How to Achieve Customer Satisfaction
Three tips to make ensure your business grows through customer satisfaction.
If the customer is King, how do you make sure your customers are satisfied?
Customer satisfaction is at the centre of customer retention and customer acquisition and if you are to build a great business you need to be in the business of satisfying the needs of your customer.
The reason is simple; no one would want to pay for a product or service that doesn’t address their needs. If your product happens to not be addressing the needs of your customers, then it is just a matter of time before you have no customers.
This is why it is necessary to conduct market research. Good market research helps to test your business idea. It enables you to understand the needs of your desired consumer ie, their pain points, features that they enjoy or hate, the price they are willing to pay for such a production etc.
However, while market research is great for starting a business and finding customers, it is not enough to create an amazing product that would keep your customers very happy and coming back for more. This is one thing that Steve Jobs Apple was very good at. It seemed that they knew their customers even more than the customers knew of themselves and, their deep knowledge of what their consumers needed is what makes Apple one of the most loved and recognizable companies today.
So here are some tips to keep your customers satisfied.
Create A Seamless Customer Experience (Branding)
It is not enough to have a great product. You need to be mindful of the way your customers interact with your organisation/ brand as a whole.
How is your customer service? how pleasant is your product packaging to your target consumers? how is fast does your website load? What is the communication like between your organisation and its customers? What type of advertisements do you run? What is your company’s tone of voice?
Many entrepreneurs do not take into account how people interact with their brand. The idea of branding is not just to have a logo or brand colours that distinguish your business from others. Branding is about creating an experience for your customers that alters their perception of your business in a favourable manner.
To build a great brand/ Customer Experience, you need to consider every touchpoint between you and your organisation and make it seamless for your customer base to interact with it freely. Whether it is through social media, product packaging or even loyalty programs.
If your customer has a seamless and enjoyable interaction with your business, there is a higher chance that they happily continue doing business with you, with emphasis on the word “happily”
Invest in Great Customer Service
Customer service is one of the most undervalued investments a business has. Apart from your product or services, the quality of your customer service is easily one of the most telling of your business. Your customer service is often perceived as a reflection of your organisation.
If your customer service doesn’t reply on time, then your organisation is slow. If your customer care representatives are rude, then your company is rude and doesn’t care for its customers.
It should go without saying that your customer service should not be part of your customer’s pain points.
Another reason to build a great customer service experience is that great customer service also provides organisations with an invaluable resource — information.
No business build the perfect product immediately. Over the years there would need to be refinements made to the products or services your organisation offers. These refinements can only be made through information gotten from your customers as they interact with your customer service.
If your organisation creates great value for its customers, provides great customer service and has an open line of communication, your customers will be more than willing to tell you how to serve them more. However, you can abuse the trust they have in you if you do not do anything with the suggestions.
Build A Great Team
While it easily makes a lot of sense to build a great customer experience or improve your customer service, many business owners may not think much about building a great team.
I am not just talking about hiring the right people. I am talking about building the right culture in your organisation. I am talking about enabling your employees to be able to take initiative, share ideas etc.
Many organisations try to hire the right people but fail to become the right organisations that enable these people to grow.
It is not unfortunate that many organisations have toxic cultures, failing to recognize that you can’t give what you don’t have. It is almost impossible for unsatisfied staff to work in a way that would create products and services that will satisfy your customers. Hence, once staff satisfaction drops, customer satisfaction drops and this cannot be fixed by merely hiring and firing staff.
To build an amazing team or workforce, you need to care about your workers. You need to put their mental health, their personal lives and growth into consideration. You need to ask yourself how to engage with your staff and create policies that empower them to do their jobs to the best of their abilities.
Things to look out for to create great working teams are:
- Looking at the power structure in your company — are top-level staff idolized? Then that may be a bad sign.
- Management style — practices such as micromanaging staff strip your staff members of the power to make autonomous decisions. This limits the quality and speed of work.
Conclusion
Customer satisfaction is necessary to build and sustain every business. It builds your business by reducing the amount spent on acquiring new customers because satisfied customers are more likely to grow your business through word of mouth advertising to other potential customers.
At the same time, it sustains your business through repeat customers, since satisfied customers are more likely to come back.
Happy Customer, Happy Company.
