How To Improve Customer Satisfaction

Improving customer satisfaction is an effective way to earn and maintain long-term customer loyalty. For customers to return to your business time and again, they need to be satisfied by the experience that your business delivers – making it essential to business growth. While this may seem relatively straightforward, it can be challenging to earn customer satisfaction in practice. Many aspects of customer service are driven or influenced by factors outside of your control, which often makes maintaining customer satisfaction consistently a challenge, even for established businesses with sufficient resources dedicated to customer service.

Customer satisfaction also plays an integral role in enhancing your brand reputation, which can influence whether a customer will consider buying products or services in the first place. If your business commits to improving customer satisfaction consistently, the resulting increase in brand reputation can contribute to new customer acquisition, which drives business growth. Customer satisfaction initiatives can help your business grow, both in size and profitability. The importance of improving customer satisfaction – and the customer service function as whole – encourages many businesses to outsource customer service to a specialist like Impact.

We explore how to improve customer satisfaction through implementing proven strategies and processes, from understanding customer needs and providing exceptional customer service through to empowering your team and delivering on promises.

Improving Customer Satisfaction

Improving customer satisfaction can transform the effectiveness of your customer service operations. Ultimately, it can significantly improve your customer experience and help you to build loyalty among your existing customer base. You can also start to unlock many of the benefits that delivering world-class service brings.

As a UK based outsourced call centre that specialises in delivering quality customer service for some of the UK’s leading brands, we share strategies that can successfully improve customer satisfaction in your business.

Understanding Customer Needs

Understanding what your customer needs is an essential way to improve their satisfaction with your brand. By knowing what they need from you and what their expectations are, you can start to create a customer experience that can meet these needs and expectations consistently. It is also important to regularly review customer requirements, as they often evolve over time as products or services, markets and external factors change. For example, during COVID, customer expectations around the availability of customer service shifted as support hours were typically reduced. Customers still wanted and expected exceptional customer service, so businesses had to prioritise ensuring their customers could still access support when they needed it.

Developing a greater understanding of your customer journey is a great way to uncover varying customer needs at different stages and mapping these will help you pinpoint key pain points, identify issues and develop resolutions or ways to manage these. Being aware of the key issues can also assist with resource planning and scheduling, including making more customer service resource and agents available at critical times so that expectations are met.

In addition to customer journey mapping, collecting feedback direct from customers can uncover insights that you may not have otherwise identified. Customer surveys are a great way to connect with your customers and demonstrate that you value their input and are eager to better understand their needs. This can take the form of a digital survey (via an in-house or third-party platform) or a telephone survey where call centre agents will directly call customers and seek their feedback.

We are experienced at assisting with surveys and have delivered many successful campaigns that have identified invaluable insights for our clients. These are then used to drive improvements in customer satisfaction and customer service delivery at scale. Our outbound team are ready to connect with your customers, collect surveys, and report back to you using your preferred reporting format. As part of these customer surveys, we can report on many customer service metrics including CSAT (customer satisfaction) and customer effort to provide an accurate picture as to your current levels of customer satisfaction. By understanding these you will be best placed to make improvements and measure your progress.

Providing Exceptional Customer Service

Providing exceptional customer service is at the heart of improving customer satisfaction. Delighting customers with convenient, timely and helpful customer service helps to win their loyalty and ensures that they have a great impression of your business. Customers who experience exceptional service can become brand advocates and are more likely to remain a customer even if they encounter issues from time to time. This extends to customer complaints: a well-handled customer complaint helps you to retain a customer, whereas a poorly handled issue can cost your business that customer.

Exceptional customer service is delivered when support is available via the communication channels that your customers use and are most comfortable with, whether that is email, phone, web chat or social media. Being present and ready to help your customers via their preferred channel is part of providing excellent customer convenience and creates a great first impression. Depending on the products or services that your business provides, you might have customers within various different demographic groups, each of which will have their own preferences regarding the channels that they utilise. At Impact, we provide omni-channel customer service to our clients, so we can deliver exceptional customer service to your customers across their preferred communication channels. Our customer service solutions are trusted by some of the UK’s leading brands and we have great success in improving customer satisfaction. Why not contact our customer service outsourcing specialists to discuss how we can help you by calling 01794 230 230 or completing our contact form?

As part of exceptional customer service, many customers rightly expect timely responses to their issues and queries. From a customer perspective, there is little more frustrating than having to wait a disproportionate length of time for a response. Ensuring that adequate customer service resources are available to handle queries in a timely way is critical to great service. We provide our clients’ customers with timely responses across multiple communication channels — over the phone, via email, live chat or social media. Our agents always strive to reach a first-time resolution wherever possible, resulting in a great customer experience and efficiency gains for the businesses that we represent.

Great customer service is not just about proven processes and systems; it also requires customer service agents to be equipped with the necessary soft skills to interact with customers in a personalised and empathetic way. Personalising interactions to each customer with tonation and intelligent choice of words can make all the difference to the interaction, making it easier to build a rapport with the customer and achieve successful customer service outcomes. Furthermore, no exceptional customer interaction is complete without empathy. Customer service agents with empathy who are actively listening to the customer to understand their needs by identifying cues during an interaction and adapting their approach to take account of these. For example, if a customer is frustrated or angry during an interaction, an agent would need to take the time to carefully listen to their concerns and calmly respond in a way that directly addresses their specific query or issue.

Empowering The Customer Service Team

Empowered customer service teams are able to help customers quickly and efficiency, without having to resort to escalation or consultation with other agents or supervisors. This promotes faster decision making, fewer delays and more first-time resolutions, all of which drive valuable efficiencies for your business.

Empowering agents through delegated decision making and the creation of customer charters that set out key policies, procedures and levels at which decisions can be taken by agents helps to accelerate decision making. If an interaction and issue is outside of the standard policy and procedure, but within certain parameters, the agent can be empowered to take a decision that is in the best interests of the customer and business. If required and necessary, the issue can then be escalated to a supervisor or manager. By empowering agents in this way, it is possible to deliver quicker issue resolution, happier customers and increased customer satisfaction. It also results in efficiency gains and cost savings for the business.

For example, a customer might call to request a refund that is just outside of the standard refund threshold. This would usually result in an escalation and delays, both of which frustrate a customer and could cost a business more time and resources to resolve. However, when an agent has an additional refund threshold tolerance of 10-15% that they can use at their discretion, they are more likely to be able to approve the refund without unnecessary delays or costs.

Similar to the example above, a customer might have a faulty product that they require a replacement for and would usually have to return it according to the standard policy. However, the cost of returning the product may be excessively expensive as it would require a large or bulky item collection service. An empowered agent would be able to approve a replacement without a return, saving the business the expense of the collection and then having to store and dispose of the faulty product. In this case, acting outside of standard procedures is in the best interests of the customer and the business. While this course of action depends on product value and the business’s preferences, delivering a quick resolution to the customer makes commercial sense for the business, and an empowered agent can deliver the best outcome for all.

In order to empower a customer service team so they can improve customer satisfaction, agents need to have the skills and experience to take decisions and confidently interact with customers. Providing on-going training will enhance their product/service knowledge, become confident with key systems, familiarise them with critical processes and equip them with the necessary soft skills. At Impact, we commit significant resources to the on-going training of our customer service agents. We complement our training with regular coaching and provide feedback to agents so they can be at their best during customer interactions. By training and supporting agents in this way, we are able to empower them and delegate decision making for many customer service issues. This forms part of our culture of care for our agents, clients, clients’ customers and the community.

As well as empowering customer service agents, recognising and incentivising agents that do a great job and go above and beyond is important. Customer service operations can be challenging, so recognising great work helps to build morale and a great team spirit. Agent incentivisation can include monetary awards for meeting quality standards or targets, but it may also take other forms such as prize draws or team days. Ultimately, happy agents lead to happy customers, which makes empowering, supporting and rewarding agents a key part of improving customer satisfaction.

Delivering On Promises And Setting Expectations

It is not always possible to resolve customer queries/issues during the first interaction, which necessitates a follow-up interaction with a customer. While this does delay issue resolution, if it is managed and delivered in a structured and planned way it can actually lead to increased customer satisfaction. Issues tend to arise when a customer is not contacted when promised, as this causes frustration and can leave a negative impression. Ensuring that agents deliver on promises and are proactive in the way that they follow up with customers is crucial to maintaining an exceptional customer experience that also results in satisfied customers.

For example, a customer may report a malfunction with a kitchen appliance that requires a replacement part and engineer visit, and the part needs to be ordered before the visit can be booked. If the agent promises a call back in two days to update on the replacement part and book the engineer visit, the call should be made regardless of whether the part has arrived, as the customer has been promised a call and will be expecting it. Even if the part has been delayed and is not available yet, the agent is delivering on the promise and demonstrating care for the customer. The customer is far more likely to be satisfied with the service if they are kept informed even though there is a delay than they would be if they had not been contacted.

Minimising Customer Effort

Many of us have busy lives with multiple responsibilities and commitments to manage. When customers interact with customer service, they want this to be as easy and hassle-free as possible with the minimum level of effort. When businesses provide a customer experience that minimises customer effort, their customers are much more likely to be satisfied with the level of service that they receive. For example, in the case of product returns, if a customer is required to take and send multiple photos of the product before they are granted a return, the level of customer effort is increased and their satisfaction level is reduced. While it is not always possible to minimise customer effort by removing these steps altogether, if the product in question is a lower value item, taking a customer at their word to deliver an easier and streamlined returns experience is often worthwhile.

The most effective way to minimise customer effort is to streamline your processes and remove as many unnecessary and burdensome steps as possible. Customer service agents who interact with customers and help them navigate processes and policies every day are often a great source of suggestions as to which steps are causing the greatest frustration for customers. They are great advocates for the voice of the customer and the source of insights that can drive your customer service operations forward. The best solution may involve eliminating the step(s) entirely, replacing it with something more streamlined, or providing an alternative. Solutions that help to minimise customer effort might involve adjusting self-service steps on your website, improving FAQs by covering additional topics or simplifying the reporting of issues by automatically populating certain fields on a form. For example, customer service agents may report that customers are struggling to locate product information such as serial numbers when completing an online warranty claim form. It may be possible to introduce a product registration feature whereby customers either manually or automatically register products that they have purchased, so in the event of a future warranty claim, they can simply select the product from a dropdown list or grid and skip having to enter product information. This effectively reduces customer effort and makes the process much more efficient.

In order to better understand your customer experience, aim to collect valuable testimonials, reviews and feedback from customers in a way that requires minimal customer effort. Inviting customers to leave feedback via a dedicated link/email can generate much higher response rates and ensure that valuable information and insights are collected. It is so much easier for a customer to leave feedback by clicking a button to respond to an invite than it is for them to manually visit a review platform, locate the business and then leave their feedback. Minimising customer effort in this area can be incredibly beneficial for both the customer and business.

At Impact, we are skilled at adopting a customer centric approach that helps to prevent issues for our clients’ customers. We work closely with clients to make it easy for their customers to interact with us and have their query resolved with the minimum level of effort. By drawing on our experience gained from delivering customer support for some of the UK’s leading brands, we are able to proactively advise on the best solutions for minimising customer effort in a way that drives efficiencies and cost savings for clients.