Just about every small business wants to keep their customers happy and returning to them as often as possible, so tips for improving customer satisfaction are always important. This is more than just basic customer service: customer satisfaction entails the entire experience a customer has with your company and their final feeling at the end of the interaction they have with your business.
Below are three simple and great ways to ensure your customers
Listen to Feedback and Interaction
The best perspective on the customer experience as a whole comes from—you guessed it—the customers themselves. If you don’t ask the customers how their overall experience was then you will never really know how your company is doing on a regular basis. So the first thing that your company should do to improve overall customer satisfaction is to ask your customers for their opinion. While people usually hate filling out surveys or anything that will take up too much of their time, providing a forum—both online or in a physical store—will give customers an outlet to convey their feelings to you. If you don’t want to provide a survey, you can encourage engagement with your business page on consumer review sites, like Yelp.
The next step is to take all of this feedback into account and implement changes where you deem necessary. While some things customers say will be isolated incidents or not very helpful for you when trying improve their overall experience, a number of comments will be integral to your customer’s overall satisfaction on a more regular basis. If there are less-than-desirable reviews, you should take the proper steps in addressing the negative reviews.
Make Sure All Employees Know How to Treat Customers
While you may have an idea of how you would like to be treated as a customer, the employees who are interfacing with customers on a constant basis may not. Take the time to train your employees to treat customers the way they would like to be treated through some basic lectures or courses. Employees can be paid for this time or served lunch, so they don’t feel like they are being reprimanded in a group setting. In this training, employees should be encouraged to think about the big picture, especially in an age where customers have more reach than ever before. One bad review online can be relatively damaging to a business, so all customers should be treated as if they are the most important. If these meetings are executed right this will feel like a team building exercise as much as it feels like a way to improve the overall customer experience.
Go Above and Beyond
Look at what your competitors are doing in regards to customer service and try to make the customer service your company offers even better. Hire greeters to stand by doors and have employees ready to help any customer at the drop of a hat, showing them where a particular product is or try and answer any question they might have. This level of customer service should also translate to the online experience, with prompt responses to any questions a customer has about certain products or services, via phone or email. The better all of these components of customer service are in your business, the better the customer satisfaction will probably be.
