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Maintaining happy customers allows your business to grow sustainable and make money. However, ignoring customers and their desires can cause losses for your business. “Elementary, my dear Watson” – would say Sherlock Holmes.
Although many businesses track this information, others may struggle to do it. Luckily, doing so is easier than it seems. After all, it comes down to learning about your customers, seeing how they react to your business, and changing it to meet their needs.
If you’re wondering how to measure, track, and maintain customer satisfaction, then this guide will provide you with those answers.
The Purpose of Tracking Customer Satisfaction
Some may wonder why they should track customer satisfaction and how it benefits them. When you track customer satisfaction, you can identify ways that your business needs to improve to increase customer retention. Tracking this information leads to benefits, but ignoring it can cause serious consequences.
Source: Clarabridge.com
The statistics above teach us about customer satisfaction.
- If a customer has a poor service experience, you will most likely lose them.
- Customers will pay more for a better service, but the majority of businesses don’t meet those expectations.
- You lose more customers to poor customer service than to pricing or product issues.
In short, these points show how your customer interactions affect your business’ profits. When customers like your business and the customer service provided, you gain more sales, more loyal customers, and a willingness to spend more money on your great product line. Brand loyalty allows your business to succeed as you keep your customers satisfied.
As you collect data about customer satisfaction, you can see what they like and what they dislike. Consider their opinions so that you can build your business around their desires. As you meet their needs and provide them the products and services that they want, they will feel happy and appreciated.
Build a Customer-Focused Business
Just like when a company builds an omnichannel marketing strategy, customer satisfaction focuses on placing the customer in the center of the business. By placing them at the center, your business keeps them in mind, which helps to maintain their satisfaction.
As you create a customer-focused business, you will want to follow these three steps.
- Create goals and plans centered on customers.
- Consider your customers with every decision.
- Collect customer feedback.
Whenever your business spends time creating goals and plans, make sure to focus on your customers. Decide on goals that focus on customer metrics, such as customer retention, and then think of plans that will fulfill those goals.
Your business will constantly make decisions. Decisions will vary in importance, but you should always think about your customers when you make a decision. Ask yourself some key questions.
- How would my customers react to this change?
- Does this decision help or hinder customers?
- If I was a customer, how would I feel about this decision?
Finally, always seek customer feedback. If you want to know what customers want, you need to ask them. Figure out different ways that you can collect this information, such as using surveys or reading reviews.
Each of these steps will help you to place customers at the center of your business. From here, you can determine what counts as customer satisfaction and how to track it.
How to Measure Customer Satisfaction
To effectively determine customer satisfaction, we need to identify the metrics for it.
Each of these steps will help you to measure customer satisfaction, so let’s discuss them.
- Product: You need to create a product that customers want. Make sure that it covers their needs and provides them the services that they desire.
- Policies: You want your business to run policies that make customers happy. This includes effective customer satisfaction, return policies, and anything that helps customers feel satisfied.
- People: People refers to your employees. You want your employees to be mindful of customers and to help them. Of course, they shouldn’t go against company policy, but employees should do whatever they can to assist customers.
- Processes: Processes are the implementation of plans to lead your customer satisfaction goals to success. You apply new ideas and ways to improve customer service.
- Proactivity: This involves making the process for customers as smooth as possible. Make it so that they can easily make a purchase or return a product if they face an issue. Make it as fast as possible.
You can apply these five key areas and see how customers respond to them. Their response and satisfaction determines the success of these metrics.
How to Track Customer Satisfaction
Some may wonder what are the steps to effective measurement of customer satisfaction, so consider these three key methods to find out how customers feel about your business.
- Surveys
- Reviews
- Statistics
These three methods will allow you to see the direct feedback of customers and how your metrics perform. Surveys and reviews come straight from the mouth of customers and statistics are their actions reflecting their responses to your changes.
Many companies use surveys because it gets a direct response from customers. You can ask them how they feel and judge their loyalty based on their responses.
Source: QuestionPro.com
When customers respond to your survey, you can tell how they feel about your business. If you use a 1-10 rating scale, then 1-6 indicates that they feel dissatisfied and will likely leave your business. However, 7-8 shows that they feel neutral and may return as convenient and 9-10 lets you know that they are loyal to your business.
You can also look at reviews to gauge customer satisfaction. Consider what they like and dislike. If they like something, then maintain that part of your business. However, if they dislike something, consider changing it so that you can satisfy more customers. You can also gauge this through survey responses.
As for statistics, your website metrics will let you know how customers feel. Do sales increase? Do you have recurring customers? Are your website visits increasing? If your metrics improve, then that reflects customer satisfaction.
Bringing It All Together
Once you know your metrics and how to measure them, you can adjust your business to increase customer satisfaction. Always seek to improve the experience for customers: after all, customer loyalty leads to sales, not just products. Yes, you need a great product, but strong customer service will help with customer retention.
As you place customers at the center of your business and build towards their satisfaction, you will gain customer loyalty. Along with this, they will also develop satisfaction for your company and continue to visit your business because of the services that it provides. Continue to work towards this goal so that you can maintain a strong customer base.
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This article was originally published by our friends at Omnisend.
