Customer satisfaction is the key to customer retention. Any customer who is satisfied with the way your brand treated them will very likely be back for more business—about 93% of them, according to HubSpot.
Beyond customer retention, excellent customer service can bring in more customers organically, thanks to word of mouth referring. When your customers’ satisfaction is your primary objective, it becomes easier to build a loyal following and a trusted brand.
Everybody with a customer-facing job description—business owners, sales, and marketing managers—understands the impact of excellent customer service. In today’s business clime, most marketing, sales, and customer interaction happen digitally. Thankfully, many digital tools can help with achieving premium customer satisfaction.
Here, we’ve outlined a few ways these digital tools can help you with customer satisfaction marketing. You’ll build brand trust, sales, and revenue via your digital marketing efforts if you follow these tips.
Use a shared team inbox for addressing customer emails.
Imagine a car wash with twenty cars, and you’re asked to wash them all by hand. You’ll most likely get overwhelmed. But imagine there were 100 cars, but the job was given to you and ten other friends. The situation suddenly becomes a lot easier to tackle, right?
With organizational issues, especially within large teams and organizations, customer emails can go unnoticed and unattended for a long time. The solution is to use a customer service tool that centralizes email operations via a shared team inbox.
This way, all customer emails land in one place that is accessed by all team members across all teams. Because this is a shared team inbox, it will be harder for an email to go unnoticed because there are many eyes on the inbox. Of course, there is the danger of more than one team member replying to the same email. So use a solution that protects against this eventuality.
Use a cloud solution for your call center needs.
We all know the immense pull digital has on business operations. Customer complaints, marketing, and sales are all handled online. Still, some people prefer human interaction when communicating with a business.
This is a huge reason why call centers still exist. But running a call center costs a lot of money. You’ll have to employ a lot of people and purchase a lot of items.
To save money on running a fully functioning call center, use a cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. Beyond handling calls, you can use these technologies across your entire CRM efforts. Besides the security of a cloud service, you won’t need as many resources—human or otherwise—as you would with a traditional desk call center.
Utilize a help ticket system.
It would be frustrating for any customer if they have to explain their problem repeatedly every time they call your business. This happens because, with every call or transfer, they likely get another customer service rep. This new rep knows nothing about their previous call or the customer’s issue. Hence, the customer is just stuck in one frustrating cycle.
You can eliminate this problem by integrating a help ticket system in your customer service model. This system speeds up the customer’s journey to resolution. A help ticket system stores all the progress in the resolution process in a way that is trackable by every team member. This way, any of them can quickly pick up where the customer left off without starting from scratch.
This method doesn’t only help to keep customers in the know about the progress of their complaint. It also helps your employees give the best customer service, resulting in delighted customers.
Use live chat and instant messaging to respond to customer queries.
For all the good that email presents, live chat seems to have surpassed it in terms of customer satisfaction levels. Having a live chat feature on your brand website is no more a novelty; today’s site visitors expect it.
This way, they can quickly contact you and get instant answers without having to leave your site or wait 24 hours or longer. This will foster user experience and customer satisfaction in a way most other CRM efforts cannot.
Of course, there’s still the option of instant messaging. This option is mostly useful for cases when customers are not keen to wait around. They can just send you a message—via Messenger, WhatsApp, and other messaging apps—and you can reply to their query as late as a day later.
Instant messaging is not as real-time as live chat, and it doesn’t stop customers from going about their day. Hence, customers are more forgiving in terms of the time it will take your brand to get back to them.
So essentially, live chat is better for queries that need an immediate response. And instant messaging can be utilized for less urgent and not so time-sensitive queries. Not to mention, instant messaging is perfect for teams that are tight on resources to run robust live chat or email services.
Prioritize mobile apps in customer interaction.
Most internet traffic comes from mobile devices today. And this isn’t just in the area of online purchasing. When customers buy stuff at a brick-and-mortar, they use their smartphone to get a more streamlined shopping experience. They use it to check out product/service reviews, interact with brands, and more.
What’s more, people prefer to do all this via mobile apps, which makes having a mobile app for your brand a no-brainer. These apps bring your customers closer to your brand and keep you on their minds at all times. They can get to your business in just one click, and that’s a really good situation.
Of course, you have to make sure that using the app itself is easy, predictable, and seamless. This all adds to your customer satisfaction score.
Self-service knowledge hub.
Take some of the burden off yourself and your team by having an exhaustive repository of content that answers every possible common question your customers may have.
In today’s world, people will usually hop on Google to solve an issue before considering asking anyone. Having a standalone website or a content hub that functions as a self-service help desk is a smart solution to common customer queries.
This eases the burden on your customer service personnel. Customers will only come to you for more complex issues that can’t be resolved in the content hub.
Final Words.
It is easy for businesses to get dragged into the cycle of product and service updates and business expansion and forget their customers in the process. You’ll need to prioritize your customers again. And to do this, the digital marketing tools and tips above will get you started on the right path.
About the Author
Ana Mayer is a project manager with 3+ years of experience. While projects can do without her participation (which means almost never), she likes to read and create expert academic materials for the Online Writers Rating website. Such work gives her the opportunity to write articles on the most relevant topics of today.
