In this competitive industry environment, it is extremely important to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction. If your company falters and develops a reputation for poor ratings, it almost certainly translates into poor performance and declining sales. Improving customer satisfaction is very different than improving customer ratings. Customer satisfaction goes far deeper than just having positive reviews, it means the customer is sharing their experience with friends and is more likely to become loyal. This article provides the top five ways that you can improve customer satisfaction starting right now.
1. Compensate Staff Based on Customer Satisfaction Levels
Many companies compensate staff based on the revenue generated or other performance metrics that may result in a high turnover of customers. If you are experiencing low customer satisfaction levels, try integrating customer satisfaction rates into the compensation structure. For lower level staff, such as food services workers, this may mean purchasing gift cards if the team receives positive reviews. Some companies only focus on threatening staff if customer satisfaction is inadequate. This fear will always be present and reinforcing it constantly creates an ominous environment where staff are intimated to serve customers. Therefore, a compensation plan that encourages customer satisfaction benefits the employer, employee, and the customers.
2. Ask Customers to Complete a Survey
The success of this is not necessarily acquired intrinsically. For instance, customers asked to complete a survey may be especially inclined to leave positive feedback if it is provided by the employee and it is not anonymous. Surveys that are heavily incentivized such as those that offer a free food or beverage product are also likely to receive many careless responses due to the incentive structure. Encouraging a follow-up review is likely to receive a disproportionately large amount of dissatisfied customers, but this means that they are also providing insights about how you can improve.
3. Have a Support Line to Resolve Complaints
Many companies actually lose customer satisfaction by failing to address the initial round of complaints. Some studies have demonstrated that customer loyalty can actually be enhanced if the company has a system to effectively resolve customer complaints. In fact, many customers will attempt to resolve the issue through the company before writing a negative review online and companies can even enhance loyalty levels by efficiently resolving customer complaints.
4. Have Monthly Employee Reviews
Holding your companies liable for customer satisfaction across the board is a key determinant for staff performance. Many companies see any downtime for employee meetings as having little impact on success. However, employees must be constantly reminded that their most important objective should be the satisfaction of their customers.
This is most likely to be accomplished when your employees have group meetings to discuss key complaints and establish strategies to resolve them. One company that employs writers holds weekly meetings to discuss the satisfaction level of the customer and key issues they have addressed. In many cases, consumers will be quicker to share positive information, which may also be recorded and analyzed in order to understand what characteristics are retaining users.
5. Hire Friendly Staff
In many customer-facing industries, the extent of customer satisfaction is dictated by the friendliness of your staff. Hiring a staff that reflects a negative emotion to customers is likely to decrease their perception of your company as a whole. Staff that appear disinterested communicate that your company lacks enthusiasm about creating value for them, so they are likely to easily go elsewhere to a company that employs more friendly staff. This is largely done by cross-checking references and asking former employers about the demeanor of each employee when interacting with customers.
At the end of the day, it is up to your customers whether or not to be satisfied and there are many things that will impact their overall satisfaction levels that are out of your control. However, it should be a core focus of your daily activities to ensure that your customers are satisfied or they will easily switch to your competitors. With a plethora or review websites and increasing competition, customer satisfaction has never been more important. By implementing the five key points within this article, your company can more effectively grow within the market by ensuring the customers are more satisfied and more likely to do business with you in the future.
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