Customer satisfaction is crucial to the success of your business. No matter how innovative your product or competitive your pricing, if your customers are ultimately unhappy, they’re not going to stick around. As such, it’s no surprise 45.9 percent of businesses surveyed in 2020 named customer experience as their number one priority over the next five years: A++ Rated MBA college in Bangalore
What exactly do we mean by “customer satisfaction?” Why is it so important, and what can you do to improve it? Read on to find out. Customer satisfaction is a measure of how people feel when interacting with your brand. It can be influenced by any number of factors, such as:
- perceived product quality
- perceived product value
- convenience
- customer expectations
- communication
- complaint handling
Every brand, no matter how successful, wants to improve customer satisfaction. To do that, they need to define two things:
- who their customers are
- what it takes to satisfy them
Part one isn’t as simple as it sounds. Let’s take the example of a hospital. It might have two distinct customer bases:
- The patients it treats
- the insurance companies it sells patient data to
Clearly, those two audiences have very different goals, and keeping them happy requires two vastly different approaches. To make matters even more complicated, satisfying one audience may sometimes be detrimental to the other’s happiness.
Customer satisfaction is more than just a “nice to have.” Getting it right has specific, tangible benefits, including:
1. Increase Brand Loyalty
Never take your customers for granted. According to PwC, 59 percent of U.S. consumers who love a product or brand would ditch it after several poor experiences. More concerning, almost one in five would do so after a single bad experience. On the flip side, if you do everything in your power to keep customers happy, it stands to reason they’ll be more likely to stick around for the long term.
2. Boost Trust
According to Edelman, 81 percent of consumers say brand trust is a deal-breaker or a deciding factor in their purchase decisions. Yet trust is pretty thin on the ground, with just 34 percent of consumers saying they trust most of the brands they use or buy from. How do you make your brand more trustworthy? One way is to improve satisfaction. According to a study from Eastern University Sri Lanka, customer satisfaction logically precedes customer trust; those two things rarely exist in isolation.
3. Attract Positive Word of Mouth
Word-of-mouth marketing is extremely valuable. To give just one example, 87 percent of consumers read online reviews for local businesses in 2020, up from 81 percent in 2019.
Unfortunately, consumers are significantly more likely to share negative reviews than they are positive ones. According to American Express, U.S. consumers tell an average of 15 people about bad experiences, whereas they only share good experiences with 11 people.
In other words, it’s a numbers game. You know consumers are naturally less inclined to shout about the good stuff you do, but if your customer satisfaction is high, you’re well placed to reap the benefits of word-of-mouth marketing.
4. Grow Your Audience and Sales
We already know satisfied customers are more likely to tell their friends and family about your brand, which in turn gets you in front of a wider audience. Best MBA college in Bangalore
However, did you know those satisfied customers will also spend more?
According to the same American Express survey referenced above, U.S. consumers are prepared to spend 17 percent more if a brand delivers excellent service.
What’s more, 84 percent of companies that improve customer experience report an upturn in revenue.
How to Measure Customer Satisfaction
It’s not enough to simply hope your customer satisfaction will improve. You need concrete plans to drive it forward, backed by robust data. To do this, you need to gather customer feedback through polls, surveys, and feedback sessions. Here are three types of feedback to collect to help you measure customer satisfaction and examples of questions to ask.
1. Overall Satisfaction
It can be helpful to gauge a customer’s general opinion of your product or service before drilling down into the specifics. Positive answers indicate they are happy with their purchase decision, while negative ones suggest they have some degree of buyer remorse.
Example question: Overall, how satisfied are you with [Product X]?
2. Repurchase Intent
Given the close ties between customer satisfaction and loyalty, it makes sense to use a customer’s repeat purchasing plans to measure their general happiness. Consumers who say they are likely to buy again may also be more likely to leave positive reviews or share their experiences with friends and family.
Example question: Will you shop at [Company X] again in the next month?
3. Word of Mouth
NPS customer satisfaction surveys are centered on a single question about whether or not the customer would recommend a given brand or product. This sort of feedback allows companies to understand whether the user’s experience aligns with their expectations.
Example question: Would you recommend [Company X] to your family and friends?
Customer satisfaction should be the main focus of an organization because customers drive business. Collecting customer satisfaction data can help your company determine what is working well with your products, services, and internal processes, and what you need to improve or change completely. In this article, you will learn what customer satisfaction is, how to measure it effectively and why it's important for the success of your business.
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