A CRM alone will not help you improve customer satisfaction. The right strategies implemented through that CRM are the real key to unlocking more customer-centric, streamlined processes and insights. In this post, we’ll discuss factors that contribute to customer satisfaction and a few ways that CRM can help increase those satisfaction rates.

Factors That Contribute to Customer Satisfaction

We are all customers to someone. So, what do you expect when you make a purchase or use a service? You want to feel as though that business understands your needs. You want to be offered products and solutions that are relevant to you. You want the process to be easy and transparent.

Customer satisfaction is gauged by a hybrid of many factors. Let’s discuss a few of the biggest ones.

Quality of the Experience

Did you delight the customer? Anticipate needs? Answer questions promptly and politely? The experience of making a purchase has a lot to do with the customer’s satisfaction.

The hardest part of providing a quality experience is recognizing that each customer’s satisfaction is a unique combination of objective (facts) and subjective (feelings or opinions) factors. It’s a balancing act – and not one that you’ll get right every time. That’s why understanding your customers’ personas and behaviors is so important.

Omnichannel Accessibility

Some customers will prefer to reach out via social media. Others may choose to engage with your website chat, and still others (like my mother!) will prefer the old-school approach of picking up the phone. Meeting your customers on their chosen channel makes your services more accessible, which helps provide a more seamless sales and service experience.

However, if you’re providing omnichannel options, it is absolutely critical to understand that your customer expects their information to cross over between those channels. If they speak to someone about an issue via chat, they expect that the next time they call customer service, that interaction is referenceable. More about this important factor can be found in the next point.

Cross-Channel Connection

If your customers are going to enjoy the freedom of connecting with you via their preferred channel, you must ensure their information is following them between those channels. Nothing is more frustrating than having to repeat the same information to different departments. In fact, HubSpot recently found that 33% of customers are MOST frustrated by having to repeat themselves to multiple reps. Make the cross-channel connection to avoid this customer satisfaction pitfall.

Personalization

Research has shown that online conversion rates can increase by roughly 8% when the customer has a personalized experience. Relevant discounts and coupon codes, product-specific tips and tricks, and targeted newsletters are all examples of personalized content that can be used to create a distinctive experience for your customers.

Providing the Complete Package

More than 70% of consumers value speed, convenience, helpful employees, and a friendly service manner the most when interacting with a company, according to PWC. In that same document, they note that “Those who get it right prioritize technologies that foster or provide these benefits over adopting technology for the sake of being cutting edge.”  

This is a perfect segue into the conversation around CRM and customer satisfaction. Let’s discuss how CRM can help you hit the mark on these customer satisfaction factors and provide above-and-beyond customer experiences across the board.

How CRM Helps Increase Customer Satisfaction

How can a CRM solution help meet the needs and challenges of customer satisfaction? Here are just a few of the ways it can aid in these efforts.

Personalizing the Experience

Without any customization or added functionality, most CRM solutions will offer the ability to save emails and notes into customer contact records. This is a great start to building a comprehensive profile of the customer that can later be used to create personalized experiences. However, the full scope of the customer’s interactions, preferences, past purchases, and support requests are what will build the complete profile. The ability to access and report on that information from within the CRM provides the necessary perspective for personalizing the customer experience.

If you’re using omnichannel communications, those channels should be integrated with your CRM to feed the data into a single source of truth. Information like purchase orders, chat histories, social media interactions, and support data can be funneled into the CRM to reveal the bigger picture about your customer’s behaviors and inform the marketing opportunities that best fit their persona.

Providing Proactive Customer Service

Automation is one of the biggest benefits of CRM tools. Automated responses offer proactive communication and keep customers looped into what’s going on, which helps them feel their time is valued. These responses also provide a unique opportunity to share helpful information relevant to the interests of that customer. So, while they’re waiting for your response to their recent request, they can peruse your FAQ page or knowledgebase to gain some clarity on their own.  

Proactive customer service shouldn’t exist solely for support requests either. The best way to maintain a proactive approach is to regularly contact the customer throughout their lifecycle. For example, payment reminders, relevant promotions, and shopping cart alerts are all examples of ways you can proactively service your customers.

Better Management of Customer Purchases

Using a CRMs in-depth reports, you can gain a better understanding of what your customers are interested in. These findings can inform upsell and cross-sell opportunities, help segment customers for specific promotions, and show trends in customer behavior.

The CRMs automated workflows can also help your reps stay on top of customer purchases for more proactive follow up. The CRM can assign a task to the team member so they remember to follow up with the customer one week after their purchase.

If the CRM is integrated with other business applications, that rep will be able to further personalize that follow up by referencing social media interactions, email open rates, chat conversations, and other data to inform their perspective on what else the customer may be looking for. For example, if the rep can see that the customer clicked on a product link in an email but has yet to purchase, they may choose to offer the customer a discounted rate to entice them to take action.

Resolving Issues & Avoiding New Ones

A CRMs help desk ticketing system can be a powerful tool for quickly resolving customer issues. This is especially important when 90% of customers rate an immediate response as “important” or “very important” when they contact customer service.

• Internal teams can prioritize and assign tickets to the correct departments for faster issue resolution.
• Notes in the CRM can help those who weren’t involved in the issue resolution understand what happened so they can avoid the issue in the future.
• Reports on issue response times can reveal patterns and customer service gaps.
• Logged phone calls and emails can shed light on the interaction and the insights drawn from those interactions can be used as teachable moments for other representatives.

Customer satisfaction should be the ultimate goal for any business. The value of a happy customer is exponential, as these individuals are likely to share their positive experiences with at least 11 other people. A CRM system acts as a single source of truth for all departments within your organization. Whether sales is referencing a contact’s email history, services is gaining insights on a past issue, or marketing is looking for analytics on purchases, a CRM helps make sense of your data so you can improve customer satisfaction and foster stronger relationships to last a lifetime.