Customer journeys and customer satisfaction are hot topics these days. However, it often feels like the focus is on new customers rather than existing customers.
In fact, optimizing the post-sales journey and ensuring customer satisfaction is just as important, if not more important, for long-term success.
In this article, we’ll give you an overview of a typical post-sales journey and outline the steps you can take to increase customer satisfaction at each stage.
A typical post-sales journey.
The exact nature of a post-sales or customer satisfaction journey varies depending on the type of product or service you sell. While every journey is different, most journeys look something like this:
- Purchase – The customer purchases your product or service
- Usage or Experience – The customer uses your product or service
- Post-Sales Support – When needed, the customer uses or refers you to your support resources, such as user manuals, support websites, live chat or phone support
- Feedback – The customer can leave a review or fill out a survey, depending on what is available
- Repeat purchases – In the best case scenario, they buy your product or use your services again, leading to higher customer loyalty
As you can probably imagine, the key to a successful post-sale customer journey is ensuring a high level of customer satisfaction.
In the best case scenario, your customers are happy with their experience from the moment they buy your product to the moment they use it, and even when they contact customer support.
If your customers are very happy, you are more likely to get good feedback, repeat purchases and loyalty.
Now let’s take a look at why it is important to keep customers happy and how you can ensure that they are.
The importance of customer satisfaction.
To remain competitive today, one of the most important things you can do is keep your customers happy. A Gartner survey found that 81% of marketing professionals believe that customer satisfaction is the most important area where companies can gain a competitive advantage.
However, too many people still neglect customer satisfaction or treat it as a secondary issue, which is a big mistake. According to a PwC survey, 59% of customers stop doing business with a company if they have more than one bad experience, and up to 17% stop doing business after a single bad experience.
In other words, if customer satisfaction is low, you are likely to get fewer repeat customers and negative publicity. On the other hand, if customer satisfaction is high, your company will receive more brand loyalty and more referrals.
As you can see, there is a lot at stake. Repeat customers or clients are the lifeblood of most companies and account for a large portion of total revenue.
Any additional investment that companies can make to ensure a positive customer journey is likely to be quickly repaid in the form of additional revenue generated.
6 Tips to Improve Customer Satisfaction
1. Ask for and Analyze Their Feedback
It’s hard to provide a high level of customer satisfaction if you don’t first listen to what your customers have to say. These days, it’s easy to ask for and encourage feedback from your customers. You can provide an online survey that rewards them with a discount code or something similar. You can also collect feedback from other sources, such as Google reviews, if available.
2. Improve your product or service
Companies should constantly strive to improve the quality of their products or services, especially if they sell goods or services in a competitive market. For example, a company that sells cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) should listen carefully to customer feedback and suggestions for improvement and upgrade its software to adapt.
If you can’t add new features or offer upgrades quickly, you should still update your customers on your progress, as good communication helps maintain a high level of customer satisfaction.
3. Plan follow-up communications and actions.
If a customer has contacted you for any reason, such as requesting a new feature, and you can’t respond right away – don’t forget to follow up. Even if the follow-up call or message is just to let them know that you’re working on their issue, it’s better than saying nothing at all.
4. Offer customer support across multiple channels.
In today’s digital age, there’s no excuse for poor customer support. In fact, customers demand a high level of support and service. That’s why they appreciate the ability to choose between multiple channels. At the very least, you should offer good email or phone support, with additional channels like live web chat, social media, and SMS support.
5. Respond proactively to complaints and bad reviews.
If you receive a complaint or a bad review, the worst thing you can do is ignore it and hope it goes away. Doing so will only make the customer even more annoyed and the bad publicity could be more extensive than necessary. Take the initiative and resolve any issues as soon as possible. For example, you can update the customer on how things are going, offer a refund or replacement, or give a free gift.
It’s a good idea to keep track of your reviews and respond to any bad reviews by explaining how you’re fixing the problem. Don’t try to make excuses or act defensively, as this never looks good and will make people think twice before buying from you.
6. Use a powerful CRM to manage the post-sales customer journey.
A good customer satisfaction software, like efficy, is ideal for managing post-sales customer support. You can set reminders to follow up with customers after a certain period of time and document any complaints or questions. A CRM stores all customer data and information in a single centralized location, making it easier for you to reach out and support your customers.