In the world of business, the customer is king. Although the business determines the product or service, customers are those that go out of their way to purchase. In our modern age, customers have a wide variety of options to shop from and thus businesses have to appeal to each customer specifically. This is known as keeping customer satisfaction high. With a high customer satisfaction, customers will be more inclined to spread the word about the quality of your business and your offerings. One avenue of increasing customer satisfaction is to have an efficient and convenient system of purchasing so customers put little to no effort in checking out. In general, people will be more likely to go with the more convenient option than to go out of their way to do business with you. To achieve this, there is a few simple systems a business can put in place to reduce customer efforts and increase overall customer satisfaction.
Provide an Online Self-Serve Service
It’s no secret that the internet is one of the greatest inventions of our time. It connects people from across the world, allowing them to interact and communicate with one another anytime, anywhere. Almost every home across the world has access to technology that can access the internet. This has lead to numerous opportunities for businesses everywhere to expand outside their region. Customers can access your product or services from the comfort of their own home. Although it may be simple, it is very important; move to an online space. Setting up and maintaining a website is both cost-efficient and cost-effective, not to mention it will boost your clientele to a national if not global state. This reduces the customer’s effort, they no longer have to go out to scout your business to doing so anytime, anywhere.
Guide Customers Through Simple Interactions
When a customer wants to purchase a product, they want a simple and quick method of doing so. Leaving customers impatient or confused will lower satisfaction and raise effort needed in a given transaction, which is not good for business. Input a system of simple and quick interactions between the customer and the business to keep customers happy! This can be done by clearly categorizing and price labelling which can be more effectively done on a website or landing page. The business can use SEO (search engine optimization) and other simple UI (user interface) so the customer can visually see what they are purchasing and for how much. When a customer can search for and claim their desire quickly with little effort, they are very satisfied.
Supply Customers with Avenues for Feedback
Your product, service or method of purchasing is never perfect and will always need to be refined with the changing times. Sometimes customers may encounter an issue with an aspect of your business. Encountering any issue will lower that customers satisfaction with the business, however, it is how the business deals with the issue that can benefit the customer and the business. This is done by having an accessible avenue for a customer to offer their feedback on their experience. If they have an issue, it is likely that other customers may have had similar issues. The business may not know about problems in their system but by having an effective feedback system, it can benefit the business while also have the customer be heard. These avenues can be verbal via the phone for example, or online in the form of an email, chat message or text request.. A help desk is a software that allocates an aspect of the website to receiving and organizing customers questions or concerns about the business’ designated customer service team. Having an accessible way of doing so reduces the customer’s effort when addressing issues.
Proactively Using Feedback Gathered to Form Appropriate Solutions
Once you have received feedback that has hindered a customers experience, the business must look at ways of forming a solution to the issue does not happen again. This could be altering aspects of your UI or SEO or be related to assigning more appropriate names for products. Whereas supplying customers with avenues for feedback allows customers to speak up, actively using said feedback gathered to form appropriate solutions makes the customers feel heard. This makes customers feel appreciated. In turn, the alterations to the systems will lower the customer effort as they will not encounter the same issues.
In the modern business world, customers are an important part of the business formula. Their experience with the product or service can influence increased sales. Having customers put little to no effort in their purchase raises satisfaction with the business. This is why it is important to have proactive ways of keeping their experience simple.
