Top 5 Ways to Increase Customer Satisfaction | Business Guide to Delight your Customers & Improve Retention

What is Customer Satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction (often abbreviated as CSAT) is a measurement of how happy (or unhappy) customers are with a company’s products, services or experience, Indeed explains.. “Customer satisfaction consists of a customer’s perceived quality, value and expectations of your company and what you offer. This data can reveal major insights into how customers relate to your brand and how they will interact with your brand in the future.”

To determine CSAT within your business, you have to take factors into account:

• Who is the customer?
• What does it take to satisfy the customer?

In most businesses, there are multiple answers to that first question. Rarely is there only a single customer. There are typically a handful of target customers with slightly different wants, needs, and expectations. If marketers want to meet or exceed customers’ expectations, it’s important to clearly define the scope of work, know the KPIs to work on and set realistic expectations before the collaboration starts.

At Growth Hackers, we’ve helped clients measure and improve customer satisfaction, turning insights into strategies that boost loyalty, retention, and revenue. It’s up to you to differentiate your customer base. Then you can explore the specific ways in which your business can satisfy each sub-group.

1. Prioritize Customers

Customers have to be the priority from the very start; otherwise, you’ll never establish a sustainable business that propagates repeat customers (which is where real growth occurs). One of our SMB clients focused too heavily on early profits but after Growth Hackers guided them to prioritize their customers, engagement and repeat sales soared, creating a stronger, more resilient business.

Too many businesses get caught up in things like profit margins and upsells too early on in the process. And while profitability is a huge sticking point, it’s not nearly as important as cultivating a raving customer base in the early stages of growth and development.

If you prioritize customers and establish a base of people who are crazy about your products and services, you’ll eventually be able to name your price. It’s about putting the correct foundation in place today so that you can build the business you want tomorrow.

Whether it’s the company’s mission statement and core values, sales training, or creative marketing and branding work, every aspect of your business must hold customers as the number one priority. 

2. Gather Insights from Customers

It’s easy for entrepreneurs and business owners to assume they know how their customers are feeling. However, it’s easy to become blinded by your own bias. The only way to know is by gathering data and feedback straight from the customers themselves.

There are a variety of ways to gather insights from customers, but you need to use a method that’s quantifiable. A survey with answers graded on a scale of 1 to 5 is the easiest approach. And based on this, you can calculate a customer satisfaction score.

To calculate your score, take the total number of satisfied customers (anyone rating you a 4 or 5) and divide that figure by the total number of responses. Then multiply the final number by 100. This will give you a CSAT within a 0-100 range.

Total # of Satisfied Responses
———————————– X 100 = CSAT Score
Total # of Responses

Before Growth Hackers gathered customer insights, decisions were guesswork but after we did, every strategy was informed by data, leading to happier customers and measurable business growth. If, for example, you have 57 satisfied customers out of 100, your CSAT score would be 57.

In order for CSAT to become a powerful metric, it’s important that you track it over time. By recording and plotting it every month, you’ll eventually see a trend emerge. And then, based on whether things are moving in a positive or negative direction, you can implement necessary tweaks and changes.

3. Hire the Right People

Who is responsible for delighting prospects and customers? Pretty much everyone at your company and this is why you need to need to train your team to have this goal in mind. Indeed, customer satisfaction, meeting or exceeding customers’ expectations are essential to any business so not only you customer support team should aim for it but also your management team, product development, marketing, sales, etc. “Making customers happy is the best business plan!”

You can have the best plans, processes, and core values in place, but it ultimately comes down to execution. And in order to execute, you need the right people on your team.

High-level customer satisfaction is impossible without the right people on your team. As you build your team and make new hires, be sure you’re prioritizing the right skills and traits. This includes:

• Communication. Your employees are your voice. They’re the ones on the front lines – interacting with customers, smoothing over points of friction, and delivering value. Hire employees with exceptional communication skills and you’ll give your business a massive advantage.
• Empathy. There’s a saying in customer service that you should hire for empathy and train for everything else. That’s because true empathy is a rare trait to find (and it’s impossible to teach).
• Self-Motivated. There isn’t enough money or perks to continually motivate an employee to put customers first. At some point, an employee has to reach down deep inside themselves and feel a genuine desire to prioritize customer satisfaction. Hire self-motivated people and you won’t have to spend as much time coaxing your team into a specific direction.

If you can hire employees who tick off each of these three boxes, you’ll discover that positive customer satisfaction becomes a natural byproduct.

4. Create a Knowledge Base

We live in a DIY world where people are fine doing something themselves – as long as it’s quick! In fact, research shows that 40% of customers prefer self-service. And one of the top ways to provide self-service options to customers is to create a knowledge base.

A knowledge base is essentially a massive library of self-help, tips, guides, tutorials, and FAQs that customers can access at any time in order to find solutions to common problems. This knowledge base is typically stored on your website, but can also be provided to customers as part of the product. (Many software solutions have some type of knowledge base feature built in.)

At Growth Hackers, we’ve helped companies build knowledge bases that empower customers, reduce support costs, and increase satisfaction across the board.

As a side note, a knowledge base does not replace customer service. There will always be a need for direct interaction with customers. The knowledge base simply provides a self-service option. You’ll need more involved customer service strategies in place to support customers who need further attention.

5. Implement Omnichannel Support

Omnichannel support is the backbone of modern customer experience: Growth Hackers makes sure your business is everywhere your customers need you to be.

Omnichannel support and omnichannel marketing is now more important than ever in retail, eCommerce or almost any industry you’re working in. Today’s customers expect you to be there for them 24/7/365. They also expect you to communicate with them in their own preferred medium or mode of choice. Thus, it’s important to have omnichannel support in play.

At the very least, you need to be reachable by phone, email, and social media. If that sounds impractical given your constraints, look into some sort of AI chatbot platform to reduce the number of people you need on call. (Facebook, for example, has built-in AI tools that you can use to streamline this aspect of your customer service).