6 Ways to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Improving customer satisfaction is one of the most important tasks of any business, seeing as how it determines whether or not they will come back after the first purchase. According to one statistic, only 8 percent of return customers make as much as 40 percent of your entire profit, mostly because they A) come over and over again and B) feel free to make more expensive purchases. Nevertheless, if your business doesn’t offer them much the first time around, it isn’t likely that they’ll return for the second run (let alone third or fourth). So, here are six quick and efficient ways to improve customer satisfaction.

Social media monitoring

In order to fix a problem, you first need to be aware that there is one, to begin with. Therefore, you need to learn how to listen to your audience when they least expect it. The simplest way of achieving this, as well as the most efficient one, is the idea of social media monitoring. In this way, you cannot only track what people are saying about your brand but also about A) your products, B) experts in your employ and C) slogans or catchphrases you use. As a means of passive market analysis, social media monitoring method is second to none.

Get feedback via surveys

There’s really no reason to start eavesdropping on your audience before you’ve mustered enough courage to ask them a direct question. The simplest way to do so is either through a poll or a survey, yet, surveys are somewhat more descriptive and allow you to gather more actionable information. Furthermore, by presenting your target audience paid surveys, you’re giving them a financial incentive to give honest and descriptive answers, which is what you were aiming at, in the first place.

Buy from your competitors

The next thing you should definitely try out is to put yourself in the shoes of a customer and try buying something from some of your closest competitors. In this way, you can closely examine what is it that they’re doing right, as well as notice a thing or two that they have all wrong. Later on, you can use these results of your industrial espionage project to improve your own business. Sometimes, you might even want to try buying a product from your own store, just in order to get a bit of insight of what all of this feels like from the outside. In practice, you might even notice a glitch that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Hire capable salespeople

Both online and offline retail businesses can benefit from employing capable salespeople. In person, this can make a difference between a closed and a botched deal, yet, you would be surprised at how much difference can this make online, as well. Proper customer service can turn a person who just called to complain about a major feature flaw into a return customer and even convince them to buy as soon as they finish the call. Still, while the title may put an emphasis on ‘hire’, it’s also worth mentioning that this is only the first step on a journey of a thousand miles. Once they get hired, you need to train them and point them in the right direction.

Insert a mystery buyer

One of the oldest but also the most effective techniques out there is inserting a mystery buyer. What this means is that you give one of your employees, friends or relatives a task of making a false profile and going to the community forum asking questions about your business. In person, you can have them mingling with clients, asking around about various features, figures or even provoking in order to see if there’s any repressed negative feedback related to your company.

Keep measuring customer satisfaction

At the end of the day, you need to understand that 91 percent of dissatisfied customers never come back, however, 96 percent of them never complain either, which makes your problem much greater than you’ve initially expected it to be. Therefore, you need to be on a constant lookout for indicators and even double your efforts in the above-listed five techniques in order to notice early signs of potential dissatisfaction. Once you establish proper metrics, this shouldn’t be that much of a problem.

Conclusion

One last thing you should understand is the fact that you simply can’t make everyone happy. Just because there are some people who complain, it doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong. In fact, this is one thing that anyone who has ever worked in retail can tell you from their first-hand experience. Nonetheless, when an issue turns into a recurring problem, you might want to take a bit closer look at it.