Customer Satisfaction has slowly made its way up the list of things that contribute to the retention or loss of customers. Price is still the foremost runner but customer satisfaction is not far behind. In 2017, 66% marketers considered customer satisfaction to be the main competitive factor, in a more recent study 81% of marketers pointed to customer satisfaction as the key battlefront. It is an area where your competitors follow you closely, they wait for you to make the wrong move and pull your customers by offering them what you failed to deliver.
There is more to customer satisfaction than keeping the product you are selling up to the mark. It is likely that there are others who offer the same product, maybe even at a cheaper price. You can still keep your customers by virtue of a superior customer experience. That is exactly why CX is an increasingly important business functionality. And in this post, we will talk about it in some detail.
What is Customer Satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction is a measure to determine how well a product or service meets the needs of its customers. It is an area tied primarily to the existing customer base of a business but it can also play a vital role in pulling in new customers.
Why do you need to focus on Customer Satisfaction?
Caring about your customers’ needs, personalizing your services for them to a plausible extent, responding to their complaints and queries quickly, all these help you earn points with the customer. The more careful you are about building a seamless customer experience the less likely are they to leave you for a competitor. You need to do all of these on top of offering a top notch product at a reasonable price.
Benefits of having Satisfied Customers
- When your customers are satisfied, it is easier to retain them even if a competitor offers slightly lower prices.
- It is 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain old ones.
- 5% increase in customer retention can result in up to 25% increase in profits.
- 92% of customers value the opinions of social contacts or acquaintances while choosing a brand.
These statistics show that positive customer experience can help you retain customers and customer retention is the key to building and sustaining a profitable business in a market brimming with competition.
Also Read – 9 Things You Need to Know Before Starting a Business
How to Measure Customer Satisfaction?
The best and probably the only way to measure customer satisfaction is to ask the customers. You can engage in surveys that seek feedback from your customers. We’ll discuss three such measuring criteria.
The CSAT score
This is a survey where you ask your customers how satisfied they are with their experience with your product on a scale of 1 to 5. 1 being absolutely dissatisfied and 5 being completely satisfied.
The NPS score
NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. This is a survey where you ask your customers how likely they are to recommend your brand to an acquaintance on a scale of 1 to 10.
The CES score
CES refers to customer effort scores. It asks your customers how easy or hard their experience was with your product or a specific feature of the product.
How to Ensure Better Customer Satisfaction?
Listening to your customers and redressing their pain points should be your priority. It’s important that your customer feels connected to your brand. You should be easily available to address an issue raised by a customer.
You will make mistakes, there will be flaws in the customer experience, but whenever it happens be quick to acknowledge it and throw something in to make up for the inconvenience you may have caused. These gestures help you increase the loyalty quotient of customers.
Pay attention to customer feedback because your competitor is. Read the reviews on public forums and try to reply and redress. Learn from your mistakes before your competitor does.
Loyal customers will often share personal experiences and express their wish to modify a certain feature of your product. Treat these insights like gold. Act upon them when possible.
Conclusion
It takes 12 good experiences to make up for one bad experience with customer service. Few will stick around for that long. It’s important to do everything to avoid and alleviate the bad experience.
Customers are more likely to write about you when they are dissatisfied than when they are satisfied. It’s better not to take any chances and create as seamless an experience as possible for your customers. Always remember, it is easier and cheaper to retain customers than to get new ones.
