Customer Experience and Satisfaction

Satisfied customers are often repeat customers. They're likely to become loyal to your brand and to tell people they know about your business. Dissatisfied customers are also likely to talk about your business — but in ways that can turn potential customers away. Customer experience management is the process of creating positive experiences for customers. Website usability, attention to customer expectations and satisfaction, and developing brand loyalty are part of it. When we focus on what we can do for our customers, our customers will be happier, and our business will grow.

Improve customers' experiences

Keep it simple. An easy-to-use website helps site visitors move through the decision-making steps and place orders. On the other hand, confusion, frustration, or just too many steps may send site visitors to the Back button. Do regular website usability testing, and make improvements where necessary.

Make your website informative. Simple and informative can go together. Provide all the information people could look for when considering your products or services, and organize it so that everything is easy to find.

Develop positive customer interactions. Be helpful, clear, polite, and fast. People who get all their answers without delays and who are impressed with the customer service have few or no reasons to look elsewhere.

If you have employees who interact with customers, provide training in customer service, and reinforce it when necessary.

Encourage brand loyalty

Look at everything you can do to improve customers' experiences, not just at competitive prices. While price is often a deciding factor in initial purchases, factors such as product selection and customer service are more likely to influence whether customers decide to become repeat customers. People who feel that they were treated poorly are unlikely to return.

Consider rewarding current customers by offering discounts on future purchases or other incentives, such as free shipping.

You may want to offer referral coupons that customers can use to get credit for future purchases by referring other people to your business.

Keep your brand name in your customers' minds. An opt-in newsletter lets you send relevant information to your customers regularly. A blog that's frequently updated or possibly a forum gives your customers reasons to come back to your site even when they aren't planning a purchase.

Ask for feedback

Have a Contact link on every page at your site. Better yet, have a toll-free phone number in the page header.

Send post-sales surveys to ask about product and customer service satisfaction. Some people don't complain unless they're asked for feedback. They'll just shop somewhere else. You won't always be able to get those customers back, but if you know what caused their dissatisfaction, you can fix the problem for future customers.

Invite customers to leave reviews at your site. Feedback helps you improve your products and service, and when it's positive, the opportunity for customers to leave it reinforces the brand for them.

Respond to problems and negative feedback

Everyone makes mistakes, but nobody respects people who deny that mistakes have been made. If you or an employee has made a mistake, acknowledge it, pay attention to exactly what upset your customers, and tell them what you're doing to fix it.

In addition to responding to feedback that comes to your company, search for product or company reviews online. If they're about a mistake, respond to them too if they're at a site where you can respond.

Look at the different aspects of each problem. A customer may have been satisfied with the product but dissatisfied with slow shipping time, for example. Or the product may have been fine overall except for one aspect of it that you can improve. Look for specific actions that you can do to improve future customer experiences.

Don't try to please everyone

This may sound like a contradiction to everything else in this article. But no matter how hard we try, we can't please everyone all the time. We do our best, and if that isn't enough for a few customers, it's time to let those customers go.

Related blog articles

To learn more about online customer experience and satisfaction, see these blog articles:

• How to Research Customer Service Satisfaction
• Test Your Website's Usability
• The New Art of Persuasion: What Worked Before Won´t Work Now
• Writing for the Web versus Writing for Print