5 Ways to Improve Customer Satisfaction in the Digital Age

Customer satisfaction is one of the biggest concerns at any company for a good reason —dissatisfied customers are always at risk for churn. Even if they don’t, they are unlikely to increase their spending with your business. Ensuring customers are satisfied helps keep them coming back for more.

Of course, customer satisfaction is rarely a simple thing to optimize or improve. This is particularly true in the digital age, as modern customers take complex buying journeys with many potential touchpoints, from your brand’s social media profiles to your call center, self-service solutions, and much more.

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Improving customer satisfaction within your organization begins with understanding what constitutes actual satisfaction for your customers and how your company's strategies can impact it. With more consumers turning to the online world for researching products, making purchases, and seeking support, it’s imperative to develop effective solutions for ensuring customer satisfaction with every interaction.

What is customer satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction is all about your customers' happiness. A satisfied customer is more likely to be loyal to your brand, be a repeat customer, and to increase their spend. Yet, with a wealth of options available to choose from in most niches and in-depth intel on all of these at their fingertips, customers are choosier than ever before.

In order to increase customer satisfaction, you need to consider the totality of their experiences with your company and make changes to accommodate their interests wherever you can. Thankfully, there are many ways to do this in the modern digital era.

Ways to improve customer satisfaction in the digital age

1. Take action on and with customer feedback

Many companies around the world have realized the importance of garnering customer feedback for improving their operations across the board. However, the feedback that you collect from your customers is only ever as useful as you make it. In practice, raw feedback becomes meaningless without a culture of action surrounding it.

Your team should be poised to please customers by making good on customers' suggestions as they come in. This goes beyond acknowledging and acting on constructive criticism. Your organization will need to keep up with negative reviews of your business too. Acting on legitimate criticism can help you correct faults in your business model that you might not have noticed otherwise.

2. Optimize for omnichannel

Omnichannel support is quickly becoming more of a necessity than a luxury as customers take to interacting with brands in ever more diverse ways. It is important to meet your customers wherever they are, as often as you can, to keep them satisfied. These days, that means accommodating them beyond traditional phone calls and in-person consultations.

You should be prepared to field requests and feedback from all angles, including social media, SMS, email and chat. These avenues open up new possibilities for brands to reach out to customers with timely updates and promotions as well, powering improved profitability, while deepening the brand-customer connection.

3. Measure, measure, measure

Aiming to make a positive impact on customer satisfaction without actually tracking your performance over time is a lot like trying to shoot a target while blindfolded. You should be accustomed to measuring each and every facet of your business that you intend to improve.

Choosing appropriate metrics to measure customer satisfaction among those that you serve helps transform your attempts to improve into an actual strategy backed by data. A few excellent key performance indicators to consider keeping track of are customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), customer retention rate and average resolution time.

4. Prioritize self-service solutions

Although a tailored, hands-on approach to customer service is often a winner in the public's eyes, there is much to be said about simple self-service solutions for customers as well. Often enough, customers simply want to find a solution to the issue they may be facing in as little time as possible.

By minimizing the effort it takes to arrive at a solution, you can ensure that your customers remain satisfied with your organization's services without being forced to take on an inordinate number of customer service representatives in the process. Simple frequently asked question or "FAQ" sections and public knowledge bases can help tremendously to this end.

5. Automate wherever you can

Although automation is not always a viable solution to customer service challenges, there are many instances in which it works extremely well. Chatbots are one such instance. These can be used to provide instant customer service that is tailored to customers' needs. If the chatbot encounters any issues in resolving a customer's requests, it can then escalate issues to the level of a live agent instead. This ensures customers are not left without a solution in cases where a chatbot is not sufficient.

Automation can also be leveraged to empower agents to go above and beyond for customers by interpreting conversations in real-time and providing the kinds of insights and in-depth information agents need to solve problems. Conversation analytics solutions and conversation intelligence solutions can serve this purpose particularly well.

Improving customer satisfaction is never a once-and-done initiative. It requires ongoing measurement, analysis, and effort to ensure customer happiness and maintain a competitive advantage. By implementing these five key best practices, you’ll be well on your way to effective customer satisfaction management in the digital age.