How to maximise customer satisfaction in 2024

Understanding how happy your consumers are with your services and products has become a crucial part of how to maximise customer satisfaction in 2024.

Dissatisfied customers will harm your brand, so you should focus on retaining current customers as well as gaining new ones.

Customer satisfaction is defined as how happy your customers are using your brand’s products or services. It means listening to customers and continuously enhancing and personalising the customer experience.

Let’s explore some ways to maximise customer satisfaction.

Here are 5 ways to improve customer satisfaction in 2024

1. Provide loyalty programs

One of the best ways to maximise customer satisfaction is by providing a loyalty program for your customers. 

Making your customers feel valued and building long-term relationships with them is the essence of loyalty.

Your brand thrives when it takes care of both new and existing customers, but in 2024 we know that consumers have higher expectations, making them quicker to switch brands.

Research from McKinsey showed that 64% of customers are more likely to purchase more frequently from brands that offer a loyalty program, and 50% of customers are more likely to recommend brands with loyalty programs to others.

Loyalty schemes give customers an extra reason to stay by offering more value and providing incentives and rewards.

2. Know your customers

Understanding customer psychology and using data to understand how your client uses your product should be a key priority of every brand, to help deliver a better experience and maximise customer satisfaction.

A cyclical process of anticipating, identifying, and meeting customer needs will yield outstanding results for your business. Here are a few reasons why:

• Understanding customers’ behaviour can provide a higher level of intuitive support.

• Knowing your customers helps you build your products and services to match customer needs and interests.

• A company's ability to listen to and value customers makes them feel valued, listened to, and cared for.

Another key part of knowing your customers is listening to feedback and using that to identify the gaps between customers and brands.

Knowing that a company is receptive to feedback can be one of the best ways to maximise customer satisfaction.

3. Offer personalisation

Knowing your customers can also mean you can offer greater personalisation.

Customers are more likely to do business with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations. A thorough understanding of your customers’ preferences can help you achieve that.

According to Google’s research, 90% of leading marketers say personalisation significantly contributes to business profitability. 61% of consumers expect brands to tailor experiences to their needs.

Evergage shows 86% of marketers have seen a measurable lift in business results from their personalisation campaigns.

Personalisation can be a great asset in an action plan to improve customer satisfaction. By tailoring content, services, and offers to the needs of the customer, you will increase customer satisfaction.

A successful brand should understand that there isn’t an average customer. Every client you have is an individual, and personalisation is key to treating them like one.

4. Build communities

Consider building an online community: that’s one of the best ways to support customers throughout their journey with your brand.

You can create a community where customers can interact with you and each other via social media or a customer portal.

• Creating a customer space can help you engage them better and improve retention.

• You can create a place dedicated to customers to provide a place for them to ask questions, share tips and provide you with feedback.

• Building a customer community can help you create a connection with them: customers care about being heard and maintaining relationships, with fellow customers and the brand whose product they love.

According to research from Leader Networks: 49% of communities generate revenue, and 36% of all revenue-generating communities connect that revenue to customer retention.

5. Stay proactive

We already talked about the importance of customer feedback when it comes to increasing customer satisfaction, but the important thing is to make sure the feedback is put to good use. Especially when it’s negative.

Ignoring customer complaints might have some drastic side effects. Dissatisfied clients are more likely to churn and more likely to share their negative opinions, and negative online reviews could stain your reputation.

Address negative feedback in real-time and try to compensate unhappy customers or put in place their suggestions.

If you have an active loyalty program, you can also set up rules to offer rewards to soften the blow.

If it’s possible to predict a potential complaint and address it before it happens, do that. Proactive customer service is about reaching out to customers and helping them even before they realise a problem exists.

This could include sharing notifications to update customers about planned outages or downtimes, keeping them satisfied even when the service you’re offering isn’t necessarily working at its best.