A business’s success mainly relies on its customers. A satisfied client base means a good reputation and more business in the future. Customer satisfaction can make or break your business, making it one of the most important things that business owners should constantly monitor.
As a business owner, it’s vital to understand your customers. This means knowing what their needs and expectations are and comparing them to what you currently offer. This article looks at different ways on how you can improve customer satisfaction for your eCommerce business.
Here are some of them.
1. Ensure Your Website is User-Friendly
A website plays a key role in influencing customers’ purchasing decisions.
Business owners realize that. That’s why they invest time and money just to get people to visit and stay on their website. But then, the biggest risk for them here is losing potential leads before making a sale.
Dull, boring, and badly designed websites frequently repel customers.
Ensuring your website is user-friendly is one way to avoid losing potential leads.
The first thing is to make the navigation horizontal and as simple as possible. Also, you need to keep it clean and uncluttered for the best UX. Anything that may overwhelm visitors will push them to leave and with no guarantee of returning.
2. Provide Outstanding Customer Support
The key to customer satisfaction is building good relationships.
Excellent customer service is one of the things that can get you a loyal customer. You need to tailor your customer service to your ideal customers’ expectations. This means you need to know what they’d consider as good customer service.
Besides, you need to provide good customer service in all aspects of your business. It should start from your first interaction with customers. For instance, a membership-based business needs to provide good service right from when they onboard new members.
It would help if you understood how membership management operates to ensure your service can satisfy potential customers. Or, working with a company that helps membership businesses manage their operations can help. It brings about flexibility and is an all-in-one solution for many other things.
3. Add Self-Service Options to Your Website
Modern customers expect many things from businesses.
One trend that’s growing exponentially is that customers want to be in control.
Companies have had to add self-service options to their websites to meet this growing need. This is also to ensure that they satisfy their customers and retain them.
The demand for self-service is rising because of the modern customer’s need for speed.
Research shows that 70% of customers expect the website they visit to have a self-service option.
You can populate your website with
- FAQ pages
- Screenshots and videos
- A search field for each page, etc
And many other features if you’d like to offer self-service.
4. Move Your Operations to the Cloud
Many businesses are moving their operations to cloud environments today. This is because operating on the cloud helps reduce operational costs, improves security, and boosts performance.
A business that wants to improve online customer satisfaction should consider running on the cloud.
The cloud
- Ensures that Customers can access services 24/7
- Provides customers with a one-stop shop as businesses can integrate services when operating on the cloud
- Helps firms offer personalized customer experiences and improve brand trustworthiness which increases customer satisfaction.
5. Leverage the Power of Social Media
Social media is one of the most powerful tools in the modern business world. It drives traffic to a brand and also builds solid relationships between customers and brands.
There are different ways that a brand can leverage the power of social media to ensure a satisfied customer base. For instance, social media can work as an excellent platform for answering customer queries.
Not just that, social media can also help you
- Interact with customers and alert them of promotions
- Collect customer feedback on your products and services.
6. Keep Surveys Short
Collecting customer feedback is vital for any business. It is with feedback that you can understand your brand’s weaknesses and improve on them.
One of the most effective ways to gather feedback is by conducting surveys. But then, long surveys no longer attract respondents, but short ones do.
It would be best to keep surveys as short as possible. Unless you are paying respondents, you do not want to inconvenience anyone or have them leave some questions unanswered.
Be upfront about the time it will take if your survey must be lengthy. This can help you leave your customers happy and satisfied.
7. Co-browse with Customers
Collaborative browsing, shortened as co-browsing, is a popular online business practice today. It refers to when two people navigate a website at the same time.
You can browse your website simultaneously with customers to help them access services faster and teach them to interact with your site.
Co-browsing comes with many benefits, including:
- Helping businesses understand their customers better
- Improving customer experiences by acting as real-time customer support
- Helping your leads access what they are looking for faster, thus improving customer satisfaction.
8. Get and Act on Customer Feedback
We have already stressed enough that customer feedback is vital.
There is no better way to make customers feel important and involved than listening to them. However, collecting feedback is just one part of the trick. The major reveal is showing your customer that you’re acting on it.
For instance, you can ask your customers what they think of their delivery experience and make better delivery choices to consistently improve your brand’s post-purchase experience. This can help you earn fierce customer loyalty in return.
Conclusion
Businesses must satisfy their customers, mainly when operating online. The online business environment has become competitive. For instance, website visitors can easily click away from a website if they are unhappy with it. There will always be a website that offers similar services on the line.
We have mentioned some ways to improve customer satisfaction online. It can be through developing user-friendly websites or offering excellent customer service through co-browsing. Also customer feedback can help you know how satisfied people are with your services, so that you can act on it when required.
This is a guest post by Daniel Martin
A Little about LateShipment.com
LateShipment.com is the world’s only tool for everything post-purchase – combining shipping refunds with everything you need to create well-managed, branded delivery experiences despite the odds.
1 in 5 packages, on average, run into delivery issues. We at LateShipment.com help businesses resolve the resulting post-purchase CX gap and inflated shipping invoices with working post-purchase solutions:
Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform – For businesses to effortlessly bridge the post-purchase CX gap and discover new ways to delight and retain customers.
Parcel Audit and Shipping Refunds – For businesses to effortlessly recover up to 20% of shipping costs through refund claims and drive informed choices through in-depth shipping intelligence.
It takes less than 2 minutes to set up LateShipment.com and the best part is that it seamlessly connects with all your existing tools such as eCommerce Platforms, Order Management Systems, and Helpdesk Tools, etc.
The value we add to businesses is most evident when experienced first-hand.
Try LateShipment.com now or talk to us at sales@lateshipment.com.