Traditional marketing strategies are no longer efficient since customers’ demands and expectations have changed. Nowadays, businesses and retailers must give their all to employee training and better practices to overcome the competition. As many companies have already emerged with perfect customer satisfaction processes, it’s time for all of them to approach a more customer-oriented business strategy.
However, it may be challenging to keep up with trends since technologies change rapidly, and companies have to adopt and adapt such concepts to remain relevant in the market. Of course, this doesn’t always apply as some businesses have other goals and target audiences, so it’s best to find ways of adapting your organization in accordance with your location, competition, wanted clients, and so on.
This article touches on maintaining high customer satisfaction rates in times of fast technological changes.
Collecting feedback
Regardless of the period of time, feedback is what sets one business apart from others. Anything from information, insights, issues, and input shared by your audience in regard to their experiences with your business can be put into a developing strategy. If you want to know what you’re doing, wrong ―or right can be easily found if you constantly research people’s opinions about your products and services.
Therefore, collecting feedback is the best method of seeking improvement. There are a few ways to do it:
- Surveys (one-question format or longer ones);
- Email and customer contact forms
- Usability tests (although they’re more complex)
- Customer interviews
- Social media
- On-site activity
- Instant feedback from the website
You also need to be wary of the challenges you may face when approaching this strategy. For example, after the surveys, you may find out that most answers were politely positive due to the fact people weren’t really thinking about something they’d need or want and just offered a sympathetic opinion. This can be frustrating as you invest financial and timely resources.
At the same time, you may find some answers unnecessarily hostile towards your products or employee services, forming a barrier you can’t get through. Finally, these surveys can turn customers against you as they sometimes expect you to change a certain thing about a product in a matter of days or weeks when the truth is that the developing process naturally takes a longer time.
Applying customer feedback
Depending on the responses you’ve got from the surveys you conducted, it would be best to try and apply them to your business strategies. By doing so, you prove that your company is reliable, and customers will expect you to bring in changes when needed. Therefore, if people feel their needs have been listened to, you’ll deepen customer satisfaction and attract new clients.
However, you must be aware that changing all “unpleasant” aspects of your business is challenging, so you need to take it easy and find what’s the most urgent task. For example, you may see different opinions about your transportation costs or delivery duration. Still, you should choose what your company is able to handle at the moment and what you consider more critical at the moment.
Besides developing your products and services, you can also apply customer feedback by:
- Improving your employee training requirements so that they can meet customer’s expectations;
- Following up with the customers after a change has been made to let them know you considered their opinion;
Conducting in-depth analysis
If you’re not satisfied with the potential outcome, you could try making more extensive research regarding the company’s productivity on customer satisfaction. For example, one way of measuring customer needs is by identifying performance and excitement requirements using a model that considers their emotions more than the product’s functionality. This is a Kano Analysis approach and works by categorizing the features of a service or product in five ways:
- Must-have features that are vital but wouldn’t necessarily impress customers;
- One-dimensional features which are not included in the final product;
- Attractive features that increase the product’s value;
- Indifferent attributes that make customers wonder if the product is good or not;
- Reverse attributes that don’t increase clients’ satisfaction although they’re high-quality;
In this analysis process, customers have two questions:
- How do you feel if you have this feature?
- How do you feel if you don’t have this feature?
Although it seems quite simple, you need to carefully read the scale after getting the answers because this analysis is quite challenging to perform, which is mainly its disadvantage. It can become quite tedious, but what it can do is:
- Identify the needs and desires of customers;
- Provide enough guidance for product and service development;
- Show you what needs to be improved to reach the best outcome;
Offering multi-channel support
Finally, one of the most important actions to take is to provide an array of customer support services so that you can be reachable for any type of customer. At the same time, people tend to use more than one channel support, so it’s best to have them incorporated into your website, including the following:
- Live chat support is best for answering basic questions about which knowledge is integrated into your employees’ training;
- Social media support is perfect for clients who spend most of their time on the internet and frequently engage with your business;
- Email support is efficient in exchanging sensitive files or complex information;
- Phone support is great for customers who need to be walked through steps, such as how to learning how to use your software programs properly;
Having multiple ways to talk with customers not only tells that your team is ready and professional but also offers customers with certain disabilities the chance to speak out and make their needs a priority.
Bottom line
Improving customer satisfaction requires you to put your client’s needs first. But you also must apply these aspects and actually change what they have complained about, so you must conduct thorough research for your approach to be successful. So, start by collecting honest feedback and end by providing multiple communication channels to engage with your audience entirely.
