6 Ways You Can Increase Customer Satisfaction Immediately!
6 Ways You Can Increase Customer Satisfaction Immediately!
How you can act to drive retention and loyalty up
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Sometimes, I think we complicate the business world.
First things first: Businesses exist to improve people's lives. The rest will follow when your product or service helps customers achieve their goals.
Happy customers return value to the business and enable growth.
Unhappy customers go to your competitors and bring their friends with them.
Often, I fear that companies start with the business and try figuring out how to deliver value to customers. That rarely works.
Now, let me tell you one important thing. Acquiring customers is one thing; keeping them satisfied is another. Let me help you understand how to keep them satisfied.
Why do you need to keep your customers satisfied?
Customers hire you to do something for them. If they like how you do it, they will come back. Yet, they will never return if you fail to deliver on their expectations.
A common challenge is that what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Let me take an example of Medium.com for bloggers.
As a blogger, I used Medium for years, and I was happy until they changed their distribution algorithm, and I struggled to reach my followers. Despite reaching 91K+ followers, I could barely get this many readers per month.
What did I do? I moved to Medium’s competitor, Substack, because I became dissatisfied with their service. Consequently, many of my followers canceled their subscriptions and followed me.
When a business fails to satisfy customers, they have no chance but to search for alternatives.
Different types of customer happiness
Understanding your customers is fundamental. That’s why it’s essential to categorize them. I like using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) because it helps me understand which strategies to apply. It has the following:
Promoters: Highly satisfied customers will help you grow organically because they will promote you. The more promoters you have, the faster you can grow.
Neutral: Some customers may enjoy what you offer but aren’t loyal to you. The moment they find a better alternative, they will leave you. When you have many neutral customers, you have to figure out how to deliver more value to them so they can become promoters.
Detractors: This cluster is the most dangerous because customers dislike your services and will hurt your brand. They will write bad reviews, share bad experiences on social media, and talk their friends out of your service. You need ten promoters for each detractor you’ve got to fix the damage. It’s paramount to reduce the detractors to as few as you can.
Once you understand your level of customer satisfaction, you will understand which action to take. Let’s discuss it further.
What’s a happy customer?
Customers expect high-quality service today. Unlike a few decades ago, customers have plenty of alternatives to get a job done, so you must provide outstanding service to make them happy.
A customer will become a happy one when three things happen:
Value proposition achieved: Customers come to you because your promise attracts them. When you deliver on your promise, customers will be at least satisfied. For example, I have used Grammarly for years because it helps me be a better writer.
Value for the money: Customers want to feel their money is worth it. When they feel balanced, they probably return, but when unbalanced, they feel fooled. Ensure you balance your product with the value delivered.
Pleasant experience: Customers will never forget how you made them feel. Ensure the experience is outstanding from beginning to end. That will increase their satisfaction level.
If you fail to deliver in one of the above, you have a high chance of having detractors.
A few strategies to make customers happy
Let’s understand some examples that drive satisfaction up:
Reduce time to value: Let’s take an online shop as an example. If customers need to sign up and inform their address and payment method before concluding a purchase, that’s too long. Some e-commerce enables guest checkouts and PayPal. That way, customers don’t sign up. Everything happens faster. The faster customers collect value, the more they are willing to return.
Surprise customers: Do what customers need before they ask for it. For example, whenever I send a newsletter with Substack, I get a few images in my mailbox to use on social media. That’s great because I can post my content smoothly. Customers love pleasant surprises.
Only ask what you need: Ensure you don’t ask for information you don’t need. Limit to the bare minimum. I travel a lot, and I notice that hotels ask for unnecessary information. Despite having an online booking, they often ask for my birthday, address, and nationality, which brings no value to me, and I have to spend time with them.
Continuously improve the experience: Your competition landscape only gets stronger, and so should your product. Empathize with your customers and constantly make your experience more pleasant, natural, and intuitive for your customers. If you fail to do that, why would they remain loyal?
Help customers before they ask for help: It might be too late if you only help them when they ask. For example, create onboarding guides, observe how long customers take to get tasks done, and, when too long, automatically offer help. When you understand how the experience should be, you can monitor it and unstuck customers before they get annoyed.
Don’t let customers hit dead ends: One of the most frustrating things happens when customers invest time and then receive a message they cannot proceed. Ensure customers never hit dead ends. Let me give you an example of a corporate car. Once I had to choose a car through LeasePlan, I’d select the brand, vehicle, model, accessories, color, etc. Only at the end I’d receive a message that the car didn’t fit the requirements. I got annoyed as I wasted time. A better experience would be to show only vehicles I could select in the first place.
The importance of making customers happy
No business will survive without customers.
Let me set some points straight:
Only your customers know what works for them
Business stakeholders aren’t your customers
The longer you take to talk to customers, the riskier your decisions become
Businesses do exist to create value for multiple stakeholders beyond customers (shareholders, investors, employees, etc). Yet, where you start is very important. It’s natural to start from a business perspective and try to figure out how customers will benefit from internal ideas.
Your product or service has a higher chance of thriving when it starts by addressing customers’ needs first.
When businesses neglect customer satisfaction, they will have difficulty having loyal customers. It’s fundamental to continuously learn what customers like about your service and do more of that, understand what they dislike, and fix the experience.
Conclusion and key takeaways
You will hear often about growth, which is essential, but when to grow is even more critical. Don’t de-prioritize customer satisfaction, or results may be unbearable.
I was part of a company that was doing well, customers were satisfied, and business was growing organically. Eventually, the founders decided to expand to another country, but they did it too fast. As a result, employees had to focus on the expansion, reducing customer satisfaction attention. A year after the expansion began, our biggest trouble was customer retention. As we de-prioritized them, we lost their loyalty.
First comes customer satisfaction, and then the rest follows.
Here are the key takeaways from this episode:
Ensure customers get what they came for (value proposition), the cost is balanced, and the experience is pleasant.
Understand how satisfied your customers are. Categorizing them into promoters, neutrals, and detractors will help you take action.
Use a few strategies to drive customer satisfaction. Start with the customer, then determine how to create business value.
No business can thrive without a high number of satisfied customers.
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