Customer satisfaction how and what: Improving customer satisfaction!

Why do you want to improve your customer satisfaction?

It is generally believed that satisfied customers are more loyal and that satisfied customers purchase more or more often. Marketing research has therefore shown that satisfied customers are willing to pay more for a product that meets their needs. In addition, satisfied customers can provide new customers through word-of-mouth advertising. More importantly, however, customer satisfaction is a good indicator of the extent to which you, as an organisation, meet your customer's expectations. Measuring that customer satisfaction is therefore not nonsensical as long as its purpose is to measure what the customer expectation is, what factors are important to the customer and to what extent you as an organisation meet them. Meeting your customer's expectations is essential for any organisation. The approach to customer satisfaction should therefore be different: it should be an outside-in approach rather than an inside-out approach.

Improving customer satisfaction begins: Inside out - Outside in!

If you want to get started with customer satisfaction improvement, you will have to start by identifying what is important to your customers. In practice, we often see that we quickly think of a script and exactly what questions we want to ask customers. So, we tend to take an inside-out approach here, identifying for ourselves the factors that should influence customer satisfaction. This approach leads to making assumptions about what the customer values, but how do you know whether these assumptions match the customer experience? An outside-in approach turns this approach around: you ask the customer what he or she thinks is important. Once you know what your customers care about, you can map how satisfied they actually are.

How can I take into account the needs of different customers?

Don't count all your customers as one group. There are differences in your customers' needs: for example, some want the best service, others the lowest price. To satisfy these different wishes, it is wise to divide your customers into segments. Each segment consists of a customer group that has similar wishes. Such segmentation allows you to make a unique proposal for each target segment, tailored to the wishes of that segment. It also allows you to measure and ultimately improve customer satisfaction per target group segment.

The nonsense of annual measurements

How does an annual measurement work? You measure in December and conclude that your customers are dissatisfied with certain aspects of your service. You then set about making improvements, but when will you know whether these improvements are successful? Not until next year. In all those months, you will then not have been working on improving your customer satisfaction and you will not know whether your latest adjustments were successful. This approach does not show that you are constantly working on meeting your customer's needs. What is important is that you identify and address issues that could be improved immediately. It is satisfying to then also see the effects of your adjustments as soon as possible. An ongoing customer feedback loop can help you do this. For instance, by measuring the satisfaction of a group of customers every month on a small scale, you can quickly make adjustments and thus meet the customer's ever-changing expectations.