6 tips for improving customer satisfaction

Improving customer satisfaction can give you the business edge you need in today’s competitive landscape. For most consumers, the overall experience with a company is as important as the products or services they buy—and nearly 90% say they’re more likely to return after a positive experience.

So, whether you’re new to or growing a business, keep reading for six tips on how to improve customer satisfaction. 

What you’ll learn:

• Consumers value their experience with a company on par with the products or services they buy.
• Using customer satisfaction metrics can help create continuous processes to improve the customer experience.
• Improving customer satisfaction depends on developing a customer-centric culture, acting on feedback, personalizing engagement, improving response times and rewarding your most loyal customers.

The customer satisfaction score, or CSAT, is a metric used to measure how satisfied your customers are. This information is typically gathered through actions like customer surveys or feedback forums and covers different parts of the customer journey and experience. Depending on your offering, it may consider:

• Product availability
• Ease of purchase
• Responsiveness of the customer service team
• How long it takes to resolve issues

Using CSAT data to personalize customer satisfaction strategies can help you engage potential and current customers. It can also inspire them to stick around, from their initial purchase to long-term loyalty and retention. 

Enhancing CSAT requires long-term and consistent efforts built on iterative processes of collecting and implementing consumer feedback. The following strategies can help you better understand your customers’ needs, fine-tune their journey and improve overall customer satisfaction.

Developing a customer-centric culture is a business strategy that prioritizes the customer. The goal is to provide a positive customer experience (CX) that leads to a long-term relationship.

A great example of customer-centricity is when a business tailors the CX to solve customer challenges. For instance, offering tools like virtual product trials or customization options helps customers easily make more informed decisions.

Collecting customer feedback to improve your service or product offerings demonstrates to your customer base that you value their feedback. And this feedback can be solicited or unsolicited:

• Solicited feedback: Businesses typically solicit feedback for specific reasons, such as product improvements or service quality. This feedback is typically collected from sources like Net Promoter Score® (NPS) surveys, CSAT metrics, email campaigns and customer focus groups. ​​Soliciting feedback is a great way to improve your product or service and enhance CX. However, it can leave you vulnerable to missing out on feedback your customers want to give but you haven’t asked about.
• Unsolicited feedback: From social media posts to online reviews, your customers leave unsolicited feedback for two reasons: They had a great experience or a not-so-great experience.

As business owners focus more on improving customer experiences, using solicited and unsolicited feedback gives you insight into what you are asking and what your customers are thinking and feeling.

And even if the feedback you receive is something you can’t deliver to your customers just yet, updating customers on progress and keeping the lines of communication open are good ways to keep your customers satisfied even if you can’t immediately deliver on a request.

Understanding your customers’ habits can help you personalize engagement and reduce friction.

For example, personalized features like “buy again” or “keep shopping for” provide relevant options at the right time, streamlining the customer’s decision-making process. Additionally, offering customers targeted, personalized promotional opportunities after a sale can help further enhance engagement and drive repeat sales, building the loyalty and retention your business desires.

Improving your average response time should be a top priority for boosting customer satisfaction. Most customers want their issues resolved right away, and short response times demonstrate that you care about solving your customers’ problems efficiently, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Short response times prioritize your customers and their needs and demonstrate your commitment to resolving problems efficiently. This enhances the customer experience and lays the foundation for a long-term relationship.

Loyalty programs enhance customer satisfaction by rewarding customers for repeat engagement and highlighting the customer’s value to the business. They can also:

• Strengthen your relationship with the customer
• Increase customer retention
• Encourage repeat purchases
• Increase revenue
• Promote word-of-mouth engagement
• Improve your brand’s reputation

Consider what an effective and personalized loyalty program looks like for your business and how happy, loyal customers can support its growth.

In today’s highly competitive market, providing the best customer experiences may require leveraging automated solutions. Strategically using technology can enhance customer satisfaction and nurture relationships in the long term. Some modern technology solutions that could help are:

• Chatbots: These tools provide immediate help for your customers, reducing response times and actively attending to customer needs.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions: CRM solutions can track and analyze your customers’ online behavior to help you personalize communications and the customer experience.
• Customer data platforms (CDPs): CDPs can combine data from multiple platforms to provide a comprehensive consumer profile. This data can help you personalize customer experiences and anticipate your customers’ behaviors. Additionally, CDPs can help you create audience segments for targeted marketing campaigns to enhance your customers’ experiences even further.

Evaluate your product and service offerings to determine how technology could support your organization’s efficiency.

Improving customer satisfaction is at the forefront of most business owners’ minds. Here are some more frequently asked questions they have about this topic.

Most consumers will become return customers after a positive experience with a company. Therefore, businesses must always strive to provide the best customer experience possible.

You can start improving customer satisfaction by exploring the six tips outlined: Develop a customer-centric culture, collect and act on customer feedback, personalize engagements, provide fast response times, reward your most loyal customers and leverage automated solutions when and where you can.

Let Capital One support you as you run your business, and learn more with Capital One’s business resources.