7 Small Steps For BETTER Customer Satisfaction

This is a guest post by Damian Wolf.

Smart business owners have discovered that the best method of survival in today’s market is through customer retention rather than through finding new customers. It costs more to find, impress and encourage a new customer than it is to convince a current customer to use your product or service again, which is why your focus should be placed on customer satisfaction.

How many of your customers are repeat buyers? And how often do you lose customers because of your service methods? If you want to be successful, you need to show your customers how you’re better than your competition. Following these 7 tips will help you improve your customer satisfaction – if you apply them, your customer retention will increase.

1. Get To Know Your Market

To improve customer satisfaction, you have to be more knowledgeable about the target customers you want to serve and the market you want to enter. You already know that you have competitions, so in order to be successful, you need to treat your customers differently and to do that, you need to know them.

What do they value? What are their greatest problems? pains? challenges? what are their aspirations? The more information you have about your customers, the more equipped you are to treat them differently than your competitions do.

2. Give More Details

Customers like to know all the options they have when it comes to working with a company. Often times, customers don’t know everything you have to offer, so when you make a presentation, give them all the information – but, keep it short and simple. Don’t make your sentences longer than they need to be.

Also, don’t stop with just words, show something that proves what you’re saying – the conditions in which you make your product, the materials it’s made of, or just a simple test – if you’re selling perfumes, let your customers smell them.

3. Ask For Feedback

No matter how much information you’ve gathered about your customers, there’s still a whole lot on their mind that they might be withholding. So always ask for their feedback. Or what better way to gather more information than to hear from the horses’ mouth? You see, you have a long way until you reach perfection, so it’s important to always work on your products and the best help you can get is from your customers.

Dedicate your time to ask them what they would do differently or what changes they would like to see in the future. All you need is one email address that you’ll publicly display for complaints and suggestions or create a set of questionnaire that you email to them or ask them to answer online.

4. Respect Customer Privacy

As an entrepreneur, the pressure to make sales is ever present so you often find yourself chasing after customers. Just don’t be too aggressive with your follow-up, you’ll earn their respect if you give them space. Your newsletters should be sent often, but don’t choke them with too much info. If you think that some of your customers would like to receive daily emails, then make a special box on your website where people can check in and leave an address.

5. Treat Your Customers Well

This is the golden rule for everyone who’s into sales. Treat your customer with respect, but don’t be sleazy. It’s not a one-way street – if you make your customers happy they’ll make your bank account happier. It’s also recommended that you offer a refund. That way, your customers will buy products with less thinking because they’ll know that they can get their money back if they’re not satisfied with your product.

Also, there’s not a single person in the world that doesn’t like attention or gifts. Sending just a Thank You card to their e-mail or home address will make your customers fall in love with you. Samples or coupons will also do the trick of keeping your customers loyal. click here, to find more ways to treat your customer well.

6. Respond Promptly

Communication is very important when dealing with customers. If you decide to communicate with your customers using e-mail – which is definitely the fastest way – keep it opened every day for a few hours. Don’t neglect your Inbox, if you leave it to fill up for a week or two, your customers will think that you don’t care about them. And this is obviously not good for business. Here are a few useful tips about keeping your Inbox clean.

7. Make Use of Technology

Every business – whether large or small — is always looking for ways to improve customer satisfaction. You have a nifty way of answering the phone, you throw in freebies every once in a while and you always smile when customers walk through the door. Those are all fine, but have you considered using technology to improve customer satisfaction?

So always do regular updates and improvements for your business software to keep in touch with new trends and opportunities. A good example is Customer Relationship Management [CRM] softwares. They help you manage the whole interaction that a company has with its customer, whether it is sales or service-related.

About the Author:

Damian Wolf has been a writer and an online ethusiast since 2009. He mostly writes about business, finance and self improvement. You can follow him on twitter.