Tips to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is essential to the success of any online business. Happy customers are the ones who constantly make your business grow and prosper through their purchases as well as their recommendations to others. But how do you ensure that customers are so happy that they come back to shop with you again and again and eventually become regulars?

It is much more cost-effective to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new customers. Customer expert Ian Kingwill claims that is 5 to 8 times more expensive to win over new customers. It is essential that customer satisfaction is always at the top of your list if you want your online shop to continue growing steadily.

In this article, we’ll share tips for you to increase customer satisfaction (and therefore sales) for your online shop.

Table of Contents

1. Meet your customers' expectations
2. Small gestures can have a big impact
3. Make it easy for your customers
4. Ensure customer loyalty outside your online shop
5. Collect & analyse data

1. Meet your customers' expectations (even before the purchase)

Sounds logical, right? That is why meeting your customers’ expectations should be at the top of your priority list. After all, your customers expect everything to run smoothly and that the product does what it promises. And yet, there are countless reasons why a customer may be dissatisfied with your store:

The product does not meet their needs.
The package arrives late or, in the worst case, not at all.
The product is defective.
The customer is experiencing problems with returns.
And so forth…

And while many of these scenarios are unavoidable, you can and should do everything to minimise them.

Product page

If you look at product pages around the internet, you will see that the product descriptions and images are often very sparse. The customer might buy the product hoping it works and knowing it can be returned otherwise. This means that you’ll have to bear the costs of the return while also having an unsatisfied customer. That is exactly the opposite of what you want to achieve.

It is therefore important that you pay special attention to the product page. Make sure your product descriptions contain enough information and that your product images show the products well.

Are you giving enough of the right details? What about the product images: Does the image depict the size of the product accurately? These are just a few questions to ask yourself when analysing your product pages.

Displaying product reviews is also a great way to increase the odds of creating a satisfied customer. With this user-generated feedback, this well-informed customer will also be more likely to leave a positive review, thereby improving your reputation even more.

Delivery time

It is also important to be honest about the delivery time so your customers know exactly when the package will arrive.

On rare occasions, a delivery might take longer than expected. You won’t score any points with your customers if they have to contact you because the package has not yet been delivered. This is not good for customer satisfaction.

Therefore, it’s important to be proactive and inform customers when a longer delay is expected. If the delivery time is much longer, you could offer a discount for the next order. However, do not do this too quickly. If you offer a discount for a one-day delay, the customer might feel bribed rather than helped.

Shutterstock/serazetdinov

2. Small gestures can have a big impact on customer satisfaction

Unboxing

Customer satisfaction can be boosted with small gestures. For example, some companies include a handwritten note in the box saying "Thank you for your purchase. We hope you enjoy it!". Sometimes the employee's name is even written underneath. This gives the transaction a personal touch. Don't underestimate the customer's unboxing experience!

Customer service

In customer service, it all starts with how employees begin their conversations with the customer. Do they answer in a monotone voice, or a cheerful voice? How well does the employee listen to the problem?

It often helps to say "If I understand correctly, you are contacting me because…" and then you briefly summarise the problem. Always explain what your plan of action is clearly so the customer feels well-informed. Don't be afraid to put the customer on hold briefly and then come back with multiple solutions.

If the product in question is less expensive to replace than to pay for the return, you can offer your customer the option of keeping the product and either getting a refund or receiving a replacement item.

Shutterstock/Yavdat

If you think the customer is satisfied after a conversation (and they didn’t cost you your sanity), you can consider sending them a small gift. If the customer ordered a notebook, send a gift pen with a card saying "You'll probably need this".

Generally speaking, you can also simply send a card with "We spoke by telephone and I hope your question was answered correctly. Thank you for our pleasant conversation", with the name of the employee underneath.

You can also offer a gift voucher for free shipping on the next order. This is how you turn satisfied customers into real ambassadors! Using an NPS or similar score can make the difference between a passive customer and a promoter.

With Trusted Shops, you can also collect NPS scores, which help you learn whether your customers are ambassadors of your brand or if they still need convincing.

Recommended reading:
What is Your Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

3. Make it easy for your customers

Shutterstock.com/asife

How easy is the navigation on your site? How long does the checkout process take?

Frustration is one of the most important conversion killers in e-commerce. Unless you want potential customers to leave your shop without buying, you should make it as easy as possible for them.

Navigation

Navigating the site is important, so the navigation menu of your site should be easy to use. However, navigating the site also means:

using clear call-to-actions
providing a simple check-out process
ensuring customers can find answers to any questions quickly and easily.

You might be too familiar with your company and your website to identify potential issues. It can be good to have the site tested by someone unfamiliar with your website. Either use a friend or hire a focus group.

If navigating your site is made easier for the customer, you can expect increased order values and conversion rates.

Recommended reading:
5 Tips for Making Your Website Easier to Navigate

Cross- and upselling

You can improve the purchasing experience through a good cross- and upselling strategy.

Cross-selling is when you recommend a complementary product.

Upselling is when you recommend a more expensive version of the product.

Both of these strategies can be done either on the product page itself or in the checkout process.

Example of cross-selling:

If your customer places a digital camera in the shopping cart, you can propose an extra battery.
Someone orders a flower pot? Maybe that person needs potting soil.
Do you sell a coffee machine? Suggest coffee beans.

Example of upselling:

The customer looks at the product page for a laptop and you suggest a slightly more expensive laptop with more RAM for a better gaming experience.
For dog treats, you offer a larger size (for savings) or a premium version (for quality).
The customer orders toothpaste and you offer a subscription for automatic deliveries.

Focus on what is meaningful. The customer must feel that you are trying to help. They shouldn’t feel irritated because you are trying to sell golf clubs to them when they just want to buy a bath mat.

Recommended reading:
Increase Sales through Upselling and Cross‑selling

4. Also ensure customer loyalty outside your online shop

Customer satisfaction is not only important within your online shop. You can also improve customer satisfaction outside of it. Make sure you give the customer added value because you are more than just an online store. But how do you do that?

With the help of blogs, informative social posts, and engaging with your customers.

Companies that help their customers with a useful blog or video to demonstrate useful topics in the industry will be perceived as experts.

This not only increases customer loyalty, but can also ensure that your online shop is found by new customers (via SEO), who would have never heard of you otherwise.

You can also improve customer service through social channels. The customer gets the feeling that they’ll receive a personal answer. If you respond quickly and reliably to a public post (not private messages), not only will this specific customer be satisfied, but everyone can see how good your company is at dealing with issues. This counts for the reviews posted on your site or on review platforms.

Therefore, never dismiss your customer with a standard response, but instead always be original and helpful. This also applies to the customer reviews you collect via a review platform.

What if you are too busy to reply?

If you collect reviews via Trusted Shops, you can minimise your efforts for this task with the Smart Review Assistant. This AI tool summarises long reviews so you get a quick overview. It also generates a personal response, which you can adjust or send directly. Therefore, you are still in control, but you can work twice as fast.

5. Collect & analyse the data

To know what is already going well and what you can improve, it is important to analyse the data you collect. Let’s begin there:

Collect data

When you collect reviews, the customer feels like they are being heard. You can send a short, easy questionnaire. For example, a simple star rating or an NPS score.

With an NPS, you ask the customer a basic question: Based on your experience with us, to what extent would you recommend our company to friends/family?

Customers are often inclined to give an 8 if they are very satisfied. Therefore, it is important to find out why they didn’t give a 9 or a 10. The customers who give a 9 or a 10 are potential ambassadors for your brand!

If you are looking for specific information, you can ask specific questions. With the Trusted Shops review platform, you have the option to customise your questionnaire yourself, so that you can ask whatever you want to know. This can be done via an NPS or a specific set of questions that are sent out in the review invites.

Analyse data

When you ask the customer questions, it is important that you analyse their answers. What is the general sentiment of your customers? What do the customers like and where can you improve? Through data analysis, you discover problems you might not know about because you don’t experience the process from the customer's perspective.

If you ask your customer service to register what customers contact you about (e.g. order not delivered, product information, etc.) you can gain insights into what is not yet running smoothly, so you know where to start optimising.

Sometimes the data from all those reviews can be a bit overwhelming and you don't have the time to read and review all the reviews one by one. A useful AI tool from Trusted Shops is the Sentiment Analysis. You can see per category whether customers feel positive or negative about it.

For example, let’s look at the topic of delivery. Are customers satisfied with the delivery or can you improve on this? The Sentiment Analysis analyses all your reviews and gives you a score for this category. You can also see how many and which reviews say something about this topic. With this complete analysis and overview, you’ll know exactly what your next steps should be to improve your offer.

Conclusion

You can improve customer satisfaction by:

Listening to your customers.
Making things easier for them.
Setting the right expectations.

Find out what your customers want and how you can make it as easy as possible for them to place an order with you. Give the customer the feeling that you care about them and turn them into a brand ambassador step by step.

19/06/24