Did you know that 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers?
Now, if you increase the customer retention rate by just 5% – it can boost your profits by 25% to 95%.
However, to have that solid existing customer base, you need to have a great customer support mechanism in place for a higher customer retention ratio. As customer retention is the byproduct of great customer service, it is essential to put customer satisfaction as a prime factor for your organization and work continuously to improve it.
To help you achieve your goal to improve customer satisfaction, we have curated this list of 8 tips for customer satisfaction.
Let us dig in!
1. Be Responsive
A few days back, I ordered a foosball table from one of the reputed online stores. When I tried to assemble it, it was confusing. So I called the customer support team from their website. While they were not working at 2 AM, while browsing through the website I found a video tutorial with the exact steps that helped me.
The moral of the story is that sometimes you do not have to support or respond in real-time but your customers should be able to find answers to their queries anyway. That is the kind of responsiveness you need to create for your customer support team.
It is also important to strike the right balance between customer responsiveness and quality. If your agent quickly replies to the customer’s queries, but if the answers are not satisfactory, they would quickly fade away. The key here is to clearly communicate the expected wait time beforehand. It will enable customers to gain trust in your brand.
Not that every query can be resolved in under half an hour, but here are the expected response times for each channel to help you deliver a better customer experience.
Pro Tip: To take a successful first step and improve customer satisfaction, try to respond as fast as possible when customers reach out to you.
2. Offer Multi-Channel Help
Using multi-channel support, you enable different methods of communication for your customers to reach you. Since every customer has a different way of interacting with brands, you must enable them to be able to answer customers with the expected level of professionalism and agility.
Multi-channel includes channels like email, phone, chat, social media, knowledge base, etc. While adding multi-channel customer support can certainly be a game-changer for your business, evaluating channels you can practically adopt and then choose is important.
3. Omnichannel Customer Support
With Omnichannel customer service, your customers can have a unified experience across all the channels. As a business owner, you get the opportunity to serve your customers through the channels that they prefer. For example, today, a lot of queries are raised on Twitter. If you send them a reply by email, they will feel frustrated, and it will ruin the experience for them.
As per Accenture’s findings, nearly 89% of consumers get frustrated for getting to repeat their questions to multiple service reps. Here are the best practices to power up your omnichannel customer support.
- Always be responsive on mobile. Still, 90% of customers feel that their mobile service was not so good.
- 32% of clients want an answer within 30 minutes but the actual response time is 157 minutes! So, being responsive on social media is the key. Solve and answer them on the same platform to increase the trust level.
- There is no doubt that you need to have enough self-service options available to you. It will help in optimizing your incoming flow of queries.
- Did you know that 90% of incoming text messages are read within the first 3 minutes, says a study by Single Point?
- Live chats and chatbots are inevitable for your website today.
- Be it any channel, email, SMS, social media, WhatsApp, etc., having the right customer support software will help you streamline your omnichannel support for increased customer satisfaction.
Want to integrate omnichannel customer support for your business? DeskXpand enables you to provide a unified experience across all channels.
4. Provide Self-Service Options
More than just enabling your customers to find the answers to their queries as fast as possible; it is all about empowering them. When you master the self-service, you not only decrease the incoming flow of the support queries but also cut down on costs, increase your team’s productivity and customers’ overall experience.
A crash course to master self-service
- Knowledge base or help center – Articles, search options, video tips, and training webinars, are the important components of a great knowledge base. The key is to keep it up to date.
- Community forums where other people can post their solved queries. Here, moderation is important.
- AI-powered chat and messaging on your website, SMS, and social channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger
- Automated Call Centers where customers call a company to solve a problem without speaking with a live support agent.
5. Empower Your Team with the Right Help Desk
Empowering is a heavy word. When it comes to customer support, it is about freedom, authority, and the right system to enable them to go the extra mile for customer’s delight.
- The writer James Clear stated in his book “Atomic Habits” about the importance of creating the right environment for the habits that help you inculcate the right habits easily. So, the right environment to make your employees feel comfortable and happy is the first thing you need to make sure of.
- Invest in a help desk that gives access to the tools like live chat, Email helpdesk, phone support, customer feedback, self-service, ticket management, etc. to automate many of their manual tasks. This way you save a lot of time and improve your customer satisfaction level.
- Provide them with the right training and feedback that help them improve regularly. The key is to focus on improving their skills that help them perform better according to their KPIs.
- At the same time, focus on their efforts and praise them, earn their trust by helping them, try to celebrate little things to motivate them, and work on upskilling.
With self-service, omnichannel support, ticketing, analytics, canned responses, and lots of other features, Deskxpand becomes the perfect customer support software you are looking for! Start using it for FREE today!
6. Act on Negative Reviews & Customer Complaints
Take your unhappy customers as an opportunity to grow and improve your business. Even the studies say that 89.7% of consumers are ready to give a second chance to the businesses before they finally decide to give up.
So, next time you get a negative review here is how to deal with it:
- Start with an apology within 24 hours and give them the assurance that you will try to solve the challenge.
- Connect with them personally and take their feedback.
- If possible, take the steps and try to solve it accordingly and let them know.
- Try to make your response authentic & personalized and not a template you copy-paste every time.
- Reinforce the standard values of your company and try to show empathy and understanding.
- You can always win back these customers by offering some kind of offer, promotion, or refund. The idea is to leave a positive impression of their interaction with your business.
7. Measure your Customer Satisfaction Regularly
According to a study by Helpscout, 80% of companies say they deliver “superior” customer service.
However, just 8% of customers agree with that assessment. So, it is important to record customer satisfaction at regular intervals. It helps you understand where you stand currently in terms of customer satisfaction. And having positive or negative customer reviews will not help you measure your customer satisfaction. Here are a few ways to measure customer satisfaction:
- Customer Satisfaction Score is a survey that targets asking a few basic questions to your customers. The answer typically ranges from very unsatisfactory, unsatisfactory, neutral, satisfactory, and very satisfactory.
- If you want more statistical-based data, you can focus on NPS.
- You can also consider one-on-one discussions, in-app surveys, and email surveys to gather more feedback.
- Just make sure that you keep your surveys short and concise. That means including questions that only make sense to them.
- Later based on the feedback you can take the analysis further on how to improve from the current score. If you have more happy customers, that gives you the indication that you must maintain a certain level of customer satisfaction and optimize processes whenever needed.
8. Build Strong Communities
Communities are a powerful way of supporting each other. And when it comes to customer support, today they want instant resolutions to their queries. When you have a community in place, it gives a sense of authority to your customers and community members to share their knowledge and help others. And eventually, that works out for you as a business. The catch here is that you need to make sure of the platform that you are considering building a community on.
Ready to Elevate your Customer Satisfaction?
Customer support has become complex today. It is not just about making sure the customers are happy, it is also about making an impact. You have to be aware of how your customers perceive your brand. If that is getting missed, you will not be able to figure out how to really improve your customer satisfaction level. So, it is time to buckle up, know your customers, and take the necessary measures to move forward from where you are right now.
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