How To Increase Customer Satisfaction And Loyalty
Operating an online business is very similar to running a traditional brick-and-mortar business in that you need to maintain your current customer base along with adding new customers. One of the best ways to accomplish this is through positive customer satisfaction.
By maintaining a professional attitude and focusing on customer satisfaction, you will not only keep those people that already know about your business but can also build through referrals from these customers to potential customers.
The big question now is how do you increase customer satisfaction and then maintain their loyalty to your site. Here are a few tips which have been found to be effective in accomplishing both of these:
Online surveys
Online surveys are a great way to measure customer satisfaction and to learn what people like about your site and what areas may need improvement.
You should make your survey user-friendly and easy to complete; the more difficult it is to fill out or the longer the survey, the less chance you will have of getting meaningful information.
Get customer feedback
This will require you to actively reach out to your customers to find out what they liked and did not like about their experiences with your company.
By doing this action, it shows your customers that you do care about their opinions and that you are trying to collect information concerning customer satisfaction in order to continually improve your service to them.
Again, the survey should be short, clear, and to the point; you do not want your customers to feel overburdened in providing you with feedback.
Reach out to non-responders
After waiting about 15 days, send out another email reminder to those that did not respond to your first invitation.
In this reminder, make sure you inform your customers that customer satisfaction is important to you, and without their input, you can not successfully improve to meet their expectations.
You can consider a third mailing if you have not received the response that you hope for. However, this may not produce significantly more responses.
Review results
Now it is time to bring your results together and see what types of trends exist. If you had rating scales in your survey, compile all the numbers to see where your score falls.
Follow-up interviews
While calculating the scores is important, be sure to flag surveys with significant comments for additional follow-up if required.
If these comments refer to a specific experience, you may want to consider additional contact with the customer to find out more information. This could lead you to an area in which you can improve.
Analyze
After completing follow-up interviews, review and analyze the survey feedback for specific trends or causes of dissatisfaction. Determine trends and actions that can be taken to improve problem areas.
Say thanks
Do not forget to thank those people that took the time to try to help you improve your customer satisfaction.
If possible, outline some of the changes the company will make in response to the information collected by the survey. This will let the customer know that their input is having an effect on your company’s service.
