According to research, 77% of customers have had positive experiences with businesses over the past year.

It’s a no-brainer that your business will fail if you don’t keep your customers satisfied. It’s also true that growing businesses prioritize customer engagement and satisfaction more. 

In fact, companies with decreasing or constant revenue don’t prioritize customer satisfaction as much. As such, you must be mindful of the fact that happy customers can become your best salespeople. It is by their recommendations and referrals that you can grow your customer base. 

A leading indicator of customer churn is bad customer experience. They can  even negatively affect the growth of your company. To eliminate customer churn and to enable your business to grow smoothly, you must gauge customer satisfaction.

In this article, you will come to know all about customer satisfaction. You will understand why it’s important, how you can measure it and how CRM enhances customer experience.

What is Customer Satisfaction?

Customer Satisfaction is a measure of how your customers think and feel about your services and products. Basically, it’s a measure of how your customers feel about your company. 

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores can tell you if your customers love your products. They also tell you if customers think that there needs to be improvement in your services.

The answers to such questions are valuable. Knowing these answers would tell you a lot about the relationship between your customers and your brand. 

The Importance of Customer Satisfaction for a Business

Understanding customer satisfaction gives you an insight into what a customer thinks about your company. 

Of course, no business wants their customer base to shrink. However, building a customer base can be quite a difficult task. Thus, you must make customer satisfaction a priority. 

Here are some reasons why customer satisfaction is so important:

1) Products

Even if you think that your products are perfect, customers might not agree. For example, your customers might point out a safety flaw in the products, which you didn’t consider. They might also be using your product in a way that you hadn’t expected. 

Regardless of the scenario, you will need input from your customers. This helps you understand if there are any changes to be made. You might also decide to do away with a product after suggestions from your customers.

2) Services

Regardless of the way you intend your customer service to be like, your customers might interpret it otherwise. For example, you may have a service for consulting, but most of your customers may not want it. 

They might want more or fewer services from you. That is why you must take customer satisfaction into account.

3) Operations

Consider the business hours of your company. Do you believe you might boost sales if you stay open for another hour? If you’re facing such a dilemma, the best course of action would be to ask your customers. 

You can have your customers fill out a survey to determine an adjustment of business hours, internal processes etc. Thus, this way you can make decisions about other relevant aspects of your business.

4) Marketing

It is of utmost importance to understand your customers when you are trying to market your products. One excellent way to understand what your audience wants is by surveying their interests. 

Once you understand their preferences, you’ll be able to offer them solutions through your products.

Also read 6 call center problems and How to overcome them.

How do you measure Customer Satisfaction?

It’s very important to measure customer satisfaction as a business. However, you must be wondering how to measure such an abstract idea. In reality, you actually measure customer satisfaction through scores.

Customer satisfaction scores are especially necessary to track, as customers are your main source of revenue. As mentioned before, your company will suffer if your customers are not happy. 

Now, how can you as a business owner collect data on customer satisfaction? You can measure customer satisfaction by making customer surveys.

With technology, you can easily make use of digital analytics. These show you how customers are navigating your website, what features they’re interacting with, challenges they’re facing, etc. However, you need to be more thorough.

Here are the three crucial metrics that you can use to measure Customer Satisfaction:

1) Customer Satisfaction or CSAT scores

This is the most important metric to find out about customer satisfaction and your customer experiences. The CSAT score gauges whether the services and products that you offer meets your customer’s expectations. 

A CSAT survey basically asks customers to rate their experience after they use a product or service. The rating scale ranges from 1 to 5 in most cases. Most surveys also show customers the reason behind their ratings.

2) Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a very commonly used metric to measure customer satisfaction. It’s also the most popular of the three metrics to measure customer experience. Generally, this metric asks only one question from a customer. 

First, NPS will ask your customer how likely they are to recommend your brand to others. Next, it will ask an open-ended question to gauge all the reasons that led to a customer’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction. NPS scores lie between 1 to 100.

3) Customer Effort Score (CES)

Yet another metric used to measure the customer satisfaction level of your brand is your CES. This score measures the amount of work that customers need to put in to solve their challenges. Basically, it helps understand whether customers are getting adequate support from the company.

The best way to do this survey would be to use multiple channels. That would enable you to cover the maximum of your customer base. Moreover, it will also ensure you receive the maximum number of responses.

Why is CRM important for Customer Satisfaction?

‘CRM is a software system that uses technology to create and maintain long-term relationships between businesses and customers. 

Customer Relationship Management is a concept that gained popularity in recent times. In fact, CRM plays a very crucial role when it comes to enhancing your customer satisfaction levels.

Satisfied customers are more profitable to your business than any other marketing strategy. That’s because loyal customers recommend a business through word of mouth, which works better. 

Thus, CRM not only helps in bringing in more customers, but also improves your company’s market share. However, it’s important that you implement CRM in the right way.

Firstly, it is imperative that you first understand your customers. You should understand their attitude, behavior, preferences and factors that affect their decisions. 

When you understand these aspects, you’ll be able to create a more targeted marketing strategy for your audience. That is also of importance as no company can ever take care of all customer needs. Thus, streamlining your target audience is a necessity.

Secondly, CRM aids in the proper communication between customer and business. It allows you to maximize your customers’ satisfaction. 

Moreover, CRM also allows you to better handle customer complaints and grievances. Overall, using CRM is a continuous process and you must be making regular efforts to be best at your business.

How to improve Customer Satisfaction with CRM

Here are six ways you can improve your customer satisfaction with CRM:

1) Keeping up contact

Businesses always need to be in contact with future prospects and current customers. This is necessary to offer them the best customer experience. 

A CRM system allows you to send regular emails to your customers regarding new products and offers. That way your customers would stay in close contact with your business.

2) Personalised communications

Through a good CRM, you can track your customers’ activities. This enables you to know about their purchases or special occasions like birthdays. 

That would then allow you to send personalized messages. Consequently, your customers would form a good positive relationship with your brand.

3) Consistent customer experience

It is of utmost importance that your customers always receive consistent messages and support from your business. Timely responses to queries or grievances ultimately help boost your brand reputation and customer satisfaction levels.

4) All your data in one place

A CRM system will store all information about a prospect or customer in one place. Any salesperson in your business can then easily access this information whenever needed. 

They can also see customers’ past purchases. Based on this, they can suggest relevant products to customers leading to greater customer satisfaction.

5) Collect more information on customers

Following up on the previous point, with more information about your customers, you’d know about their preferences. As such, you’d come to know of other products they may be interested in as well. You can then use this information to improve customer satisfaction.

6) Handling social media requests

It’s to be noted that over 65% of customers use social media platforms for customer service. 

With a good CRM, you can collect all service requests from different social media channels without missing any. As you keep up with the request and reply appropriately, you will be able to improve customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Now you know about all the benefits that CRM can have on creating a better customer experience. For all these reasons, your business should definitely consider getting one to enhance your customer satisfaction scores.

To provide the best customer experience and keep all your business processes running smoothly, you should consider NeoDove.

Equipped with features like an auto dialer, multiple integrations and multi-channel engagement, our telecalling CRM has a lot to offer.

Moreover, these are just a few things that you can get out of NeoDove! Supercharge sales and build the most loyal customer base for your business today, only with NeoDove!

Also read, What are the important steps to take in the lead generation process?