5 Ways Local Businesses Can Improve Customer Satisfaction

Imagine this: You took your family out for dinner at a local restaurant everyone’s talking about. It’s the first time in seven long months you got the chance to spend quality time with them.

It’s Sunday evening, so the place is overcrowded. There are people everywhere. After waiting in queue for over an hour, it’s finally your turn. 

One of the staff members takes you and your family to a table that hasn’t even been cleaned yet. He says to you and your family members, “Please have a seat. I’ll send someone to clean the table.”

Five minutes pass and nobody cleans the table.

That’s bad experience #1.

After a few minutes, a waiter finally arrives and cleans the table. 

Now, you’re sitting there waiting for someone to attend to you and take your order. But every waiter you see is busy attending to other customers. You raise your hand to try to get their attention and try—unsuccessfully—to wave someone down.

That’s bad experience #2.

And the bad experiences don’t stop there. Over the course of the evening, you’re faced with rude staff, undercooked food, and incorrect orders. 

After a night like that, would you consider visiting the place again? Our guess is no. The culprit? A poor customer experience.

Customer experience is one of the biggest key differentiators between businesses today. A fantastic customer experience will help you win new customers and repeat business. A bad customer experience will send people running to your competitors. 

The Importance of Delivering a Top-Notch Customer Experience 

The Covid-19 pandemic has not only fueled the digital revolution but also changed the way customers think—permanently. No matter what vertical your business belongs to or who your target audience is, companies all across the globe are faced with the obstacle of rising customer expectations.

Consumers have access to a wealth of data at the tip of their fingers. A simple Google search is enough to tell them just about anything they want to know. 

They also have more options than ever before—your competitors are waiting to steal your customers. In fact, 58% of your customers will switch to one of your competitors upon having a poor experience with your business. 

From the moment customers find you—whether in-store or digitally—you need to have systems and processes in place to make sure their interactions with you are positive.

According to McKinsey’s The State of Customer Care in 2022 report, most customer care leaders’ fastest-growing priority area is improving the overall customer experience.

If your customers want to purchase a product on your website, you need to make sure that they’re easily able to:

• Find your product
• Add it to their cart
• Check out without facing any technical glitches

If a customer runs into a problem with one of their orders, you need to make sure that:

• They can easily reach out to your customer support team
• Your support team addresses the issue quickly and comes up with a satisfying solution

To sum it up: Every interaction your customers have with your business should be quick, easy, and positive. That’s the only way you’ll earn loyal customers.

Customer Experience Obstacles

Let’s talk about the challenges. It goes without saying that many customer service experience burnout. Not having the right systems and processes in place can leave your team struggling to keep up. Apart from this, some other mistakes most companies make are:

• Not collecting customer feedback. If you don’t collect customer feedback, your customers may be facing issues you don’t even know about.
• Not understanding your customers. If you want to serve your customers better, you must understand their pain points. 
• Restricting your customers to a single channel. Different customers like interacting with businesses across different channels. You can elevate your customer experience by offering multi-channel communication. However, while doing so, you need to make sure that your customer service team is easily able to address all queries from different platforms from a single dashboard.

5 Ways Local Businesses Can Improve Customer Satisfaction

So now you understand the problem. Let’s talk about the solutions. Here are five simple tactics that local businesses should implement 

1. Understand Your Customers and Their Pain Points

To deliver an outstanding customer experience and improve customer satisfaction, you need to understand your customers. Here’s how. 

• Dive deep into your customer personas. Focus on their demographic information, purchasing behavior, pain points, and more to understand who your different types of customers actually are. 

Stuck? Read Getting Clear on Your Ideal Customer to learn more

• Identify the challenges your customers face the most. Once you do that, the next step is to dive deep and figure out whether your products or service are actually helping them solve their problems. If the answer is no, you need to ask yourself: What can I do about it? How can we improve our offering?
• Interact with your customers often. Ask them why they purchased your product or service. Learn firsthand how your product or service makes their lives easier. Furthermore, learn more about them as people. Strong customer relationships will have a massive impact on your business. 

2. Collect Customer Feedback

Did you know that 96% of your customers will not complain directly to you if they have a bad experience with a business? They’ll simply leave. 

Silent customers are often a big red flag. While these customers will not reach out to you, they’ll probably share their bad experiences with their friends and family, which can have a brutal impact on your reputation. 

The simple solution is to ask your customers for feedback—often. Welcome both the good and the bad, because all feedback presents an opportunity for you to improve. 

By reaching out to customers and asking for feedback, you’ll make them feel valued and show them that you’re proactive about helping them, which can cause even the unhappiest customers to reevaluate their opinion of your business.  

Click here to learn more about proactive customer service.

And remember: Gathering feedback is just the first step. It’s equally important to act on that feedback. 

Offer Multi-Channel Communication

Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for customer communication. Different customers have different preferences. Some might prefer to call you while others might prefer to reach out via text or email. Some might even prefer to communicate with your business on social media. 

If you want to position yourself as a customer-centric business, we recommend giving your customers convenient communication options. 

Offering multi-channel communication can work wonders for the customer experience; however, make sure that while doing so, you don’t make the process too hard for your customer service team. 

Podium Inbox allows local businesses to bring every conversation into a single thread, making it easier for customer service agents to effectively keep a track of everything and respond five times faster.  

Cut Down Response Time

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

These days, customers expect lightning-fast responses.

46% of your customers expect a response from you in less than four hours. And over 12% want businesses to respond to them in 15 minutes. So, if you’re taking forever to respond to your customers, you may end up losing them.

And we’re not just talking about responding to customer service tickets. Some customers might want to speak with a sales rep before they make a purchase. Others might want to follow up about purchases they’ve already made.  

But how do you cut down response times without burning out your team? Here are a few ideas:

• Use Automated Messaging: You don’t need to have 24/7 staff in order to offer 24/7 communication. That’s what automated messaging is for. By setting up automated messaging, you can give an immediate response no matter when a customer reaches out. Here’s a template to use: 
• “You’ve reached us outside of business hours. Our business hours are :business_hours:. A customer service agent will reach out to you as soon as we’re back in office.”
• Implement Text Messaging: Customers love texting because it’s quick and convenient. With Podium, you can incorporate text messaging into your overall strategy in no time. Want to start sending texts with Podium? 

Start a free, no-strings-attached trial today. 

Train Your Employees

Train your employees—that sounds like a no-brainer, right? It’s crucial but it’s something a lot of businesses overlook. If you want your employees to deliver the best possible customer experience, you need to provide them with the right tools and systems as well as the processes they need. 

You need to help them understand who your customers are and their pain points. You need to motivate them to collect customer feedback and provide them with access to resources and tools to act on it. 

To effectively train your employees, you should:

• Make sure they understand your customers’ pain points and problems. You might consider letting them listen to sales and customer service calls to help them understand the challenges your customers are facing. 
• Arm them with information about your products and services—make sure they know the ins and outs. 
• Create a mentoring plan and divide the training into different levels. 
• Set training goals and reward your employees for accomplishing them.

Let Podium Help You Connect with Your Customers

With more and more businesses trying to catch your customers’ attention and an ever-increasing number of options available, the competition is fiercer than ever. If you don’t prioritize the customer experience, your business will struggle to win customers. 

The good news? You don’t have to do it alone. Podium offers a wide range of tools that will help you exceed customer expectations and get more done in less time. 

Interested? Start a free 14-day trial today.