What is the importance of customer satisfaction?
In virtually every industry, customers have choices. They can choose to give you their business, or they can choose one of your competitors. Customer satisfaction is what sets your business apart from others. By being attuned to your customers’ needs and desires, you can surprise and delight them at every stage of their purchasing journey and create loyalty, which translates to repeat business and more money in your pocket. Ignoring customer satisfaction is risky and can lead to resentment, which can manifest in negative online reviews and social media conversation around your company. It is contingent on you to proactively solicit feedback from your customers, and to operate accordingly, if you want to have any hope of continued success in a hyper-competitive marketplace.
How to improve customer satisfaction
The way to improve customer satisfaction will depend on the issues your customers currently face, and the only true way to find that out is through customer satisfaction surveys or otherwise soliciting their feedback. Does your company offer products or services your customers want, at a price they want to pay, in a way that is easy and convenient for them? Are your employees satisfied and happy, and does it rub off on your customers? Do you provide top-notch customer service, no matter what issue your customers present with? Much of your ability to do this will depend on the customer service skills of your employees, so it’s important to hire and/or train for these skills accordingly.
A more modern way to improve customer satisfaction is by having a customer relationship management strategy. Most companies rely on software to handle this for them. Customer relationship management in a nutshell is a concerted effort to reach out to certain customers at certain times in the hope of their making a purchase. For example, if you know your customers’ birthdays, you can wish them a happy birthday and offer them a discount on the special day. If you know they purchased a specific item, you can offer them complementary items or services that will enhance their ownership experience. It might seem like a sales tactic, but customer relationship management is vitally important to customer satisfaction.
It also helps to be a consumer of your own products or services. Aside from soliciting feedback via surveys and looking at market research, the only way to truly understand the customer experience is to be a customer yourself. It’s easy to operate completely in hypotheticals and under assumptions, but this can lead to missing crucial details in the customer experience that might be dragging on customer satisfaction. It’s also important not to be everything to everyone. Some companies overextend themselves trying to appease every demand from every customer, instead of focusing on doing a few things very well. Trying to please all of your customers in every single way is not feasible, and often backfires and leads to not impressing anyone.
Related Articles: How to Create and Use Customer Satisfaction Surveys?
The risks of ignoring customer satisfaction
In this day and age, there is no excuse for ignoring customer satisfaction. Those businesses who choose to do so risk hits to their reputation and potentially losing customers. There is some truth to the adage that a happy customer will tell one person, but a dissatisfied customer will tell ten. One only has to look at online reviews for proof of how quickly a repeated negative experience can snowball into a critical mass of vocal unhappy customers. Offering great products but accompanying them with awful service can tarnish the entire customer experience. Conversely, offering great service but shoddy products can lead to a negative reputation.
Taking your customers for granted is another pitfall, and businesses that operate in smaller markets or in industries with little to no competition often fall into this trap. There are a few industries in Canada that are notorious for their lacklustre levels of customer satisfaction, such as airlines and banks. This is because there is very little competition in these industries, and companies know that if customers are dissatisfied with the products or services they offer, there are limited alternatives. This also often happens in smaller geographical areas where there may only be one or two businesses in a given industry. Even if your customers don’t have many (or any) alternatives, it’s still important to give them a satisfying experience with your company. It can end up saving you the stress and consternation that comes with dealing with chronically dissatisfied customers. No amount of customer service skills can overcome dealing with a non-stop barrage of complaints and irritation day in and day out.
Most notably, companies that ignore customer satisfaction put themselves in a position to be usurped by companies willing to go the extra mile. It’s been proven around the world and throughout of the history of capitalism that when the marketplace is not being supplied with what it wants, someone with more drive and ambition will fill the vacuum and provide it. It is therefore crucial that you do not become complacent and take customer satisfaction for granted, just because you aren’t being forced to take it seriously. There will always be someone else willing to do what you are not, and that person stands to take a lot of your business.
