Complete Guide To Achieving Customer Satisfaction And Delight, With Tips To Put Into Practice
How important are customer satisfaction and delight? According to the 2020 Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, 74% of customers feel loyal to a brand or company. In addition, these same consumers list a list of highlights that they consider essential for a service experience to be memorable for them:
- First, quick problem solving ;
- Also, support is available in real time;
- Friendly service is very important ;
- Have support available on the customer’s preferred contact channel.
The list of points raised by the consumers interviewed in the survey already provides us with quite powerful ammunition to unveil the best customer satisfaction and enchantment strategies.
So, regardless of what kind of manager you are, if you are a company, if you have a business and work with a sales team, you probably know that customer service, satisfaction, and delight are three pillars of good business management.
However, it is not enough to develop strategies to achieve each of these pillars. It is necessary to do this in the best possible way and in an integrated way to effectively achieve customer satisfaction and enchantment. After all, customers increasingly seek to have memorable purchasing experiences, capable of truly linking them to a brand, that is, capable of promoting customer loyalty.
In this text, you will see, in a very practical way:
- What does it mean to effectively delight the customer;
- How to invest in effective customer satisfaction and enchantment;
- How to delight the customer in the first service;
- Tips on how to delight the customer;
- How does customer loyalty work?
5 ways to Invest in Customer Satisfaction and Delight
Optimize response time
This is one of the best tips on how to delight customers. Do you remember that at the beginning of this article, we listed the main demands of customers to feel satisfied with the service offered by a company or brand, according to the Zendesk report?
So, the winning item among those mentioned in the survey was precisely the response time, or the interval that the support and service team takes to contextualize, process, and return customer queries.
Very clearly, if you are wondering how to delight a customer on the first contact, know that having the agility to respond quickly is the first strategy you should seek to employ if you want to build customer loyalty.
According to Jay Baer, influencer and author in the marketing and customer experience segment, consumers expect a maximum response time of 30 minutes to questions made on social media channels. And we go even further: the same author identified that 57% of consumers expect this same response time outside of business hours, including evenings and weekends.
We know that this is a very complex challenge, especially if we take into account the growing increase in the volume of data stored by companies in search of optimizations in the results delivered. With that in mind, what are the possible strategic solutions for this scenario?
We list a few:
- Invest in online customer service software, capable of gathering and offering quick information so that more assertive decisions can be made;
- Tune and integrate the team so that any agent can provide feedback promptly;
- Store and manage service history with the help of an automation tool;
- Seek sector demands according to levels of complexity and assign their resolution to teams with experience compatible with each of them;
- Invest in omnichannel solutions (we will explain more about this item below, such as its importance).
Bet on omnichannel
We mentioned omnichannel as one of the known ways to delight customers in the first contact. Since this is a strategy of paramount importance to ensure customer loyalty, aiming at customer satisfaction and enchantment, let’s go a little deeper into this tip on how to enchant the customer.
According to the same survey on customer experience trends cited at the beginning of the article, the number of companies adopting an omnichannel approach has increased sixfold in the past five years. More than that, research also reports that high-performing teams are twice as likely to adopt an omnichannel approach that integrates channels.
Percentage of companies that adopt omnichannel service:
Faced with data like this, you may be thinking: How will I be able to structure my team to manage all these channels, combining the data obtained from each of them to obtain a history of the relationship with my customers?
Here comes another very important tip on how to delight the customer: a tool like Zendesk Support, which works as a single set of processes for any support channel (from social networks to online chats in real-time). This way, it is possible to manage customer demands in less time. The result is the ability to quickly address demands and quickly return questions, speeding up service and being an effective way to bring customer satisfaction and enchantment.
Invest in the co-creation of products and sales strategies
Have you ever heard of co-creation? Expression can be an important ally to ensure customer satisfaction and enchantment. Want to know why?
Because co-creating means bringing to the center of the development of products and services all the actors in history (including, of course, the customer). The main objective of co-creation is the promotion of innovation and the development of differentiated solutions obtained from new points of view.
With this in mind, there is always the possibility of co-creating with your consumers, suppliers, partners, and employees. In this process, it is essential to keep an open mind so that new perspectives can be seen as opportunities. You can also use the information provided (from research, reports, conversations, and interviews) in favor of the development of your business.
Deliver a memorable, streamlined experience
What is delighting the customer anyway? Know that customer satisfaction and delight begin even before your first contact with support or service. They generally expect them to be able to enjoy a certain amount of autonomy in their shopping experience.
The Zendesk survey, already mentioned in this article, reveals that 66% of respondents try to resolve their problems autonomously in self-service before contacting the team of agents.
With this in mind, it is essential to structure a simplified, didactic, and accessible purchasing journey. The product or service offered must be available on channels that the customer is already familiar with, without having to subject them to complex and time-consuming processes so that they can resolve their problem.
Track appropriate KPIs and anticipate customer needs
All good customer relationship management requires accurate data analysis. The assessment makes it possible to establish types of thermometers to monitor the performance of the relationship with the customer from different perspectives, such as:
- The time of the first response;
- The rate of abandonment or withdrawal of purchases by customers;
- The customer satisfaction index;
- The probability that the customer will recommend your company to other people.
Another of the main tips on how to delight customers is to take advantage of the use of the best indicators of customer satisfaction and delight: this way you generate the ability to anticipate some of their needs. This way, your company can offer a memorable service in which it is clear what it means to delight the customer.
With accurate and up-to-date data, you will be able to develop insights that enable good customer service and optimize the purchasing journey, as well as enable proactive service delivery.
How to delight the customer on the first contact?
Generating customer satisfaction and delight from the first contact is something that goes beyond offering a technically impeccable service. The company’s values must be reflected: the service team must always act based on truth, humility, availability, and empathy. These should be the basic business premises for anyone who wants to grow and succeed in their company.
Be aligned with your purpose
Understanding how to delight the customer in the first service means going beyond the operational level. A team may know, like the back of their hand, each of the procedures required to provide good customer service, but that same team may not be able to awaken delight if they do not work with their hearts.
For this, it is very important to combine investments in innovation and technology with a human component in organizations: the development of a sense of purpose in your company.
Companies must keep in line with their employees the real reasons for doing what they do, that is, the work priorities and the causes in which they truly believe.
The Disney model of customer delight
One of the companies called a model in customer satisfaction and delight is Disney. A reference in studies and literary works in the segment, Disney is an example to be followed by all commercial sectors, in any niche: from hospitals to technological solutions and product sales, We are not exaggerating when we say that everyone can follow this example.
The Disney customer delight model is based on the following pillars:
- In creating unique experiences for the consumer;
- In valuing the team of employees;
- In empathetic leadership;
- With the use of technology.
All these factors, when combined, contribute to increasingly surprising deliveries for customers.
Other companies, besides Disney, also work similarly. These are the cases of corporations like Google and Southwest Airlines, which have revolutionized customer service.
Find out more about Disney’s enchantment strategy and these two other companies mentioned in the video below. The speaker is customer experience expert Alicia Matheson, former director of the Disney Institute. It shows a little about the best customer service practices and Disney’s secrets for delighting customers on the first visit.
In this post, you saw some important tips to promote customer satisfaction and delight throughout the purchase journey.
We recommend additional reading so that you can learn about the main types of customer service and some news in the sector.
Extra tip for customer loyalty
Customer loyalty is a process that develops a good relationship with our customers, based on in-depth knowledge of them. With this knowledge, it is possible to meet your expectations, and even exceed them. The intention is that they will return to buy from your company again. As they have a good experience time and time again, loyal customers spread the word about your company and recommend your products and services to friends and family.
In this way, we have a virtuous cycle that is formed: as the customer has his expectations exceeded, he will buy again and invite other people to buy too. These new customers, in turn, will have their expectations exceeded and will then buy again and refer their friends.
Perhaps, the best tip on how to delight the customer is to invest in software that fully collaborates in favor of customer loyalty, that is, to achieve customer satisfaction and enchantment. If possible, there’s nothing as good as delighting the customer on the first contact.
During sales, it is extremely important to think about how to delight customers in this first contact. For this, we recommend a CRM System created especially for sales teams, which improves productivity, processes, and pipeline visibility. However, despite being very complete, it is a simple tool. We don’t believe it’s part of the sales team’s job to deal with difficult software; it takes software designed to keep sales going strong. Here are some of the advantages of this tool:
- Makes it easy to update opportunities so your team can always access, analyze, and collaborate using relevant data.
- Keeps control of everything, as data is captured automatically, so sales and support teams are always informed;
- Sales and support teams can access built-in tools that provide the full context of a customer account. This keeps teams informed so they can take advantage of opportunities;
- Make calls, send emails, schedule meetings and show sales history in one place, without having to record anything manually;
