By Jenna Bunnell – Senior Manager, Content Marketing, Dialpad
So, you’ve got a fantastic idea for a product or service and a shiny new website and logo. These are important for achieving success. But what do they mean if you’ve unhappy customers? Well, not a lot. Customer happiness should be central to everything you do.
If your customers are dissatisfied, you’ll struggle to retain existing customers, never mind attracting new shoppers. But what can be done to change this? We’ll show you various steps to follow to achieve customer happiness.
Firstly, What Does Customer Happiness Really Mean?
Think you’ve already achieved complete customer satisfaction? You might want to double-check that. Customer happiness shouldn’t be constrained to a sale. It should carry through to every stage of a customer’s journey.
Think it’s impossible to measure customer happiness? Think again. One useful method is by using a customer satisfaction score (CSAT). This helps your business measure how satisfied your customers are with your product, service, or company as a whole.
Alternatively, you could combine data from various sources. This includes the first call resolution rate of your customer service, reviews, and the number of return customers.
But what can be done to ensure that customers are happy throughout their journey?
Speak With Your Customers
Your customers don’t just want to feel like another cog in a wheel. It’s your job to contact them and ensure that they’re satisfied with the services or products you’re providing. There are many ways that you can do this. These include:
Carrying Out Focus Groups
Focus groups are a great way to communicate with a representative section of your audience. This allows customers to ask and answer questions. They can voice their concerns and opinions on future products.
Use free video chat to eliminate travel expenses and increase convenience.
Start Conversations on Social Media
Social media provides a useful platform for interacting with a much larger group of your audience. Share enjoyable content. Create posts that are likely to invoke a response. The more positive interactions a customer has with your business, the higher their level of brand loyalty.
When posting on social media, make sure you pick a platform that will help you get in touch with your audience. For example, 71% of young adults (aged 18-29) use Instagram, while 73% of adults aged between 50 and 64 use Facebook.
Send Them an Email
In today’s modern world, where many businesses have undergone digital transformation, email sounds almost old-fashioned. Don’t let this deter you. Email is an invaluable resource for businesses. In fact, there are over 4 billion email users.
There’s a good chance that most of your customers have an email address. If you convince them to sign up to your mailing list, you have an easy way of contacting them. This means that you can send surveys, discounts, and special messages that will increase brand loyalty (for example, a birthday wish).
Use Your Lead List
Companies that deal in business-to-business should use a B2B lead list to find companies to work with. The list should include contact details, such as phone numbers and email addresses. With a lead list, a business can improve its networking abilities and foster better B2B relationships.
Customer Service Is Essential
No business can survive with poor customer service. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You’ve almost certainly been there, waiting on the phone to talk to a support representative. You’ve been waiting for hours, but your issue is unresolved. It’s frustrating, isn’t it?
This isn’t the kind of experience that will leave a customer happy. If your customer service is lacking, prioritize improving it. Here are a few tips for improving your customer service:
- Hire the right people: it might sound simple but hiring the best candidate is often easier said than done. Be aware of factors such as interview bias that can negatively sway a hiring decision. Try to pick an applicant that is personable, warm, and interacts well with other people.
- Prepared for international calling: good customer service means being available for your customers wherever they are in the world. This means that you need to be equipped with the tools to contact customers across the globe. International calls should be just as clear as local calls and should support features such as video chat.
- Use call center analytics: keeping track of call data can help you resolve future calls more swiftly. Call center data can also be shared with different teams throughout your organization. This helps to make your wider operations more customer-centric.
- Provide self-service: customers are becoming less fond of waiting for a human to solve their queries. They want a solution, and they want it quickly. With the right self-service, you can meet this need. For example, the best chatbots can use AI to recognize customer complaints and provide a solution.
- Segment your call center: customers with simple queries don’t want to be held up when your support teams are dealing with more complex issues. A simple solution is to segment your call center into two teams: one to deal with the simpler queries, while the other handles more time-consuming problems. Use custom call routing to ensure that customers reach an agent quickly.
Personalize Customer Experience
- Customers want personalized experiences. Studies show that 66% of customers expect businesses to understand their needs. But what exactly is personalization? To have a personalized experience, a customer’s journey should feel tailored to them.
- For example, have you ever bought an item online and received recommendations for other products that you might enjoy? This is personalization. By providing personalized experiences, a business can improve customer retention rates and should see a reduction in its Google bounce rate.
- But these experiences should extend beyond that. All interactions should be personalized. If you send an email, address the customer by their name. An email addressed “Dear customer” isn’t likely to endear people to your brand.
- When planning personalization, think outside the box. One excellent example is The Coca-Cola Company. In 2011, they launched their “share a coke” campaign. The brand added names to the back of coke bottles, suggesting customers should share bottles with their friends and family. The campaign provided a massive boost to the company, turning around an 11-year decline in the US.
Learn From Past Experiences
In many ways, running a business is all about learning new things. But too often, brands fail to learn from past mistakes. When looking ahead, always ask, “What is working now?”. This could be a successful product, marketing campaign, or creating a brilliant in-work culture. Use these successes to steer you going forward.
Similarly, when something doesn’t go to plan, ensure that you understand why. By knowing your successes and failures, you’ll have more success when interacting with customers. This could be through creating products that they enjoy or finding ways to engage with them on social media.
To better learn from your experiences, make sure to keep a constant eye on data. By taking the time to analyze and understand your data, you’re sure to make better decisions going forward.
Happiness Is Everything
Customer happiness is paramount. Unhappy customers result in your competitors cashing in on their discontent. But making a customer happy isn’t easy, and it means more than offering a great product. Customer contentment should come before all else.
When traveling in a new business direction, you need to first ask yourself, “Will this make my customers happy?”. Although a challenging task, the tips outlined here will set you on the path to ensuring customer happiness. So, look at your organization. Which areas can be improved to make customers happier?
By putting in the time and effort, satisfied customers will reward you with loyalty and cash.
