Do you dread waking up and discovering half your customers ditched you for your competition? Good, that means you’ll do whatever you can to keep client satisfaction at its peak.
You know if you don’t make your clients satisfied, your business will fail.
You wouldn’t think I’d have to say client experience is important in 2022, but, here we are. Survey results from Gartner indicate that 4 out of 5 marketers see customer satisfaction as the primary competitive component of their industry.
In other words, client satisfaction is now the battlefield of competing businesses.
Client satisfaction is a metric used to see how your business meets or exceeds your customer’s expectations. This covers every aspect of customer interaction, from customer service, product quality, client surveys, etc.
If you win the race for client experience, you’ll have highly satisfied clients on your plate. These clients are less price-sensitive despite the grudge purchase, are more likely to convert, and are missionaries who will go forth and spread the good news of your brand.
In this article, we’ll answer the following questions:
- What is client satisfaction and why does it matter?
- How can you assess client satisfaction?
- How do you improve client satisfaction?
Ready? Let’s get right to it.
What Does Satisfaction Feel Like?
The best way to understand client satisfaction is through the lens of client experience which refers to the way your customers view you, how they interact with you, and what they think about your service or product. Exceeding customer expectations builds customer loyalty and influences purchase decisions. These are good indicators to help predict your company’s growth and revenue.
Before we describe what client satisfaction looks like, let’s first take a look at what happens when you have dissatisfied clients. It doesn’t matter if you’ve established your brand as a household name. PwC’s survey says that in the U.S., even if people love a company or a product, 59% don’t mind walking away after several bad experiences, while 17% will do the same after only one bad client experience.
A steady stream of recurring clients doesn’t indicate client satisfaction. In the same way, you can’t say “another satisfied customer” when you complete a transaction with a new client. It’s possible that there just isn’t a nearby alternative that offers home services or customers simply procrastinate switching to your competition. Unless you tip the satisfaction scale to your favor, customers will be forced to pull the plug on you and that entails revenue drops, higher acquisition costs, and failed KPIs.
By implementing client satisfaction surveys, you can determine what works and what doesn’t concerning their satisfaction, or lack thereof. These client questionnaires demonstrate your company’s care and willingness to recalibrate if it means giving an impressive client experience and ensuring client satisfaction.
To put it simply: Don’t expect your customers to care about you if you don’t care about them.
Keeping your customers very satisfied pays off. Having improved client satisfaction helps your business stand out 600 ft. above competitors and guarantees long-term clients. Also, it helps you avoid the consequences of poor customer service, such as customer churn and negative publicity.
In this day and age, businesses shouldn’t underestimate client satisfaction. Wizard of Sales® can help you to transform one-time customers into recurring clients, and eventually, your brand ambassadors. Book a demo.
How Can You Measure Client Satisfaction?
The purpose of a product or service is to soothe the felt needs of your clients. You fill your client’s satisfaction to the brim when you deliver on your proposed value proposition and follow-through in carving out the pain point or satisfying the pleasure point after they purchase.
There’s more to client satisfaction than merely your proposed solutions. You should never underestimate the importance of customer service in ensuring customer satisfaction. Customers are real people trying to make a living just like you. When your solutions plus customer service prove advantageous for their money, energy, and time, that’s when you build a solid customer base and foster client loyalty.
That said, here are 5 ways to measure client satisfaction:
1. Overall Satisfaction Measure
The overall satisfaction measure reflects the attitudinal perception or opinion of a client with your product or services. For example, asking a question like “Overall, how satisfied do you feel after working with Joe’s HVAC Services?” elicits immediate client opinion regarding their experience with the product, service, or company as a whole.
It is the client experience that ultimately predicts their satisfaction and their perception of your quality.
Your company’s perceived quality is typically measured in three categories:
- Overall quality — this covers a client’s level of satisfaction in working with you from start to finish
- Reliability — this measures how reliable your solutions are and how helpful your customer service personnel in supporting client needs
- Fulfillment — this measures the extent to which you alleviated a customer’s pain point or satisfied a pleasure point
A rule of thumb to remember is that dissatisfied customers express feelings of purchase regret. This is known as cognitive dissonance, or buyer’s remorse. Even though you’re selling a grudge purchase, satisfied customers will associate their satisfaction with positive expressions like “it was worth it.”
Attitudinal surveys such as this help you grasp your business’ perceived quality and your customer’s satisfaction level.
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Qualtrics calls the Net Promoter Score (NPS) the gold standard in assessing customer experience. This metric measures their client loyalty to your company. Client satisfaction is the building block that creates customer loyalty. Your loyal customers are the ones likely to repurchase your solutions or recommend you to people.
You can measure NPS, say, by asking clients “would you recommend Joe’s HVAC Services to your family, friends, or colleagues?”
If respondents are urged to rate between 0 (Big fat no) and 10 (Definitely would), you can define their NPS based on their responses. It usually falls into one of 3 levels of customer loyalty:
- Promoters – they will normally rate you with 9 or 10, which means they’re loyal and enthusiastic to work with you again or recommend you to others.
- Passives – they will typically respond with 7 or 8, which means they’re satisfied enough with your service but not delighted enough to be advocates.
- Detractors – this bunch attributes a score of 0 to 6, which illustrates their dissatisfaction with your service. They are unlikely to repurchase and worse, may even create bad publicity.
You calculate the NPS by subtracting the percentage of detractors from your pool of promoters. If 20% are detractors and 80% are promoters, your NPS would be 60%. An NPS above 0 is the bare minimum target, which means your promoters outweigh the detractors.
3. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is one of the easiest ways to measure customer satisfaction, and you obtain it by asking a simple question like “How satisfied were you with your experience?”
The strength of CSAT lies in its simplicity. You can use the client survey to seal a customer interaction and see if it was advantageous from your customer’s perspective. For this reason, it’s best to integrate CSAT into every touchpoint of your customer experience to identify the bottlenecks and improve the overall process.
A CSAT score is easy to calculate: Divide the sum of positive responses by the max number of responses you collected, multiplied by 100. If you get 20 positive responses out of 30, that’s (20/30)*100 = 60%, which means a majority of your clients are satisfied.
4. Customer Effort Score (CES)
The customer effort score measures how much effort your customers put in to interact with your business. Another way to look at CES is how much effort it takes customers to use your product or service or how manageable was it for your service reps to solve their problems.
The ease of a given experience is a useful tool to measure client loyalty and ultimately, client satisfaction. Using a rating-based score system, Customer Effort Scores aim to streamline your processes to limit the effort customers need for a solution.
Here are other questions to help with CES:
- Was it easy to book an appointment?
- Was it simple to use our equipment?
- Was it effortless to communicate with our customer care representatives?
- Was it intuitive to navigate through our website?
5. Data Collection and Analysis
5. Data Collection and AnalysisClient surveys aren’t meant to sit idly in your basement. They’re supposed to be collected, interpreted, and analyzed to devise the best courses of action in maximizing customer satisfaction and establishing client loyalty.
Each survey strategy listed above, whether the Overall Satisfaction Measure, NPS, CSAT, or CES, is meant to streamline your methods and eliminate bottlenecks that contribute to your audience’s dissatisfaction.
How the Postcard Strategy Leverages Client Satisfaction?
The in-home postcard marketing strategy is one of the most ingenious ways to solicit 5-star reviews from your customer base. You can also use it to improve client satisfaction levels, especially in the internet age.
Postcard marketing has been in use for a long time, but it has only recently started to be used as a client satisfaction tool. It is an old-school way of marketing that many believe is outdated. Nevertheless, this technique will actually help you improve customer satisfaction when done correctly.
Thank-You cards vs. Proactive Postcards
Sending out thank-you cards is a great way to show your customers that you appreciate their business. It is also a great way to stay in touch with your customers, but why wait until you’ve left the customer’s home, when your technician has the perfect opportunity to confirm the buyer has received a 5-star experience BEFORE they leave the home?
Want to reduce callbacks, increase 5-star reviews on Google, and minimize bad reviews altogether?
Try this:
You’re an HVAC technician working on an AC unit for a couple. You finish the job and want to know if they feel you’ve provided a 5-star service today. You hand them this postcard with your company’s branding and message on it, and say to the customer, “Mr./Mrs. Customer, do you feel I have given you 5-star service today?”
Now, the customer will say yes or no, and anything less than an enthusiastic YES! means it’s time to figure out how to get to 5-stars before leaving the home.
If they say, “YES!”, then the Technician can say, “Would you be willing to give us a 5-star review on Google mentioning my name, because my boss takes me out to lunch every time I get a 5-star review with my name mentioned”.
Note the QR code. That will take the buyer directly to your Google Review page, and if the Technician filled out his or her name in the spot provided, they will get yet another glowing review. Just be sure to provide your Technician with a $20 or $25 restaurant gift card, and occasionally take them out to lunch yourself.
Reciprocity research tells us that when the Technician says because … the likelihood of the customer complying increases by 66%. Further research teaches us that customers who are asked to speak positively about their experience (even the grudge purchases) are 80% more likely to reflect on the experience in a more favorable light in the future. That’s setting you up for client satisfaction success.
Postcards are a great way to improve client satisfaction, but only when they are used correctly. Make sure you thank your customers for their business and stay in touch with them, but don’t miss the perfect opportunity to get those 5-star reviews when the opportunity is ripe. Not only are you getting those precious 5-star reviews, but you are also actually improving customer satisfaction.
When you use postcards with this strategy to improve customer satisfaction, you are making a commitment to your customers. You are showing them that you value their opinion and that you are willing to make changes to make their experience better NOW. Not later. Not maybe. NOW! This is a great way to build loyalty and keep your customers coming back. There is no better strategy to encourage customer loyalty and cultivate better client satisfaction at the moment.
If your residential home service business is having trouble establishing 5-star client satisfaction, let Wizard of Sales® help you take care of it. Book a call to learn more.