Five ways businesses should seek to boost customer satisfaction

No business sets out to leave customers unsatisfied. Whether it’s genuinely concerned with brightening the day of its customers or simply wants their repeat business (or some combination of both of these), ensuring customer satisfaction makes total sense as a goal on every level. But how exactly do you satisfy customers? 

The core of this question is, of course, to produce a product or provide a service that customers are willing to pay for.

A customer feeling that they’ve traded their cash or time for something high quality is the ultimate gauge of success for a business. But there are also behavioral elements that businesses should pay attention to if they want to optimise the satisfaction levels of their customers. 

Here are five of the main factors they should take into account - regardless of the industry they’re operating in. From tools like Customer Effort Score to a simple willingness to listen, here’s what every business should be thinking about.

Always listen to customers

There may be exceptions to the old adage that the customer is always right (at least, when taken on an individual basis), but there’s no mistaking its core message: That businesses should listen to the people it’s trying to serve.

A company that listens to its customers creates more of a genuine connection with them. This, in turn, can help to upsell customers on future purchases, aids with retaining customers and boosting their levels of loyalty, and reduces customer churn.

While a business that listens to its customers will reap the rewards, that’s nothing compared to the negative repercussions for a business that actively fails to do this. 

According to one survey, 95% of people who have had a bad customer service interaction told someone else about it -- while respondents were 50% more likely to share negative customer experiences on social media than they were good ones.

It all adds up to one inescapable conclusion: Listen to your customers.

Always focus on being proactive

Businesses don’t want to simply respond to what’s happening; they want to be proactive when it comes to shaping customer experiences.

That could mean reaching out to prospective customers for a particular product with chat messages, tracking mentions and feedback on social media and using this to shape your offerings, and the use of loyalty programmes to try and hook customers for the long-term.

Using audience analytics tools, it’s even possible to pinpoint the behavioural traits on the part of customers that suggest they are possibly going to churn (i.e. stop being your customers) - and allow you to proactively address any issues that might stop them leaving.

Change with the times

Not every business needs to operate its own TikTok account, but every business should be flexible and willing to change with the times. The goal of this is to meet customers where they want to be met in an effort to make the customer experience as smooth as possible.

For example, rather than simply having email and phone numbers for customers to call, consider Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp as a way to let customers message you for friction-free resolution of any issues they may be facing.

The way that customers want to interact with companies (and one another) changes constantly. Always be on the lookout for new ways to interact.

Always be honest

Underpromise and overdeliver should be the mantra of every business out there. In an age in which the competition for customers’ wallets and attention is fiercer than ever, it’s easy to see why businesses might balk at this idea.

But it’s also key to long-term success. Making sure that you stay on the right side of customer expectations is vital to building an authentic connection with customers that leaves them feeling happy to have spent their money and time on your products.

Marketing campaigns should be built around promising only what can be delivered. 

Never stop checking in on customer satisfaction

Point number one on this list was to listen to customers. This point could be labelled “never stop listening to customers.”

Simply put, businesses should never assume that a customer coming back for a second time is now considered satisfied and shouldn’t be paid any more attention to. We’re living in a golden age of data analytics - and businesses should do their best to take advantage of this. 

Tools like Customer Effort Scores (CES) make it easier than ever for businesses to gather the feedback of customers. CES acts as a measure of how easy and straightforward customers felt their interaction to be with a particular company, as based on a numerical scale.

Gathering this information at the point of purchase, or at various junctures in the customer journey, can be the source of invaluable insights, so that companies can get better and better at fine-tuning their offerings.

It’s a tool every business should consider a “must have.”