How to Improve Customer Experience & Keep Your Customers Happy

In a competitive world, making a customer is easy, but to keep them happy for a long time is a difficult task. This applies to every business, whether the business is small or large.

However, it's imperative to make your customer happy and completely satisfied when they come to your business. You might have heard this line: “Treat others as you want to be treated.” This rule is applicable to businesses too.

When customers are satisfied, they will keep coming back to your business again and again.

So, if you want remain competitive in the market and a step ahead of your competitors, raise the interaction rate, customer experience, and customer satisfaction in your business.

Customer satisfaction can be gauged by the type and nature of feedback you get from customers. And customer feedback can be easily collected and analyzed using various customer feedback apps and solutions available online.

But before moving on with this topic, we must understand what customer satisfaction is?

What Is Customer Satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction is defined as how you treat your customers and how happy they are with your services and products. Customers can rate your business as well as review your services.

You can enhance your customer experience by meeting their expectations and by providing the right services at the right time. And a great customer experience not only predicts business growth, but also increases customer satisfaction.

Customer experiences and satisfaction can be measured by understanding how your customers interact with your brand. You can calculate customer satisfaction by different factors, such as the Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction Score, etc.

Let’s highlight some of the different tactics proven to improve customer experience.

Proven Strategies to Improve Customer Experience

Here’re some of the best strategies and proven tactics to improve customer experience and ensure you keep customers happy:

1. Understand Your Customers

It's important to know your customer psychology in order to better meet their needs. When businesses operate under a cyclical process of anticipating, identifying, and meeting customer needs, you can expect quick positive results.

Make sure that you know your customer preferences and interests. This will help you to connect better through personalized communications that make your relationship strong.

When customers are satisfied, they tend to become the best brand advocates for your business by sharing their success stories and experiences with others.

You can understand customers and improve customer satisfaction in a number of ways, including:

• Listening to your customers keenly, including listening to their complaints and praises.
• Observing customer behaviour and emotions to provide a higher level of support.
• Anticipating customer expectations to inform the building of your products/services that match customer needs and interests.

2. Provide Customer Support on Social Media

Social media offers a powerful way to keep customers updated on what’s happening in your business. It also an effective tool for providing consumer support to meet the customers where they are and quickly answer questions.

Post content regularly about different aspects of your business, including new offers, products/services, and events happening in your business on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and even email newsletters.

The good news is that if you’re consistent and strategic by using a social media post planner and automation tools, posting frequently doesn’t have to take a lot of time and effort.

3. Encourage and Manage Customer Online Reviews

By proactively encouraging customers to give their honest testimonials and reviews of your busines and experience with your products/services, you ensure customers have a way to publicly express their genuine thoughts and feeling. That makes them feel relieved and satisfied.

However, manage all reviews (both positive and negative) by responding promptly to the thoughts expressed by customers. The way you respond to customer reviews has a big impact on your brand reputation and ability to win over potential or new customers reading the reviews.

According to a report by ReportLinker, a whopping 78% of people believe online reviews are at least "somewhat reliable." The report also notes that some 59% of shoppers see online reviews as trustworthy as a review given by a friend.

That highlights the critical impact reviews can have on businesses. So, you can't afford to ignore reviews because they impact customer purchases and consumer perceptions. Online reviews should be a key factor in you online brand and customer experience strategy.

4. Provide 24 Hour Call Service

Sometimes customers want to talk to a real human representative about various issues, concerns, or opportunities relating to your business. Make it possible for them to do that easily.

Provide 24/7 customer service line and you will get brownie points from people who call your business for different reasons. Encourage your customers to call in whenever it is convenient for them and leave feedback about your services or other issues.

List your telephone contact details on your website so that customers can easily find it, call in, and explain the problems, recommendations, and suggestions they have. It will boost customer satisfaction, retention rate, and that will be for the betterment of your business.

5. Leverage Chatbots for 24/7 Customer Service

In the same vein as the previous point, the availability of 24/7 customer service helps to ensure enhanced customer service, satisfaction as it means customer problems get solved immediately.

Integrate chatbots on your business website to ensure you can offer 24/7 customer service and stay a step ahead of the competition. You'll have happier customers.

Chatbots demonstrate a positive commitment to your customers as it leverages new technology that automatically pops-up on a window on your website to address customer queries and concerns in real time. This feature delights most customers.

6. Make It Easy to Book Appointments

Offer intuitive ways and slots for clients and customers to not only contact your company, but also book virtual or physical appointments with your business representatives where applicable.

By deploying this move, clients will know you are accessible and that they can get direct help/assistance from your business as necessary and when needed. This will boost customer trust and prompt them to keep coming back to your business premises and website.

It’s another way to speak directly to your customers/clients, hear their exact needs, and serve them better, which leads to greater customer satisfaction.

7. Maintain Professionalism Throughout

Every business should set rules and guidelines for communicating and engaging with customers professionally. This helps to boost customers’ experience, increase customer satisfaction, and strengthen positive, long-term customer relationships.

Set customer interaction policies and regularly train and educate your employees on how to professionally interact and communicate with customers to deliver excellent customer service.

Some professional customer satisfaction tips you can use include:

• Choosing positive words and phrases while interacting with customers rather than negative, vulgar words. By using positive words, you can win over even the most agitated customers. Incorporate positive words like “My apologies,” and “You are welcome.”
• Listening to customers intently, which helps to serve them better as you are able to know what exactly are your customers desires, opinions, and feedback.
• Training customer support team to offer gratitude at the end of conversions as part of your core principles for customer service etiquette. A sincere “Thank you” goes a long way.
• Providing truthful and authentic information about your product or services always to avoid future misunderstandings, confusion and complaints. Don’t give false info or commitments that will break customer trust and loyalty. Establish a policy of being truthful and reliable always.

In Conclusion

The aforementioned tactics will go a long way to enhance customers experience and make your customers happy, which in turn will lead to high customer retention and greater performance.

As Forbes Magazine observes, “A company is only as good as their customers perceive them to be.” Make sure your customers perceive you positively by improving your customer experience and customer satisfaction in your business or company.