Increase Customer Satisfaction

In a business world where customer acquisition costs are sky-rocketing, small and medium businesses must focus on building a customer experience to increase customer satisfaction.

Here are nine game-changing ideas to help you on your way:

1. Treat your customers like they are your boss

Jeffery Gitomer speaks about how your customer is your paycheck. With no customers, there’s nobody to pay you! By taking this approach to every customer interaction you can naturally flip the angle on customer service.

Picture yourself as the boss… if your employee treated every customer the way they treated you, how good would the service be!

Here are some of the approaches I recommend businesses use:

• Thank all your customers for their business
• Go out your way to help customers
• Try to impress your customers as if you want a pay raise
• Think about your paycheck every time you talk to a customer
• Keep your promises and integrity

2. Focus on measuring customer satisfaction

Did you know that 91% of your unhappy customers will never purchase services from you again? Measuring customer satisfaction can help you reduce the number of unhappy customers.

So how do you measure customer satisfaction?

• Use one of these four Online Survey Tools
• Focus on these Customer Satisfaction Metrics
• Use customer support tools with ticket systems (Zendesk, Desk.com or Helpscout)

• 3. Build customer loyalty to increase customer satisfaction

  Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.
  – Jeffrey Gitomer

  Jeffery talks strongly about customer loyalty and it’s relationship with customer satisfaction in his book, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty is Priceless. He believes that businesses should be focuses their efforts on creating loyal customers, that sticky and not easily influenced by competitors.
  I agree with Jeffery and have included my five favorite ways to build customer loyalty to increase customer satisfaction:
  • Remember special occasions like birthdays
  • Strive to empower and educate customers
  • Invest in a self-service support channel
  • Top level managers must lead from the front with customer service
  • Talk to your customers, tap into what they want and deliver
  
  

  4. Avoid making these customer retention mistakes

  No business is immune to unhappy customers. In fact, even companies with the best customer service in the world will still lose up to 9% of their customers to competitors.
  The good news is you can do something to stop customers defecting. Here are three common customer retention mistakes that are killing your customer satisfaction:
  • You are ignoring customer feedback
  • You are taking customer feedback to personally
  • You are using long, boring customer feedback surveys