Boosting customer satisfaction is an essential practice that can be harder than we think, especially in a contact center environment. Ultimately, we need to ensure the customer is, above all else, happy. Customer happiness is influenced by various factors. For example, businesses can inspire it through a number of different strategies. Customer happiness is the level of loyalty and satisfaction your customers get. To achieve this, their needs must be met in the right method and at the right time. So, what does it really take to inspire customer happiness?
Customer Autonomy
Autonomy is the notion of freedom. A customer needs to feel like they can do everything they want with your business at arm’s length and in a manner that suits them. There are many ways to do this. You can always ask for their opinion, prioritize personalization or customization, and transparency. But you can also create an environment that focuses on self-service. In brick-and-mortar stores, you can do this through something like a tablet kiosk.
The company Bouncepad has been a global market leader in tablet kiosks & stands since 2011, and there are many other companies that can provide the technology for customers to peruse items in-store on systems that suit their needs. Autonomy is such an important thing, but it can also benefit your business because you will inevitably reduce your overheads and empower people.
Give Your Customers a Voice
Customers need a platform to express their opinions. When they give you insights on how you can do better, you should take this information to inform every aspect of your business. There are many ways to learn about your customers, for example, social media, email questionnaires, and focus groups.
Customers should have plenty of opportunities to speak about what is important to them. When you start to understand their needs, they will invariably be happier, and your business will be all the better for it.
Listen to Your Customers
Listening to your customers is a very simple thing that we should all know about but very hard to achieve in practice. Listening to our customers should occur in every single interaction. Communicating with our customers is very important, of course, but we can run the risk of talking at customers rather than building a conversation where both sides interact wholeheartedly.
When we, as customers, engage with a contact center, we can come away with the feeling that they haven’t listened to what we’ve said. This is going to eat away at the customer because ultimately they will decide not to give you their custom. Our staff members should learn how to be in the present moment so they can focus on that conversation. From the perspective of any call handler, they can feel bound by having to deal with X amount of customers per day to meet their targets, and this is a completely incorrect approach.
Instead, we should prioritize the quality of our service. If we can deal with a customer query, no matter how long it takes, that customer will be 100% satisfied, and it is less likely they will return with a problem and provide glowing feedback.
We’re so consumed with KPIs and targets in general that we’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to deliver excellent customer service. The fundamental of this is always to listen and make sure the customer knows that you hear them.
Be Grateful to Your Customer
Gratitude is something that can be fantastic for building trust between a customer and a customer service representative. We can almost lose sight of the bare basics when it comes to manners, such as saying “thank you” and “please,” or we can come across as very disingenuous when we interact with customers. But if we genuinely express gratitude, this will build positive feelings while also going a long way to humanize your business.
Gratitude is a basic human behavior, and we should look at the importance of paying it forward. While there can be customers who don’t want to give anything and feel that we should grovel, it’s so important to learn how to let these unsavory interactions go. Not everybody is going to be a good Samaritan, but if we can focus on helping those types of customers and kill them with kindness while also being creative in how we express our gratitude, this will go a long way to highlighting your business as one that prioritizes its customers.
Transparency and Honesty
We live in a time where a customer can easily learn about our business because we should have our values and ethos front and center of every interaction we have with customers. Transparency and honesty are behaviors that may seem difficult to achieve, but keeping customers satisfied and on the side can be achieved through being honest. It’s not easy for any business right now and sharing our struggles but also our achievements and helping them celebrate or commiserate as we develop can make them feel like part of the team, which will increase their loyalty.
Many organizations still believe that they need to cover up so many different aspects of their behavior or their tactics in case something slips out. But if we start on a foundation of sheer honesty, this means there is a lot less to keep track of, which makes it less stressful, builds a culture of trust among your employees and your customers, and this means everybody can progress in the right direction.
A happier customer might seem like a difficult thing to achieve, but if we consider our customer’s needs, this is what will keep them happy and, in turn, will breed brand loyalty. This means that they are more inclined to stick with us as we develop over the years, which can result in a better brand in the long run and improved profits. Customer service is not just one of those things we should prioritize, but we need to look at making them feel better in every way. It should be something we do as people. If you focus on making others look good, you will look good by default.
