73 percent of customers share good brand experiences with their friends. A good experience goes a long way in increasing customer satisfaction.
As a business owner, whether you’re running a dental practice or dental supplies store, one of your primary goals is to make your customers happy and satisfied. Greater customer satisfaction equals greater customer loyalty and, importantly, increased sales.
However, in theory, improving customer satisfaction is easy. But in practice, it’s a big challenge for business owners. In most instances, you’ll find yourself spending a lot of money while achieving small results.
So, how do you boost customer satisfaction without spending a boatload of money?
We’ve got the scoop. Keep reading!
1. Offer a Great Product or Service
Often, customers don’t ask for too much. Once they come to your practice, they expect to receive the best service. Meet their expectations and they’ll walk away happy and satisfied. Money well spent.
Offering a great product or service that meets the needs of your customers or clients is a surefire way to improve their satisfaction levels. And, in this case, service isn’t just your core offering. It’s the wholesome experience your business provides.
If you run a dental practice, for instance, your dental services might be stellar, but if your front office services – i.e. interaction with your receptionist – isn’t excellent, most of your patients will leave unsatisfied. They might love you as a dentist but dislike your practice as a whole.
Offering great services doesn’t cost a lot of money. Sometimes all you need to do is hire the right front-office personnel and implement policies designed to boost customer satisfaction.
As an example, it’s easy to think that it’s part of a receptionist’s job to smile at a customer. This isn’t always the case. If you don’t make it company policy for your employees to smile at customers and be warm toward them, they might not see the need to do so. Great customer service begins with a smile.
2. Listen to and Act on Customer Feedback
A customer doesn’t just want to buy your product or service. They also want to tell you what they think about your offering.
But have you enabled your customers to leave their feedback?
If you run a brick and mortar establishment, installing a suggestion box in the waiting area is one way of allowing your customers to leave their feedback. The only problem? We aren’t in the 90s anymore.
The modern consumer leaves their feedback online. This means you need to make it easy for them to post their feedback on the right channels. Setting up a Facebook page for your business, for example, is an effective measure.
If you don’t make it easy for your customers to give you feedback online, they will post their views on their own platforms. This makes it hard for you to locate and respond to their feedback.
A business owner who wants to improve customer service investigates and acts on customer feedback. If need be, you should also reach out to the customer and explain the measures you’re taking to rectify an issue, or even to say a simple “thank you for your feedback.”
3. Enable Multi-Channel Support
How easily can a customer reach your business?
Can they reach you on the phone? What about on website live chat? On email? On social media?
In short, customers want multi-channel support. If a customer is browsing on your website and needs to contact your business, they don’t want to fetch their phone and give you a call. They want to reach you on live chat.
If a customer is one using your mobile phone app, they want to be able to contact you in-app. If they want to call you at any time, they want to find someone at the other end of the line. In a recent survey, about 40 percent of the respondents said the biggest aspect of customer service is getting their issue resolved quickly.
On that note, while calls are an effective way to engage with your customers, they do present a big challenge, especially if you don’t have 24-hour on-call support. You can overcome this challenge by having an auto attendant. Read this article to learn more on how auto attendants work.
4. Ensure Business Values Match Customer Values
63 percent of consumers in the United States consider a brand’s purpose before making a purchase.
What’s your business’s purpose? Does this purpose resonate with your target market?
An easy, low-cost way to improve customer satisfaction is to not only build a purpose-driven brand but also ensure the purpose matches what your customers believe in.
For example, if your customers are keen on protecting the environment, they certainly won’t do business with a company that doesn’t care about the environment. Your company must embrace environmentally sustainable practices if you want to attract this target market and make customers happy.
5. Build a Positive Company Culture
Sometimes improving customer satisfaction doesn’t even directly involve your customers.
A positive company culture, for instance, has little to do with your customers but everything to do with your employees. It’s your staff that’s a direct beneficiary of positive company culture.
But when customers know that you go the extra mile to satisfy your employees, they’ll be proud of your company and be more motivated to do business with you. No customer would want to purchase from a company that mistreats its workers.
Building a positive company culture isn’t a costly undertaking. It’s not about purchasing state-of-the-art appliances.
Culture is largely about the workplace policies you implement; the diversity and fairness, the effort to reward and motivate your employees.
Improving Customer Satisfaction Made Cheap!
Improving customer satisfaction isn’t always about offering outlandish discounts or loyalty programs that cut deeply into your bottom line. Neither is about offering top-of-the-line apps – though these do help.
Often, it’s the little things that make the biggest difference; the little things fleshed out above. Implement them and see your customer go away smiling 😊
While at it, keep reading our blog for more small business tips.