No matter how similar they seem, customer satisfaction isn’t customer happiness.
In fact, both these concepts are miles apart, yet important enough to distinguish from each other.
On the surface, customer satisfaction and happiness, both seem to mean that you should be promoting a positive experience for your customers.
And to some extent, that’s accurate.
Customer satisfaction refers to shortening the line between customer expectations and what you deliver. And that’s all customer satisfaction really is.
Most times, customer satisfaction is fulfilled in something as basic as completing their order and delivering the product/service.
A customer purchases a smartphone from your online store, adds the phone to their cart, makes the payment, gets the product delivered, and experiences good after-sales service. And that’s customer satisfaction – managed expectations with predictable experience.
However, customer happiness includes taking creative and proactive measures to ensure that your customer is leaving with a positive experience. That means giving them more of what they want.
86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. And, 89% of customers will make another purchase if they had a great experience with the brand.
So when a customer purchases a smartphone from your store, you give them options to engrave their name on the phone, add a complimentary tempered glass to their order, or automatically add them to your loyalty program – all constitute to customer happiness.
Customer happiness means going the extra mile to create an emotional tie with your customers so that they remember you and potentially return in the future.
Improving Customer Happiness: 7 Actionable Tips
The truth is that customer happiness is a mix of a variety of simple things that you can do along the customer journey to make them feel more emotionally connected with your brand.
And here’s how you can do it:
1. Introducing Personalization
‘Nike by You’ is a good example of personalization.
It allows you to customize your pair of shoes in such a way that you can choose everything from the Outsole to the shoe tongue – along with the fabric and color – on your own.
Even though a customer and business are involved in a mere buy-sell relationship, the expectation still is to have a warm and positive interaction – and personalization allows that.
No doubt your business sells some of the best products or your services.
But if a new vs returning customer has the exact same journeys while buying from you, chances are that you aren’t creating that much of an impact.
Establishing a personal connection with your customers is important. 89% of marketers see a positive ROI when they use personalization in their campaigns.
From email marketing to your customer support system, your customer expects a warm and friendly interaction.
Customers who frequently purchase from you expect to start getting the best recommendations. But that’s not all.
A report from McKinsey mentions that businesses that have personalization have over 40% more revenue than businesses that have no form of personalization.
2. Proactive Approach to Customer Experience
One of the main reasons customers prefer Amazon over most other brands is because of their simple user interface.
When a customer purchases anything, all the relevant product and customer info is associated with their order ID. This means that if you’re ever to reach out to Amazon with a grievance, you wouldn’t even have to narrate all your details one by one. They can extract all of it with the order ID created.
Most customers want and prefer that.
One of the most frustrating experiences that a customer can have is narrating all their details to every single customer executive they talk to before explaining their problem.
Over 67% of customer churn is avoided if the service request is fulfilled during the first interaction. And that could be achieved by creating a ticketing system for your business for every query by a customer.
But that’s not all.
Another problem that most customers could get frustrated by is the non-uniformity in the service channels – including phone, email, or live chat support. Implementing efficient outbound calling solutions can help streamline communication, ensuring faster response times and a more cohesive customer experience.
If different channels seem to be operating differently, the customer will have to go through tedious methods to explain their problems. This leaves them with a bad experience.
Ensure that you have a simple method for customers to reach out to you and for you to address their problems.
3. Introducing Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs have transformed quite a bit over the years. They’re one of the most rewarding creative customer engagement techniques. From the use of discount codes to membership cards, businesses have tried their best to retain and grow their customers.
Businesses have come up with their own methods of customer loyalty programs and have basically redefined them.
A common example of this loyalty program includes the Prime Membership of Amazon.
Not only is this program a brilliant method of getting people to enter your customer base, but it also redefines the customer loyalty program, since they are entering an elite membership where they get multiple benefits from a single membership.
YouTube on the other hand also introduced the channel membership system which allows people to enter tier levels, where each level has its exclusive benefits.
Image Source – MKBHD | YouTube
The provision of membership programs and tiers encourages the customers to continuously interact with your business. This creates a sense of community and belonging among them, ultimately helping you to build a customer base.
Offer exclusive discounts or dedicated services to your customers. This eventually encourages them to repeat purchases.
A loyalty program that’s easy to enter, seems beneficial enough and transforms the customer experience quite a bit is the one that most of your customers will prefer.
4. Leveraging Technology
Using the right tech will allow companies to make the customer journey smoother, think proactively about customer experience, and offer guidance throughout. Here are some tools to invest in:
- Live Chat: AI-driven chatbots can create multiple opportunities to boost customer happiness. It significantly reduces FRTs (first response time) by instantly offering human-like answers to FAQs, signposting to the right knowledge-base resources or readily connecting an agent with the visitor. Moreover, the data gathered by numerous queries from prospects and customers can help businesses to understand needs and pain points of people – helping create personalized products, services, and experiences.
- Heatmaps: The website heatmap technology allows you to understand which part of your landing page or website your audience interacts with the most (and the least). Heatmap technology like Crazyegg will allow you to measure heatmaps for all the pages of your website and help you analyze what elements of your website could be changed, removed, or renovated.
- Discovery Calls: In certain cases, your website doesn’t seem informative enough for a customer to understand your entire business. That’s where discovery calls play a crucial role. These discovery calls allow a potential customer to book a call with one of your team members to understand the product, ask questions, and maybe feel more convinced before clicking the “Buy” button. Snov, a popular email outreach tool, allows customers to book discovery calls with them and answer their questions.
5. Training The Team
Training your employees means encouraging them to always strive to have positive experiences while talking to your business’s customers.
But this training isn’t just limited to workshops and team activities and it’s essential to the career of all customer success specialists.
Your team is always at the forefront of customer communication.
Your emails, calls, texts, and everything else are handled by people who are the face of your brand.
And you’d want to make sure that you’re creating a proactive environment.
If you’re the manager or the owner, the work environment around you needs to be encouraging enough for your team members to do their best and be on top of their game.
Listen to their ideas, train their communication skills, and be open to feedback.
6. Offering Interactive Purchasing Options
This is another creative customer engagement technique. The use of augmented reality is one of the most immersive experiences of our time.
Using the same technology in your business is one of the best examples to showcase the power of interactive purchasing options.
IKEA has a great option of allowing customers to view how their furniture or accessories would look in their homes in 3D scales.
This allows the customer to get an idea about how the product will look at their homes before buying it.
Another example of an interactive purchasing journey is the option of customizing your product before you purchase it.
Rayban, a popular eyewear company, allows you to completely customize your sunglasses before you buy them.
This includes customizing your lens color, changing the frame texture, adding an engraving, and customizing your sunglass cases.
Allowing your customers to add or change certain features before they purchase from you is a very unique feature.
Offering such options will not only create a memorable impact but also re-invite them to your business.
7. Going Above and Beyond (when needed)
73% of consumers will switch to a competitor after multiple bad experiences.
But bad experiences are almost inevitable, especially if you’re a huge brand.
Talking about the e-commerce industry specifically, the average return rate for the orders is typically 20% to 30%.
Such a product return rate is due to multiple reasons. Maybe the product is damaged, isn’t of the right size, isn’t of great quality, or arrived late to the customer.
Even though there are certain things that are beyond your control, what you can control is how to interact with the customer post-return.
In cases where your product didn’t prove worthy, you can send a freebie as a token of apology.
This is especially relevant with huge marketplaces like Amazon, who in certain cases, will refund you the money and also allow you to keep the product.
Now of course you shouldn’t be sending free products to everybody everywhere but in cases where you feel that the discrepancy was from your brand’s side, it’s probably a good idea to send a token of apology or gratitude.
This will make your brand memorable for the customer even after they had a bad experience.
Conclusion
Customer happiness isn’t rocket science.
But it also isn’t just another thing as well.
This is why you need to have a balanced combination of psychological and technological signals in your business that will make your customers have a positive experience every time.
Customer happiness is usually a result of personalization, building an emotional connection with customers, and most importantly, under promising and over delivering.
We hope these tips are actionable enough for you to implement into your business.
Till next time…
