How Satisfied Are your Customers?

Proven Ways to Improve Customer Satisfaction in Kenya

Making customers happy and satisfied with your products and services can sometimes feel like an uphill task and can take some trial and error.

This however should not deter you as a manager or business owner to stay persistent. The goal is to always ensure that you go over and beyond for your customers, while including everyone at the organization to play their part in delivering high quality customer experience.

How to Improve Customer Satisfaction: 10 Tips

1. Customer Feedback Is Your Friend

It is said that if you don’t ask, you will never know. The idea here is not to just collect information but rather, analyze and then apply corrective or improvement measures.

It should be the company’s aim to learn about customers’ pain points, and then make a plan to mitigate them in ways that set your business apart from competitors.

As a business, you need to make it easier for your customers to complain. Investing in customer feedback tools and customer support is great but should this not be possible, have channels that make it easy for customers to reach you e.g. social media platforms and online review boards.

For the customer service team, being able to get customer feedback and responding in real time, can prevent a user from becoming a detractor in the first place. If the team can react quickly, a potential horrible situation can be turned into a positive one.

2. Meet Customers Where They Are

Imagine getting home late from work and just when you are about to start preparing your meal, you notice you ran out of salt and cooking oil which you had purposed to buy in the course of the day.

Now isn’t it refreshing to know you will not have to settle for tasteless food because there is a supermarket that offers 24-hours service? For your business to have similar convenience for your customers, it is important to have a digital presence on platforms that your customers use.

WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter are some of the channels that your customers use to interact with their friends and family. Therefore, offering support via the same channels gives your business a chance to meet customers where they are.

3. Reduce Response Time

In a continually connected world that we are now living in thanks to technological advancements, customers no longer have to wait long for responses.

Having your customer service team respond to all customer feedback in a timely manner, can help reassure customers that you care about their issues and remain dedicated to solving them.

This can be achieved by having a dedicated team of professionals do it, pre-written responses that ensure agents don’t have to write common answers repeatedly or using automation.

4. Make Customer Satisfaction a Company-Wide Focus

Having a customer- centric business strategy can help improve the overall customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction should be at the core of everything that goes on in a company. It should be incorporated in the company’s mission and value proposition.

When customer satisfaction is embedded in every action of the employees and departments as a whole, it helps businesses consider how all their activities are working towards the goal of high customer satisfaction.

5. Delight Your Customers

This is the “Wow” effect. Satisfying your customer’s needs is one thing but being able to surpass their expectations will delight them and they will highly appreciate it.

Warren Buffett said “Any business with delighted customers has a sales force they won’t have to pay; You don’t see them, but they are talking to people all the time.”

There is no definite strategy that works across the board that goes into delighting customers; however, to be remarkable, you have to do something a little outside of the ordinary. When you have everyone in the company understand and work towards delighting the customers, ideas on how to do this will flow.

6.Personalize the Customer Experience

90% of consumers will spend more with companies that personalize the customer service they offer them. Additionally, 68% expect all experiences to be personalized, at least by a report done by Zendesk on Trends Report.

Customer experiences can be improved by giving the customer service team access to valuable customer information.

Customer representatives who have access to important customer context such as the previous issue the customer reached out about, how long they have been a customer, and what products they have purchased; can help the agents anticipate customer needs and deliver more tailored support.

7. Leverage Social Media

In these modern times, it is important for any business to have a social media page be certain and ready to respond and offer prompt feedback regardless of whether the business uses social media as an active customer service tool.

As a business, you can also use social media to proactively collect customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction. Offering live chats or Q&A sessions where customers can ask burning questions, express concerns, or merely connect with your service or sales team can help in improving customer satisfaction.

The amazing thing about social media is that it meets your customers wherever they are, allowing you to improve their satisfaction in the process.

 

 

8. Provide Proactive Support

A good number of businesses in Kenya have a more reactive approach to customer support as opposed to being proactive. Companies will wait until a customer reaches out to them to make a complaint.

For instance, for a public holiday coming up and your business will be closed on this day, having a post on social media, a highlight on Instagram, an email to your customers advising that the business will be closed is better than having them come by your business only to find it closed.

Cliché as it may sound, Communication is key. If a customer sends an inquiry when your team isn’t available, they should get an auto-reply acknowledging that their message was received, while providing an approximate response time. This way, the customer is not left in the dark wondering when someone might get back to them.

This is a more proactive approach, where as a business you anticipate issues and address them before your customers reach out to you.

 

9. Check Out Your Competitors

In this competitive era, where there are multiple businesses offering similar products or services as your business, unsatisfied customers will take their business elsewhere.  It is therefore important to take a close look at your competition to understand how they may be making their customers as well as yours, happier than you did.

Having an understanding on what the competition is doing right and/ or wrong can help your business learn a lot about your customers, industry, and products.

So if they have a physical location, make a point of visiting their business to understand how they engage customers in person. Also have a look at their website to understand their online customer journey.

Also playing the customer and contacting their sales and service teams to see how they interact with potential and current customers will help you understand what they are doing and get to borrow the positives while keeping away from the negatives aspects.

 

10.Invest in Customer Service Training

The journey to supporting customers starts with supporting your people. The customer service representatives are the heartbeat of any customer service team. Therefore, it is absolutely crucial to invest in their professional knowledge and well-being. This in turn, establishes a crucial foundation on which to build your customer satisfaction scores.

Having a team that is well versed in their line of profession ensures that they are able to deliver high quality services to your customers which then translate to customer satisfaction. Implementing a mentorship programme for new team members will help them learn from the best.

Have your employees gone through Customer Service Training? Reach out to Customer Centric Kenya for a well-tailored training suited to address the needs of your team and the gaps in your business.