Customer satisfaction is an essential element of a company's growth and prosperity. It ensures customer loyalty and the company's good reputation. From actively listening to customers, to personalizing their experience and measuring their satisfaction, here is how to satisfy clients and ensure their loyalty.

Know your customers well

“Active listening” is at the heart of high-quality customer service: as a company, you must take the feedback of existing customers into consideration.

Pay attention to customer feedback

To satisfy your customers, it is essential to know their opinion on the services or products you offer. Understanding your customers' expectations allows you to redirect your efforts towards the right areas and to better manage your brand image.

When the customer approaches your company, practice active listening. This must be applied at every moment of the customer journey.

• Before the purchase, when the customer is interested in the service or the product, they communicate about their needs, desires and expectations.
• When they benefit from your services or products, they communicate about their needs for improvement, and share their positive or negative impressions.
• Feedback to the customer service department after the purchase is another valuable source of information in order to avoid having unsatisfied clients.

Set up a monitoring system

Listening to your customer's voice is not only done when they initiate contact with the company; it must also be done externally, in all the places where existing customers are likely to talk about your company and services.

It is then essential to set up a monitoring system to know what is being said in strategic places. Among them are:

• Social media;
• Google reviews;
• Comments on review sites;
• Ratings and reviews on partner sites;
• Blog posts and comments.

Collect customer data

All this data collected must be centralized - each customer-facing employee can report feedback in real time, using CRM tools, that can eventually be used by any departments.

Brands must have a perfect knowledge of their customers, and of the reasons some are satisfied while others aren't. This enables the company to have prepared solutions in advance for a reactive and personalized treatment of complaints, an essential element of customer satisfaction.

Put customers at the center of your culture

How can you satisfy a customer without it being at the heart of your company's values? Your staff must make this their priority by defending the company's values with an irreproachable level of service.

A commitment to values

The customer relationship is established partly on the brand's values and commitments. When dealing with a company, the customer must understand its commitments, values and ethics.

The brand should have transparency, total integrity and a deep respect for its customers and staff as primary values. These represent the foundation of the customer relationship and must be defined and communicated to all employees.

Define a corporate culture and share it with staff

Customer-facing employees represent the brand and its values. It is essential for them to be trained according to the corporate culture that has already been defined.

Company values must be perfectly known by the staff, as well as the customer satisfaction goals - their mission is to achieve them.

How to satisfy a customer: put the need before the product

When the customer is at the center of the company culture, meeting their needs takes priority over a product-oriented strategy. Customer satisfaction increases when the company focuses on identifying and meeting the client's needs and expectations first.

From this point of view, sales goals can be less strict, with satisfaction goals taking precedence. Customer satisfaction is the key to loyalty, and therefore sales and success.

How to satisfy a customer: offer a personalized customer experience!

Thanks to active listening, the brand can have a detailed knowledge of its customers and can therefore offer them, in addition to impeccable services, a personalized experience.

Segment your customer base

Offering a personalized customer experience requires segmentation. Thanks to the customer data collected and centralized in a CRM, you can classify your customers into lists or groups according to relevant criteria (age, gender, average shopping basket, location, etc.).

By personalizing your communication, as well as your offers, you ensure that you target the right people with the right message. Personalization helps customers feel heard, understood, recognized and valued. These goals are essential when it comes to satisfying a customer.

Offer a seamless and intuitive customer journey

The customer experience must be positive at each step of the journey and on each of the media used. Thanks to the previously defined personas, you can understand your customers’ expectations, needs, and also habits.

This allows you to establish a clear customer path where the experience must be as positive and seamless as possible. For example, offer an intuitive, easy-to-use appointment scheduling software that can be customized to perfectly fit your company's offer.

How to satisfy a customer: maintain the customer relationship

If you want a satisfied customer to become loyal, you must maintain your relationship with them; put in place concrete actions to forge and maintain the link, and create a strong customer culture that will last.

Keep in touch with the client

Maintaining a link with your customers following any purchase is essential to turn them into loyal customers.

For a high quality relationship, it will be necessary to find good reasons to contact them through the most appropriate communication channels.

Show your customers that you care about their opinion after a purchase by offering them the possibility to rate your products or services, send them personalized offers, communicate about your new collections...

Make sure you choose a reasonable frequency of communication at the risk of annoying your prospect!

Reward your customers

A little attention is always appreciated: when a customer is loyal, don't hesitate to congratulate them with rewards, advantages, and special offers.

You can also thank your customers by sending a message on a specific occasion: subscription renewal, new purchase, account anniversary or even a special event (new year...).

Celebrating these events and implementing an active loyalty strategy helps to give an emotional aspect to the customer relationship.

Handle claims quickly

You cannot satisfy a customer without answering their complaints! If a client has a question, a request, or a specific problem following a purchase, they must be able to easily contact the customer service and receive a fast and personalized answer.

You should also think about setting up FAQs and an automated response system allowing the customer to quickly find answers to their questions by themselves.

Measure your customers' delight

After implementing these numerous actions and areas of improvement, it is essential to evaluate the degree of customer satisfaction in real time using measurement tools.

Satisfaction survey

To evaluate the level of customer satisfaction at a given moment, the most effective tool is undoubtedly the satisfaction survey. It can be carried out in different ways: directly with the customer, by telephone, by email.

In any case, do not wait until after the purchase to conduct it.

Here again, it is possible to segment the customer base by creating, for example, a specific form for new or regular customers.

Analyze the information you collect

The satisfaction survey is a new and easy way to collect valuable data on your customers' opinions. It can be useful to compare answers in order to understand the evolution of their satisfaction over time or the disparities between groups of customers.

The comparison can be made according to:

• Time periods,
• Age groups,
• Points of sale...

It is up to you to choose the comparisons that seem the most relevant. You will then just have to draw the conclusions for your customers’ happiness.

You now have all the information you need to keep your customers happy. Feel free to check out our other helpful articles on our blog. And to find out more about our product for your business, contact one of our experts.