It’s a digital age, and technology plays a crucial role in everyday human life. Learn how tech can help businesses improve customer satisfaction and interact with people at the next level of personalization.
One of the most significant brand values is customer satisfaction. It’s the result of all interactions the customer has with a company online. The most successful and forward-thinking brands approach their website design, mobile experience, and online accessibility with customer centricity in mind, first of all.
Fortunately, modern technology can help service providers address customer needs even more efficiently. It can enable a brand to become a good listener, be aware of all customer needs, meet them on the right platforms, and deliver the best solutions timely. Keep on reading to learn more about technologies, tools, and actionable practices that will help your brand achieve a higher level of customer satisfaction.
How Can Technology Impact Customer Satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction measures how delighted customers are with a product or service. Believe us or not, technology plays an important part in this. The right tools can empower companies to make the customer experience smoother and more exciting. With technology on the rise, long waiting times and slow responses are no longer acceptable and may negatively influence sales. Thus, companies have to keep abreast of the latest tech trends and tools and integrate them into business processes proactively to achieve the highest level of customer satisfaction.
Utilizing software and communication tools, companies can not only address urgent customer needs but also show that people can rely on them. Technology can help brands earn customer trust and loyalty through delivering a service at the next level of immediacy and personalization. Are you curious how? Here we share seven steps to increase customer satisfaction by leveraging technology.
7 Steps to Improve Customer Satisfaction Using Technology
1. Integrate a live chat
Whether you need to get an answer to a single question or to get comprehensive advice on the product use, you are unlikely to email your request to the company or hit on the phone call. There is nothing more exhausting and time-wasting than hanging on the call waiting for the customer agent’s response. It would be way easier to just type your question in a live chat and receive an instant response with a few options of how you can solve your issue. Isn’t it? A live chat technology can help you provide the level of immediacy close to a consultant assisting the customer at a physical store.
This recommendation refers not only to websites but also to companies that have their own applications. Today, an increasing number of SMBs and larger organizations develop mobile apps to address customer needs on mobile as well. Integrating one of the popular chat APIs into a mobile application enables live chat features and lets you deliver customer care.
Source: HelpCrunch
2. Try cobrowsing
While cobrowsing is not a very well-known practice, it’s extremely helpful in customer service. Cobrowsing can help your company create the ‘aha’ effect when providing support to the customer. This tactic has become more popular during the COVID-19 restrictions when there is often no opportunity to interact with teammates in person.
Imagine you are on a call with your customer and you need to show how to deal with particular trouble (let’s say, an account set-up). Most online communication tools (CPaaS) allow sharing a screen with your interlocutor during the call. It’s called cobrowsing. This approach helps improve communication and resolve customer issues faster. It reduces the waiting time and allows avoiding long explanations about what customers see on their screens and what their next step should be.
3. Provide a mobile experience
As mentioned above, the mobile experience has gained paramount importance in the modern world. It has become crucial for all businesses to provide mobile access for customers to simplify their life. That’s why more and more companies decide to create mobile applications to cover all customer needs when those are on the go.
Mobile apps don’t only provide an opportunity to deliver important information to the user, but they also allow people to interact with your product based on their needs. It helps increase customer satisfaction and engagement rate. An excellent example of a business app that helps increase customer satisfaction and engagement rate is the IKEA application with an AR feature.
Source: 9to5mac
4. Launch a chatbot
There is a lot of buzz around chatbots in recent years, and it’s for a good reason. This technology opens multiple opportunities for businesses across different verticals and industries. It enables a company to provide real-time 24/7 customer support when your teammates are out of work.
Source: SproutSocial
Modern chatbots can be fun, informative, and help you capture leads. They provide consistent customer support by suggesting help articles, enhance site navigation directing users to the right web pages, increase sales recommending customers relevant products, and much more. Chatbots are particularly beneficial from the marketing perspective since they allow collecting the details of customers and help you move them through a sales funnel.
5. Leverage analytics tools
To provide high-quality customer service, you must know who your customer is, first of all. Analytics tools like Hotjar, Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Hootsuite can provide valuable insights into your customer needs and behavior. Furthermore, you can gauge people’s opinions about your customer service by using Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.
Online analytics software can help you define bottlenecks in the digital experience and make the necessary improvements. For example, you can collect call data to get insights and understand your target audience better. It allows you to see what types of products customers check the most frequently and display them in product recommendations. By monitoring customer behavior data you can increase personalization. Research which customer groups are the most interested in a product and take this insight into account when launching advertising or sending marketing emails to different customer segments.
6. Use social media listening tools
One of the greatest inventions that the digital age has given to business is social media. It’s a great environment for interaction with customers and providing round-the-clock support. Through sharing engaging videos, blog posts, guides, and infographics brands can connect with customers without being too pushy. Another advantage of social media is that it can provide a wealth of information about customer needs, pain points, interests, and trends. You can collect all this data by using social media listening tools. Moreover, this software enables you to monitor a brand reputation online, respond to customer comments in a timely manner, and deliver even greater support to people.
7. Rethink your website navigation
A website is likely the first place the customer goes before making a purchase. Businesses should care to make it inclusive, easy to navigate, visually appealing, and provide all the necessary information about the product and the company itself. By the way, did you know that the average customer needs only 0.05 seconds to form an opinion on your website? Make sure it looks great enough to make a positive impression on your visitors within this short interval of time.
Follow proven web design practices to create convenient navigation. In addition, you may use web visitor behavior analytics tools to monitor how users navigate through your website and consume content there. It will help you adjust the design for customer real needs and enhance the overall interaction with a brand online. Walmart’s website is a great example of user-oriented and convenient navigation.
Source: Walmart
Conclusion
Customer satisfaction is a critical detector of the company’s success since it directly affects a brand’s reputation, sales, and revenue. Happy customers are returning customers, which means healthy and continuous relations with a brand. In the digital transformation era, businesses can benefit a lot from using technology. The right tools used in the right place can become a booster of business performance and smooth out the edges of customer experience. We hope that this brief guide on using tech to improve customer satisfaction will provide all the necessary information to help your business grow and build trust-based relationships with customers.