering needs to surprise and delight your buyers to be viewed positively; it simply needs to do the job quickly and efficiently.
The degree to which you need to invest will vary depending on your precise circumstances. However, your goals should be to reach a point where you achieve the level of repeat business that is deemed appropriate and that negative customer experiences are kept to a minimum as a method for reducing bad word of mouth.
By being aware of when diminishing returns begin to occur, you can invest appropriately without dedicating too many resources to the task.
If you are looking to hire new staff members who share your dedication to customer satisfaction, the professionals at Bayside Solutions can connect you with high-quality workers quickly and efficiently. Contact us to learn more about our services and how they can help you succeed today.
