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Pursuing the hearts and minds of customers can be vexing. What is it they want exactly? Keeping your customers satisfied with your product or service is non-negotiable.
Customer happiness is one of the key element that contributes towards business growth. A happy customer is considered to be the driving wheels of revenue for any kind of business. There is no better marketing than referrals and word of mouth.
Acquiring a new customer costs 5x as much to attract a new customer as to keep an existing one. It is never too late to start nurturing your customer base better. Because client happiness is a more powerful tool than any marketing advertisement.
The secret to keeping your customers happy, therefore, is simple: remain caring and supportive towards their needs and emotions in every step of their journey.
What is Customer Happiness?
Customer happiness is defined as the level of loyalty and satisfaction that your customers experience after engaging with your product, services, or team. It is the feeling that comes from your customers having their needs met regularly, at the right time, in the right way.
Happy customers are the ones who are loyal to your business for a long time to come. Also, client happiness and loyalty go hand in hand. When customers find businesses they trust, they advocate your brand among friends and colleagues.
Customer Happiness Index to Measure Customer Service
Measuring customer happiness is crucial to understand their satisfaction levels. The customer happiness index (CHI) is a metric used to quantify the degree to which a customer is satisfied with a product, service, or experience.
Here is how the metric helps to evaluate client happiness.
- The customer happiness index reflects on how a customer feels about the engagement with your company.
- It updates its score with every customer interaction. It allows your customers to rate your product or service and hence gives you accurate feedback.
- Furthermore, it also gives you an indication of whether they will stick with you forever and recommend you or not.
Who is Happy Customer?
A happy customer is defined as the one who is a repeat customer to your business. Happy customers do not abandon you when you make mistakes; they give you a chance. Happy customers care for you just the way you care for them. They travel with you in your growth journey.
Making your customers happy can be a great goal to have in terms of understanding if your business is scaling up in the right direction.
Not that your happy customers are always loyal towards your brand but your loyal customers are definitely the ones that are happy. Which means happiness is the first step towards achieving loyalty and building a truly customer-centric brand. A happy and loyal customer becomes your brand’s true advocate.
Happy Customers Happy Business, Agree?
Agreed! Bcoz happy customers = happy business!
The key to achieving customer happiness, as in customers who want to do business with you again and again, is to focus on employee happiness first.
“Studies confirm that employee happiness correlates with employee efficiency, creativity, and productivity. This, in turn, has the same effect on customers– proving that happy employees make customers happy.”
On the other hand unhappy employees can negatively impact the productivity, turnover, and overall efficiency of the business, which, in turn, has a knock-on effect on the customers. So, if your business is customer-centric, invest in your employees first.
A Happy Customers is a Repeat Customer, Right?
Absolutely Right!
One basic rule of every business: A happy customer is a repeat customer.
Statistics show that 80% of a company’s revenues come from just 20% of its customers. Tailoring your practices to meet your customers’ ever-evolving needs can be the ticket to lifelong brand loyalty. Which means lifelong repeat purchases and sustainable revenue over time.
Keeping your customers satisfied with your product or service is non-negotiable. It not only encourages them for repeat purchases but also improves your brand credibility with the word of mouth virality.
Why is it Crucial to Keep Customers Happy?
Many businesses focus more on reaching out to new customers. While it is essential, the most crucial component for long-term success is keeping customers happy. Doing so, however, requires focusing on many aspects of the business and honing them as much as possible.
Here are the key reasons why keeping customers happy is so important.
- Happy customers retain longer: When brands go the extra mile to meet customer expectations they boost customer satisfaction. A happy customer tend to retain with the brand for a longer time.
- Delighted customers spend more: Studies have consistently shown that pleased customers will purchase more products or services. By hiring the best sales reps and train them, businesses can ensure maximizing their profits through customers
- Satisfied customers are your secret marketing weapon – Usually, happy customers turn out to be the best brand ambassadors. They share their experiences with friends with positive word of mouth.
- Provide genuine feedback: When customers are happy with the products or services you offer, they give honest feedback about their overall brand experience.
10 Innovative Ways to Increase Customer Happiness
Pleasing your customers is a pursuit that goes back as far as competition within commerce. It’s something that has to be figured out again and again, because what people want changes depending on circumstance and the product or service in question.
We have narrowed down some of the best ways you increase the number of happy customers.
- Respond to customer concerns faster
- Help your customers in real time
- Deliver a consistent experience across all channels
- Help your customers 24×7, even though it’s automated
- Value your customer feedback
- Reward your customers
- Create a customer community
- Make every customer interaction hyper-personalized
- Follow the right communication etiquette
- Show your customers you care
Let us discuss the tips and best practices to delight customers.
#1. Respond to customer concerns faster
Delay in response time is one of the key reasons for customer’s frustration and creates a negative service experience. Unhappy customers are more likely to share their experience with bad word of mouth.
Businesses should focus on addressing customers’ concerns faster and going beyond their expectations to make them happy. 82% of customers say the number one factor to great customer service is having their issues resolved quickly.
A faster response is a key attribute of a great customer experience.
Here are the key tools to improve response time and increase client happiness index.
Live chat
- Personalized triggers: Support agents can figure out that customers might have some queries and assist them before they make support requests with personalized triggers.
- Route chats automatically: Route chat requests to the right agent or department for an expert solution that reduces the wait time.
- Initiate a proactive conversation: Live chat allows agents to start a proactive chat to help customers throughout the journey.
Chatbots
- 24×7 support: Engage your customers round the clock with instant answers to their simple queries and increase customer satisfaction.
- Easy scalability: A chatbot template for pricing can be easily scaled to handle customer queries effectively during peak business hours or when your support team is busy with no extra costs.
- Build trust in customers: Bots have the ability to aggregate preferences from past customer service encounters and apply them to current interactions.
#2. Help your customers in real time
One of the great ways to boost customer happiness is to provide instant assistance. By implementing visual engagement tools, you to connect with customers instantly without letting your customers wait for a long time.
Co-browsing solution helps to collaborate with customers and provide real time help in complex form fill-ups. Video chat allows to identify the issue faster and deliver effective solutions, which reduces the number of touchpoints and increases customer satisfaction.
Combining live chat with co-browsing and video chat helps resolution of the query in a meaningful manner.
Here are the key ways how real time helps improve client happiness.
- Offers faster resolution: Live customer engagement tools help to identify the issue faster by collecting the information and providing faster solutions.
- Improves first contact resolution (FCR): Agents can diagnose the problems in the first contact by direct chat and collaborating with the customer browser. It improves FCR and reduces multiple touchpoints.
- Personalized communication: Video chat enables friendly personalized conversations that build trust and credibility in customers.
- Better experience across the customer journey: Guide your customers across all stages starting from awareness, acquisition, engagement, and retention. It enables customers to make quick decisions.
#3. Deliver a consistent experience across all channels
9 out of 10 consumers want an omnichannel experience with seamless service between communication methods.
Customers expect excellent consistent experiences across multiple channels as they use them to reach out to brands. And when the experience is not consistent they get frustrated and switch to another brand.
What it means in simple terms is “be where your customers are”. Being omni channel helps you to streamline all the conversations across all channels like websites, Facebook Messenger, Mobile apps, Whatsapp, Viber.
You can seamlessly engage customers over their preferred channels breaking all the silos and deliver an omnichannel customer experience.
Bank of America is one of the biggest known brands following consistent omni-channel service to its customers. The bank allows depositing checks to scheduling appointments to be handled by the company’s mobile and desktop apps.
How can businesses delight customers by going omnichannel?
- Identify the most preferred channels and be 24×7 active across those channels to reduce average response time.
- Streamline all the customer conversations under one platform and provide a cohesive experience.
- Engage your customers in real time and reduce the average response time.
- Improve customer satisfaction with a high first contact resolution (FCR) rate.
- Make use of tools like live chat, chatbots, visual tools, self service options to gain faster details of the issue and deliver first contact resolution.
#4. Help your customers 24×7, even though it’s automated
One of the key reasons why chatbots are becoming incredibly popular is to deliver instant responses to sales and support FAQs asked by customers.
Deploying chatbots helps to automate simple queries and pre-qualify leads by asking relevant questions. Bots can be leveraged across all customer channels like Facebook messenger, websites for better interaction with users.
American Well, a telemedicine company, is a good example of how websites can use chatbots and live chat intelligently to determine user intent quickly and enhance customer experience.
The bot promptly answers queries and boosts customer satisfaction. But there might be instances when the bot is not able to identify the user intent in the request and make a human handover.
How can bots handle conversations to make customers satisfied?
- Live chat agents can handle complex queries that require comprehensive discussion without leaving the customers unanswered.
- The smooth transition between chatbot to live chat provides real-time response to the customers, giving them the best hybrid experience.
- The integration of live chat and chatbot together can help brands engage with customers intelligently and all day, every day.
Balance your support with both live chat and chatbot to deliver a better conversational experience. With bots as the primary contact, you can answer simple queries and transfer the complex chats to the support agents for effective handling.
#5. Value your customer feedback
Businesses that are customer-obsessed to delight them or value their feedback and opinions, make them loyal to your brand.
Feedbacks help to identify the gaps between customers and businesses. Customers appreciate when their voices are heard. The simple acknowledgment that the brand values the feedback can act as a catalyst for repeat business.
Encourage feedback at all stages so that you can discover what your customer is really thinking about their experience with you.
Measuring CSAT helps you to know the current position and the areas you need to improve. Asking customers’ feedback and acting on it is the best way to increase customer happiness and satisfaction scores.
Here are some tips to level up client happiness.
- Customers feel their contribution has been valued when they see feedback leads to actions.
- Acting on customer feedback helps to instill loyalty in existing customers, which increases their lifetime value.
- Customers that have a positive experience with your brand can become your best advocate.
#6. Reward your customers
Rewarding loyal customers should be an integral part of your loyalty programs as it impacts customer happiness directly.
The happy customers are usually the frequent buyers and certainly, they deserve some reward from you. Some ideas for rewards are early access, sending invites for special events, and surprising customers with unadvertised discounts.
How loyalty programs can increase consumer happiness?
- Encourage emotional bond: 59.5% of consumers would like to join a customer loyalty program of a brand to which they are already loyal. They want to become deeply involved with the brand, not just get discounts.
- Ask feedback from happy customers: Loyal and satisfied customers look for both respect and personalized services. When they get what they want, they provide valuable feedback.
- Encourage delighted customers to be brand advocates via referrals: Identify customers who promote you via social listening tools. You can include points for referrals as one of the key incentives in your loyalty program.
#7. Create a customer community
Happy customers love to be part of a community or group.
Communities are 13% more likely to have an impact on customer experience.
Building communities benefit customers to create a positive feeling and improve your brand image. It can act as a resource for sharing useful information related to products and services.
Southwest Airlines has invested in an online community as a place for customers to share stories, exchange knowledge, and find inspiration from other members. The discussion forum’s taxonomy is aligned to common support inquiries, including boarding, check-in, international travel, rewards program, etc.
When businesses foster a special place for customers to interact with one another, it adds extra value to the customer experience both before and after the purchase. Generally, customers trust other customers, when they intend to purchase.
So, the sponsored community forum can be used to help to guide their buying decisions.
#8. Make every customer interaction hyper-personalized
A personalized customer engagement strategy is sure to meet the customer happiness index.
Customers expect business interactions to be customized to their needs and preferences. Hence, businesses need to understand customer behavior and tailor messaging accordingly.
80% of customers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences.
With the use of the right tools, you can better understand consumer behavior scope, collect customer data, draw actionable insights to personalize your customer interactions and provide unique messaging to every client regardless of their preference of channels.
Here are some ways to personalize interactions to boost customer happiness.
- Use a tone that matches the customer’s personality. Some prefer short and direct communications and some like longer conversations and sharing opinions.
- Understand your customers’ background by having relevant conversations to personalize every relationship.
- Make kind gestures by sending follow-up messages to customers after each purchase or service interaction to thank them and offer further assistance if required.
- Recommend products or services based on purchase history. Personalized cart recommendations influence 92% of shoppers online.
#9. Follow the right communication etiquette
62% of consumers globally mentioned they have stopped doing business with a brand after a poor customer service experience.
Every business should set ground rules for how to communicate with their customers. It helps to accelerate customer happiness and satisfaction.
In order to increase your client happiness index, you need to train and educate your employees on how to interact & communicate with customers to deliver superior service.
Here are some customer service tips to keep happy customers.
- Use positive words & phrases: Choosing words while interacting with customers determines the impression it creates. By using the right words you can win the customers. You can use words like my apologies, you’re welcome, etc.
- Practice active listening: Try to listen actively to your customers without undivided attention. It helps to identify what exactly your customers want, their opinions, feedback, etc.
- Offer gratitude: A sincere thank you goes a long way. Train your customer support team to offer gratitude at the end of the conversation as a part of customer service etiquette.
- Maintain transparency: You should always impart authentic information about your product or services to avoid future confusion. Make sure that you don’t make fake commitments and set customer expectations that will break their trust and loyalty.
#10. Show your customers you care
Making your customers feel important is one good way to increase customer happiness. It shows that you care for and value them.
Best practices for delight customers.
- Take notes about their special days such as birthdays, anniversaries.
- Talk about their children, hobbies, and interests. It creates a far deeper level of communication and shows that you are interested in them as individuals.
- Call your customers by name. Ask about their families, vacation plans, additions to the family. Acknowledge their accomplishments.
Interesting Customer Happiness Quotes
Why do you think some of the most recognized businesses across the world are so obsessed with CSAT or customer satisfaction? Because no business out there can really be in business without a happy customer. Customer satisfaction is one of the cornerstones of an exceptional relationship that is considered true customer loyalty.
We have outlined some of the awesome customer happiness quotes:
- “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” ~ Bill Gates
- “A satisfied customer is one who will continue to buy from you, seldom shop around, refer other customers and in general be a superstar advocate for your business.” ~ Gregory Ciotti
- “Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.” ~ Chip Bell
- “Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company.” ~ Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.
- “The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.” ~ Roy H. Williams, Author & founder of the Wizard Academy Institute.
- “The customer’s perception is your reality.” ~ Kate Zabriskie
How to Get Feedback from Happy Customers?
The best way to know what your happy customers think about your brand, service, and product is to collect feedback directly from them. The goal is to go beyond simple likes and dislikes and gain an understanding of your customers along with their feelings about your product. Happy customers are excited to share the feedback and success stories across social media and friends.
Here are some tips to follow to acquire feedback from happy customers:
- Ask feedback at the right time like end of chat or checkout
- Post a link to a survey on your social media channels
- Prepare right questionnaire with open-ended and close-ended questions
- Escalate the feedback to the right team for faster resolution
- Acknowledge your customer feedback and implement them
Customer Happiness Software & App
Businesses conduct surveys on customer happiness software to evaluate whether customer expectation, business model and execution align. Prioritizing your customer’s needs is healthy for a successful expansion of the business. By gauging client happiness, a business can find areas that need improvement and work on them.
Brand interaction can be calculated by using an app that surveys your customer’s happiness. Here are some of the well known customer happiness software and apps.
#1. piHappiness
piHappiness is a customer happiness software that enables great customer service by offering multi-lingual support, It provides help desk, call center and live chat for better customer interaction. piHappiness’ customer happiness app also brings email, phone, chat, and social media under one software. It enables customers to create more interactive relationships with customers.
#2. Nicereply
Nicereply is an online customer happiness app for calculating Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) per agent, team or company-wide, helping teams measure and improve the quality of their customer service.
#3. Feedbackly
The customer happiness app is generated with built-in marketing and sales tools. It turns the customer experience into leads and instant sales.
#4. SmileBack
It is a cloud-based customer happiness software that provides actionable insights to improve customer retention. It quickly collects feedback after every business-client interaction and responds to clients, creating genuine reports. Its key features are survey management, sentiment analysis, customer segmentation, and feedback administration.
How to Measure Customer Happiness?
Measuring client happiness is vital for all kinds of businesses. It provides valuable insights into what works and provides opportunities for optimization. It helps you to understand what your customers are complaining about and work on them. Keeping your customers happy with your products or services will reduce customer churn.
The key metrics to measure customer happiness and satisfaction are as follows:
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): It is a survey metric that asks a basic question to customers i.e. “How would you rate your satisfaction with our product or service?” across different channels such as live chat, email, etc.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures the overall customer experience with the help of the key question i.e. “How likely would you refer the brand to others?”. It has an index on a scale from 1 to 10.
- Customer Effort Score (CES): The CES metric, you can ask customers to evaluate their experience with their products and services.
Use REVE Chat & Make Customers Happy on Any Channel
REVE Chat is an omnichannel customer communication platform that provides real time sales and support assistance with AI powered chatbots. With REVE Chat, offer consistent customer support across the website, social, mobile, and messaging apps by using chatbots and live engagement tools like co-browsing and video chat.
With REVE Chat, you can engage your customers at different stages of their journey and offer proactive assistance. Getting instant response resolves customer’s queries at the moment they need, which makes them happy and delighted. Implementing REVE Chat to your website is a great way to your customer happiness.
Customer happiness is non-negotiable
Customers are the greatest asset to any business, and it is important that your service encourages them to be promoters instead of passives and detractors. By outlining a solid strategy to engage customers with the help of digital tools and processes will help to meet customer expectations.
Businesses need to pull up their socks and consider happy customers as a key ingredient to brand success. Aligning your brand messaging with customer desires will help not only to gain more happy customers but also to retain them for a lifetime!
