When your marketing guru says that they need to improve their content output, it means they want to make your customers happy. Similarly, when your IT crew tells you that certain pages on your website don’t load fast enough to meet the latest search engine criteria, their ultimate goal is to prevent impatient, annoyed customers going to a competitor. Customer satisfaction as a purpose comes in many different shapes and forms, and a wide range of your brand’s milestones and goals. What may appear as a temporary focus of your social media strategist is actually just one part of an overarching, common agenda: to satisfy your customer base.
If you have focused on the menial tasks that come to your desk every day, and if you’ve let your team be guided by numbers alone, you most likely aren’t really making the most of your potential to achieve customer satisfaction. Let’s go over a few reasons that can inspire you to take better care of your customers and focus on satisfaction within every strategy you create.
Improving your brand’s reputation
Once upon a time, in an era that preceded our digitally-enhanced lives, people would go straight to the source to ask for tips and tricks: your mom, your dad, your spouse, your best friend. All of these people close to us would share their experiences with a certain product or service and give you a life-changing perspective on whether or not you should trust a business with your money and loyalty. The current, contemporary equivalent of such recommendations are reviews.
Today, thanks to social media growth, having a website, and a slew of platforms that serve the singular purpose to collect impressions, your brand needs to inspire positive reviews. They are the most powerful vessels you have to get more customers to come to your doors.
Did you know that 90% of customers read those online reviews before they visit your store? And that 74% of customers claim that a good review has increased the trust they feel for a brand? That means that every review matters. Inspire good experiences with your brand, elicit positive reviews, let the world see them, and you’ll have a much greater chance of inspiring loyalty and growth.
Solidifying your cash flow
What every business owner knows is that making your customers happy is vital to that bottom line. More importantly, satisfied clients lead to a steady, stable cash flow, which in turn helps you reinvest your profits properly, manage your debtors successfully, and ultimately stay competitive in your industry. Various forms of financing can help you protect this aspect of your operations, but it’s key to remember that satisfied customers will pay in full, and pay in time, especially when given the opportunity to pay in a way that suits the most.
This brings us to one other point that affects customer satisfaction levels greatly: diverse payment methods. When you work with a single payment provider, you risk alienating a major segment of your audience. Then again, become creative by offering installments, fixed monthly fees with early-bird discounts, and a collaboration with all sorts of payment platforms, and you’ll instantly resolve a common satisfaction issue for your users.
Building loyalty
If there’s one thing all businesses fear, it’s competition. The world certainly doesn’t lack diversity when it comes to a range of brands who offer the same or similar service like yours, effectively challenging your role as the leader in the field. It’s often not what makes you stand out but what makes your customers happy that ultimately lets you keep them coming back for more. A customer treated well and with care will be far more likely to trust their choices with you, even if there is a slightly superior brand out there. Someone who doesn’t feel all that special as your customer will be more likely to peruse elsewhere and pick a different name off the shelf the next time.
Add to that, every business owner knows that keeping an existing customer happy is not only easier on the budget, but also more effective for your entire strategy and your ROI. More specifically, acquiring a new customer can cost up to five times more than investing in retention, and increasing retention by as little as 5% can lead to a 95% increase in profits. Simply put, loyalty pays.
Brand differentiation
Another problem that arises from this mass of choice presented to us is for brands to stand out, even when they really do stand out due to their stellar, innovative product or service. The overflown market with too many moving pieces hardly has the time to slow down and give you a gold star for your efforts – it boils down to how well you impress your customers so that they begin to notice how amazing you are.
The service alone is not enough to make you worthy and different, but the manner in which you deliver that service can make all the difference in the eyes of your audience. If you have been in search for ways not to blend in, but to make yourself known, customer satisfaction is the missing piece of your puzzle.
Everything from your cash flow, online and offline image, all the way to your long-term success heavily depend on happy customers. Make sure to invest time, creativity, and consistency to put a smile on your customers’ faces, and your brand will have a chance to stand the test of time.
