Customer satisfaction is essential for your business’s health. But with a decline in UK customer satisfaction, solutions must be sought and implemented. Once a customer or potential customer has finished the buying process, you can't forget about them. There are many ways you can improve your team’s customer service skills, as you must listen to consumers to improve their emotional connection with your company. Understanding customer satisfaction levels in your customer population is essential for your business success. Not only do you need to measure satisfaction, but you also need to react to the feedback to manage and achieve customer expectations.
This article will discuss customer satisfaction importance, how it can impact your business, and what you can do to improve it.
Customer satisfaction is becoming harder to achieve. In a post-Covid world of economic challenges and a shortage of employee talent, research by the Institute of Customer Service showed that UK customer satisfaction has declined in the past year, and businesses that do not invest in customer satisfaction could struggle to survive.
In addition, they found that UK businesses are spending an estimated £11.4 billion a month in lost productivity because employees are spending, on average, 4.8 working days a month on customer issues.
Competition to survive in the current climate of instability is fierce, and you need to stand apart from your competitors more than ever and satisfy high customer expectations. Positive customer satisfaction can help you achieve this.
Therefore, you can use short customer satisfaction surveys to gain some quick feedback about the customer experience journey so far and assess how you could improve their experience. Not only does this show that you are interested in them and value them and their opinions, but you can also make changes based on real feedback rather than speculation.
Forbes carries out Halo 100, a review of the best companies for customer service and satisfaction. And while not all companies can possibly strive to make it onto their list, it does illustrate customer satisfaction importance and how it can boost or weaken your brand.
Also, if you have fewer customer complaints, your employees may be more motivated, helping retention. The cost of hiring and training staff is excessive, and in an ideal world, satisfied customers equal satisfied employees and less employee turnover.
Once you have details of your customers’ expectations and feedback about your service or product, you will know what is working and where you can improve. This way, you should be able to increase the customer experience, loyalty and retention, reduce marketing costs and focus on the areas that didn’t score so well.
At Momentive our SurveyMonkey service can help you with consumer segmentation and review customer satisfaction over time and across locations. Sign-up for free now to improve your customer satisfaction.
Knowing how satisfied your customers are should encourage you to strive harder to improve in areas that don’t score highly. If your customers are happy you can continue to keep focused on satisfaction but also on other aspects of the business. Low satisfaction should become a business priority and included in strategy.
Understanding customer satisfaction is important and the only obvious disadvantage is you might not like what you hear! It takes time and effort to collect and analyse feedback, but once you have it, you can improve and provide a better product or service to meet customer expectations.
Yes! By looking at the market and seeing who does satisfaction well, whether or not they are in the same industry, you can still look at what they’re doing to succeed. This might be customer service offers or regular polls, or requests for feedback.
You can combine types of surveys and either switch between them or run them for different areas of customer feedback. Together, different surveys will highlight customer loyalty, service, the likelihood of customer referrals and satisfaction.