Improving CSAT to create happier customers
Customer satisfaction plays a huge role in the success of your retail business since you depend on your customers to create profit.
Therefore, it’s crucial to measure KPIs like CSAT to gain better insight into how your customers feel about their customer service experience. Not only can data on customer satisfaction provide insights into opinions and feelings on your brand, but it can also reveal the extent to which you’re making your customers happy.
However, boosting customer satisfaction can be tricky when you’re unsure of where you’re potentially falling short within your customer service strategy. If all you know is that your CSAT scores are lower than you’d like, it can be difficult to know where to start when trying to build the score up. Luckily, there are a few tried-and-tested methods for discovering where your customer journey might be lacking.
Building a customer-centric culture is one of the first methods to trial when you’re looking to boost your customer satisfaction. And although this sounds simple, it can sometimes be quite a large adjustment depending on your current strategies in place. Creating a customer-centric culture requires businesses to put customers at the heart of everything that’s being worked towards.
For example, when making crucial business decisions like product design or shipping processes, you should ask yourself how they could affect the customer. Everything you do should be of benefit to the customer when your team is focused on boosting CSAT. So, if a decision could have a negative impact on your customers, the team should be questioning whether this is the right way forward, or whether other options should be explored first.
An example of this would be when raising shipping prices, you should work out how many customers abandon their carts after shipping costs are added to their total. The abandonment rate will give a good indication of whether this could affect the happiness of your customers. This is where trialling new features can become useful since you could trial higher shipping costs for a short period to find out what they think of it and how it could affect their experience.
Feedback is also a huge aspect of customer satisfaction. It’s almost impossible to really gauge how your customers feel about their experience without a robust feedback system in place. Make sure your business takes a proactive approach to reviews by asking them about their experience at every opportunity. However, it’s also just as important to ensure that they’re not bombarded by pop-ups and communications asking about their experience because this approach can end up being counterproductive. Constantly interrupting their customer journey by asking about their thoughts and opinions can turn away valuable customers, so you’ll need to be smart about how and when you’re asking for feedback.
Although it can be time consuming, it’s worth scheduling some time to help your team come up with the right strategy for collecting feedback that works for you and your customers. This can often mean testing out different methods and finding out which ones are responded to most often. For example, email communications might be the best method for collecting feedback for some businesses, while others might find that their customers respond best to feedback requests at key points of the customer journey.
Similarly, businesses must prioritise aligning customer expectations with function. This means that whatever you’re doing should match up with what customers want and expect from you. At a time when customers expect more than ever from retailers, it’s crucial to keep up with this if you want to stand out against the competition.
When you’re preparing to launch a new feature, ask customers what they’re expecting from it and test whether it’s fit for purpose if possible. If customers complete a purchase, ask them about their personal experience of the checkout process. Finding out if you’re meeting expectations is a key component for boosting CSAT scores. This will set you up for greater success and should result in your customers feeling listened to and understood. It’ll also provide you with better insight into any future features you should be working towards, alongside anything in the customer service strategy that could be dropped.
Customer satisfaction can also be hugely affected by employee satisfaction rates. When your employees feel supported, valued, and motivated, you’ll breeze through boosting your customer satisfaction because the team is likely to be more focused and productive. But when employees are overworked and feel undervalued, this can cause standards to slip.
As a result, businesses must support their employees as much as possible when looking to improve CSAT scores. By implementing employee reward schemes and ensuring work is delegated correctly and fairly for maximum productivity with as little strain as possible, you can prevent both scores from dwindling simultaneously.
Insight courtesy of Rob Mead, Head of Strategic Marketing at Gnatta. To find out how Gnatta can help your retail operation, visit them here.
