8 Simple Strategies To Get More Happy Customers  | #customersupport #supporticket

The customer experience market was valued at $6.5 billion in 2019 and is expected to experience a 17.7%¹ compound annual growth rate each year until 2027.

With happy customers being the lifeblood of all businesses and the value of customer experience, it’s no surprise that 45.9%² of businesses rate customer experience as their most important priority over the next five years. 

But in an increasingly competitive world where consumers have so much choice, how exactly can businesses go about keeping their customers happy? 

This article will give the answer to this question. We’ll take a look at strategies you can implement to boost customer happiness and some of the most effective ways of measuring customer satisfaction.

8 Ways to Make Your Customers Happy

We define a happy customer as someone who’s not only made a purchase, but has had a great experience with that purchase. Here are eight ways to make your customers happy, and improve the reputation, and longevity of your business.  

1. Don’t compromise on the quality of your product

The quality of a business’ products or solutions and the results they produce go a long way toward determining the business’ long-term success. 

Consumers expect the products and services they purchase to function flawlessly and solve whatever problem they’re having.

With these expectations, companies should do everything they can to ensure product quality. You have to make sure that any product performance faults or bugs are kept to a minimum.

If you’re in the process of designing or looking to release a new product or service, make sure you can confidently answer these questions regarding product quality:

1. Does the product solve a problem?
2. Is the product tailored to your user’s needs? (is there a product-market fit)?
3. Do you know your ideal customers?
4. Are customers able to understand and effectively use the product?
5. Is there a demand for the product?

While there’s much more that goes into defining and developing a quality product, these questions are a good place to start when you’re beginning to plan a new product or service.

2. Have an effective customer complaint resolution process 

Even with the most professional, proactive customer service, customer complaints are inevitable. No matter the reason for the complaint, it’s the business’ responsibility to find an appropriate resolution.

This is why it’s vital to have an effective resolution process in place. If you’re looking to implement a resolution process, here are some tips to follow:

• Ensure support agents show empathy and understanding with the customer.
• Listen and document customer concerns.
• Find out what outcome the customer is hoping for and what their expectations are.
• Discuss resolution options.
• Decide upon a resolution and give the customer an action plan.
• Let the customer know they can expect the issue to be resolved and follow up after resolution to get feedback on their experience.

The process of customer complaint resolution gives your team a chance to interact with customers, truly understand their needs and strengthen customer relationships. So it’s important for your team to offer fast, uniform customer service.

3. Deliver a consistent, omnichannel customer service experience

Customers have more ways of getting in touch with a company than ever before — they can pick from email, phone, live chat, social media, SMS, and messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Apple Business Chat. 

Often, customers will use more than one channel to get in touch with a company, and customers expect a consistent experience across all of them. 

71% of consumers state that they want a consistent experience across all channels, but only 29% report that they get one.³ 

This data shows that omnichannel helpdesk software can help companies deliver a consistent, high-quality omnichannel service. 

Freshdesk’s own omnichannel help desk aids customer support agents in the management and delivery of seamless customer service across digital and traditional channels. 

An omnichannel customer service software can offer the right context that agents need to provide the best service possible during every customer interaction regardless of the channel of communication.

4. Maintain low response times and resolution times

Responding to and resolving customer queries quickly is one of the cornerstones of good customer service. 

Delayed resolutions and long wait times can lead to unhappy customers. In fact, 75% of customers state that fast response time is the most important attribute of customer experience⁴, while 88% of consumers now expect a response from companies within 60 minutes of raising an inquiry.⁵

In response to this, companies and customer support teams should prioritize getting their customer response times down. Using response templates or canned messages is not the only way to do this. Let’s explore different ways in which you can lower your response and resolution times:

1. Turn to workflow automation 

Automating workflows goes a long way in saving time, reducing repetitive tasks, and improving efficiency. Your customer service software or helpdesk software should enable you to automatically assign, prioritize, and categorize tickets, follow up on or close pending queries, send CSAT forms, etc.

From within Freshdesk, you can automate workflows across channels using time and event-based triggers. You can also use data from other applications that you might be using for billing, issue tracking, etc, to build robust workflows that help solve issues faster, and with the least inconvenience to the customer. 

2. Launch agent-facing AI and an internal knowledge base

Customer service agents need to have easy access to the right information in order to provide quick resolutions. Investing in an internal knowledge base, a customer support wiki that contains up-to-date details related to your product, service, and company, is a great way to equip agents with the right resources.

If you want further improved access to resources, you can invest in agent-facing AI, an AI that is dedicated to improving agent productivity. 

With an agent-facing AI such as Freddy AI for CX, you can, 

• • set up an agent-assist bot that provides smart recommendations for responses and resolutions and empowers agents to offer faster customer service 
  • enable agents to execute workflows that have been automated using robotic process automation in a single click
  • improve training and onboarding by providing access to learning resources, FAQs, and how-to guides that agents can refer to whenever they need assistance

3. Implement AI-enabled customer service chatbots 

Businesses that have implemented AI-enabled chatbots have an average first response time of 13 hours, compared to a first response time of 19 hours for businesses that don’t have AI-enabled chatbots.⁶ 

AI-enabled chatbots help to cut down response times by using machine learning to respond to customer inquiries. 

For example, if a customer writes “I want a refund” into a chatbot, the AI-enabled chatbot can use machine learning to read existing knowledge base articles and give the customer information on what they can do to get that refund. With process automation, chatbots can also assist the customer with troubleshooting the issue. 

If the query is too complex, a human support agent can step in and provide an answer. Even if a support agent has to step in, the AI-enabled chatbot has still provided the customer with relevant information and timely response. 

5. Offer proactive customer service

Proactive customer support involves identifying and resolving customer problems before they occur, which helps to improve customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and improves customer retention rates.

Proactive customer engagement shows your customers that you have their best interests at heart, and that you’re willing to go the extra mile to be proactive and deal with any issues that could affect their experience.  

Some of the most common and implementable forms of proactive customer service include:

• Creating self-service materials such as knowledge base articles, instructional videos, and FAQs that customers can access to solve their queries.
• Letting customers know of any service or product maintenance in advance.
• Acting on customer feedback and recommendations when appropriate.
• Keeping customers up to date with any product or service issues and letting them know when they can expect the issue in question to be resolved.
• Launching a help widget or a live chat widget that pops up and offers help when customers are showing visible signs of frustration.

6. Build a rewards or loyalty program

Rewards and loyalty programs have been proven to improve customer retention, increase rates of customer satisfaction, and boost company revenue. Companies with strong loyalty programs tend to grow their revenue 2.5 times faster than their competitors.⁷

There are a lot of different rewards/loyalty programs and initiatives that work well. The specific type of program that’s right for you will depend on your goals and your industry.

Here are some examples of proven customer rewards/loyalty offerings:

• Offer discounts, special offers, or free products/upgrades to repeat and loyal customers.
• Offer redeemable points toward a purchase.
• Offer exclusive access to new products or beta versions of a product or service.

7. Invest in agent training

Poor, inconsistent customer service can hurt a business’ bottom line and lead to customers looking elsewhere. 

62% of customers share their bad experiences with others.⁸ While 95% of consumers say that customer service is an important factor in their loyalty to a brand.⁹Companies should do their utmost to ensure customers get professional, friendly customer service interactions across every support channel. 

You can do this by building a customer-centric culture and offering extensive customer service training. 

Provide both soft-skills and technical training to ensure agents are more empathetic, are able to communicate well, and offer effective resolutions to your customers’ issues.

8. Keep your employees happy

Keeping employees happy, satisfied, and productive in their roles is a proven method of improving customer satisfaction.

A study on the correlation between employee happiness and customer satisfaction by Glassdoor found that each one-star improvement in a company’s Glassdoor rating corresponded to a 1.3 out of 100 point improvement in customer satisfaction scores.¹⁰

Employee happiness is proving even more important, considering the increased level of customer support requests agents have been experiencing. 

Over the past 12 months, 83% of customer service leaders in the US have noted an increase in requests, while 33% reported operating with a reduced staff.¹¹

With increased demands, businesses and customer service leaders need to do everything they can to keep support agents happy and provide them with adequate tools. 

A few ways that customer service leaders can provide support to their agents include:

• Hold frequent one-on-one meetings with each agent.
• Enable seamless collaboration between team members.
• Equip support agents with the latest customer-facing AI technology to reduce agent workload.

How to Measure Customer Happiness

Now that we know some of the strategies that can improve customer happiness, let’s look at how companies can gauge and measure customer satisfaction.

1. CSAT 

CSAT is short for customer satisfaction. This customer service metric is one of the most straightforward customer satisfaction survey methodologies. 

CSAT is calculated by asking customers a single question or a series of questions to gauge their overall satisfaction level.

The most common question being asked is, “How satisfied were you with your experience?” The customer can then answer this by giving a rating, usually ranging from one to five.

These numbered ratings are broken down as such:

1. Very unsatisfied
2. Unsatisfied
3. Neutral
4. Satisfied
5. Very satisfied 

A company’s CSAT score is calculated by working out the percentage of satisfied and very satisfied responses from the total number of responses. 

For example, if a company gets 100 responses and 50 of those responses come back as “satisfied” or “very satisfied,” the company’s CSAT score will be 50%. 

According to the Freshdesk Customer Happiness Benchmark, the average CSAT score industry-wide was 79%.¹² Keep this figure in mind as a benchmark when you’re calculating CSAT score.

2. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a popular customer satisfaction survey used to gather quantitative and qualitative customer insights. 

NPS measures customer satisfaction based on one question: “How likely are you to recommend (organization/product/service) to a friend or colleague?”

Respondents give a rating between 0 (not all likely) and 10 (extremely likely) on whether they would recommend the product or service they’re using.

Respondents are then divided into three groups based on their answers:

• Customers who answer with 6 or lower are classed as “detractors.”
• Customers who answer 7 or 8 are “passive.”
• Customers who answer with a 9 or 10 are “promoters.”

The overall NPS score can be calculated by following this formula: (Number of Promoters – Number of Detractors) / (Number of Respondents) x 100.

For example, let’s say you get 100 responses to your survey and you get:

• 10 responses in the 0-6 range.
• 20 responses in the 7-8 range.
• 70 responses in the 9-10 range.

You would subtract the number of detractors (10) from the number of promoters (70), so your overall NPS score would be 60. 

It’s important to remember that the NPS scale can range from -100 to 100. So as long as your NPS score is above 0, your company has more promoters than detractors. 

3. Measuring customer churn rate 

There are many various different reasons that cause a customer to churn. The general rule to keep in mind is that if too many customers are canceling a subscription over a certain period of time, there is a major issue occurring.

There are numerous ways to work out customer churn. How it’s calculated can differ from business to business.

One way of determining your customer churn rate (usually carried out monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, or annually) is to work out the number of customers you’ve lost over a certain time frame, compared to the total number of customers you had at the beginning of that time frame. 

This will show you the number of customers who’ve churned during that period.

For example, if you have 600 users at the beginning of January and 400 users at the end of January, you’ve lost 200 customers.

The calculation you would use to work out your customer churn rate would be:

(600-400)/600 = 33.33.

In this example, the churn rate would be 33.33% for January.

It’s important to remember that there are quite a few different ways to measure churn, so take time to research the most effective method for your particular business.

Conclusion

There’s a lot that goes into keeping customers happy. However, it all boils down to these two things: keeping your focus on producing high-quality products/services and ensuring great customer service.

By effectively implementing all the tips listed in this blog, and measuring metrics that reflect customer happiness, you can make sure you’re doing everything possible to delight your customers.