Customer satisfaction is an important factor that directly affects the success of the company. Building long-term and productive relationships with both existing and new customers is critical to the sustainable and healthy growth of brands. This blog covers strategies to increase customer satisfaction, customer reviews, the importance of personalised services and more.
Firstly, let's start with this: What is customer satisfaction and why is it important?
Customer satisfaction is the sense of loyalty and trust that customers feel towards a brand when they are satisfied with a product or service. Meeting or exceeding customer expectations increases this satisfaction. High customer satisfaction ensures the loyalty of existing customers and allows new customers to recognise and even benefit from the brand. To ensure customer satisfaction, it is important to understand the needs of customers and to offer quick solutions to these needs. So which methods are effective in ensuring customer satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction not only increases customer return rates (relevance), but also strengthens brand image and facilitates new customer acquisition through positive customer reviews. According to Referral Sasquatch statistics, the conversion rate of referral leads is 30% higher than other marketing strategies. This also emphasises the quality of leads that come through personal referrals. Instead of casting a wider net, marketers may consider investing more in strategies that encourage genuine word-of-mouth marketing (WOM).
5 effective solutions to ensure customer satisfaction
1. Evaluation or special feedback section on the website so that existing and new customers can give feedback through comments and messages on social media accounts, online and offline surveys, questionnaires (direct surveys at points of sale), etc. It is important to take their opinions into account when creating it. Positive feedback shows that your product or service is on the right track, while negative feedback allows you to solve problems without losing customers.
2. Positive feedback is one of the important nuances of product or service development. For example, satisfied customers can give ideas about what could be better in your product or service. These suggestions help your business to have a customer-orientated structure.
3. Although it is not always possible to provide 24/7 customer support so that customers can reach you easily, you can close this gap with solutions such as chatbots, online and social media support. 80% of customers expect a support service that will help them with everything they need.
4. As important as it is to proactively collect customer feedback, it is also important to react quickly to this feedback. Taking quick action, especially in negative situations, can turn your customers' negative experiences into positive ones and maintain their trust in your brand.
5. Ignoring negative feedback can increase customer dissatisfaction. Dissatisfied customers often leave more feedback than satisfied customers, and this feedback can spread quickly on the internet. Therefore, when you encounter negative feedback, you should try to regain customer satisfaction by producing solutions. For this, your company should identify the risks in advance and prepare an advanced action plan against these risks. Customers cannot write to you directly and can publish their thoughts on other online platforms or sites. You can use various social media tools for this. This means that when someone expresses a positive or negative opinion about your brand, you can react to this post as quickly as possible.
Sometimes it is possible to anticipate customer complaints and take action. For example, if you know that an app is going to be down for maintenance, or if you are experiencing delays in product delivery, you can prevent dissatisfaction by informing your customers in advance.
Personalisation (or personalised approach) is an effective strategy to increase customer satisfaction. Making customers feel special can strengthen their bond with your brand. For example, personalised messages sent on birthdays or special discount coupons can make your customers feel valued.
Personalisation is also important when collecting customer feedback. For example, instead of asking general questions to everyone who visits your website, you can ask more targeted questions to your existing customers. This allows you to gather more accurate and valuable information.
So what is the problem with not being present on a website or any social platform? Then, when people can't find you online, they are less likely to buy from you and you are less likely to sell to them. According to statistics from Visual Objects, 76% of the people who don't buy anything from you are always looking for you online and want to get quick information, and when they see that there is no information about you in reliable sources, you don't have a website. Even if you have a website, social media pages and all that, if your online customer support is poor or non-existent, your customers will be dissatisfied and your chances of acquiring new customers will be reduced. 30% of customers often leave websites when they can't find what they're looking for, causing them to abandon their shopping basket altogether.
It is important to know what needs to be improved to increase customer satisfaction. For this reason, it is very important to conduct regular customer satisfaction surveys and analyse the data obtained. Survey types such as CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CES (Customer Effort Score) can be used to measure customer satisfaction. Thanks to these surveys, you can track customer satisfaction and learn how much you have improved or missed this system.
Customer satisfaction is not only the responsibility of the customer service team. Problems are solved faster when all departments work together and act according to customer feedback. For this, customer feedback should be shared with all relevant departments. For example, if the marketing team sees a problem in the customer experience, it will accelerate the solution of the problem by forwarding this feedback to the technical team. Making customer satisfaction the common goal of the entire team contributes to the formation of a customer-oriented culture throughout the company. This ensures that customer needs are better understood and problems are solved quickly.
All this means that customer satisfaction plays an important role in business success. Satisfying your existing customers increases their brand loyalty and helps you gain new customers. Satisfied customers become ‘brand ambassadors’, true advocates of your brand and recommend your brand to their friends.
Ultimately, by investing in customer satisfaction, you can build long-term relationships with existing and new customers and increase the value of your brand.
