A happy customer is far more likely to turn into a repeat customer. In addition, a new sale costs five times more than repeat business. However, while customer happiness is a simple idea to grasp, achieving the pinnacle of consumer satisfaction is easier said than done.
In this blog post, we discuss why customer happiness is essential in business and how you can keep your customers happy with over a dozen proven strategies.
What is Customer Happiness?
Customer happiness is achieved when consumers feel highly satisfied and delighted after their interaction with your product or service, leading to a strong sense of loyalty. While customer happiness isn’t a metric that can be precisely quantified, like impressions or conversions, it is a goal shared by every company.
Understanding and prioritizing customer happiness is essential to remain competitive in your industry. Customers are willing to pay a 13-18% premium for services when they offer a high-quality customer experience. Furthermore, 49% of buyers made impulse buys after receiving personalized care. And with over 80% of organizations already citing CX as their competitive edge, you can’t afford to simply keep customers satisfied.
Customer Happiness vs. Customer Satisfaction: What's the Difference?
Leaving your customers satisfied should be the bare minimum. Satisfaction doesn’t evoke an emotional response, provide comfort, or lead to enthusiasm. Customer happiness, on the other hand, creates a connection between your user and brand.
The main difference between customer happiness and satisfaction is loyalty. A satisfied customer is still willing to try a new product or defect to a competitor. Even though they accomplished their goals as a customer of your company, they don’t feel emotionally bound to the relationship.
Customer happiness is only achieved when the user feels seen after an interaction with your product, service, or company.
Here’s an example: let’s say a customer is having trouble logging into their account, and they send a customer support email and message through live chat.
Scenario #1: The customer gets an automated email and hears back from a representative within 24 hours. The problem is resolved. They can get back into their account the following day, everything is okay, and they are left satisfied.
Scenario #2: They get an immediate response from the live chat. Their message greets them by name, apologizes for the inconvenience, the agent hops on a cobrowsing call immediately solving the issue, and then offers a discount for the next month’s subscription fee as a token of appreciation. After this interaction, the customer is beyond satisfied; they are inspired by a level of service they’ve never experienced.
Why is Customer Happiness Important?
Happy customers are the foundation of a successful business. Without loyalty, you will burn through cash chasing new users. Investing in ways to make your customers happy gives your company stability and the ability to scale.
Below is an overview of why customer happiness is crucial.
- Improve brand loyalty: Happy customers have an emotional connection with the brand derived from an elevated sense of care. Apple’s loyal user base is a great example.
- Reduce customer churn: Acquiring new users is exponentially more expensive than investing in personalized customer care.
- Strengthen your competitive edge: Companies in your industry are already putting money into CX, an industry valued at nearly 17 billion.
- Build lifetime customers: Customer lifetime value (CLV) is essential in the digital era. Research shows that 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers, and 70% of customers will switch brands after a bad experience.
How to Measure Customer Happiness
As we mentioned, customer happiness isn’t a 100% quantifiable metric; however, there are ways to gather data and analyze how your customers feel about their interactions.
For example, a VoC program is a popular way to collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback. This method typically includes software to help gather customer insights through surveys, direct, chat, and social media. The software then organizes the feedback and shares the information with appropriate departments. Once a company has data on customer happiness, it can act to address shortcomings and monitor perception over time.
You can also use more quantifiable customer satisfaction metrics such as customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), and customer effort score (CES) to gauge happiness. While these numbers alone won’t measure customer happiness, they serve as a way to analyze feedback and provide insights into how customers feel after interacting with your brand.
13 Ways to Inspire Customer Happiness
We’ve provided a comprehensive look into customer happiness. Now, let’s dive into how to make customers happy with 13 actionable strategies to build an emotional bond with your offering.
Here’s a quick overview of our strategies:
- Nail your customer persona
- Empower your customers
- Practice the art of active listening
- Personalize experiences
- Make every customer feel like a VIP
- Express gratitude
- Continually measure metrics and improve
- There’s value in being consistent
- Don’t make promises you can’t keep
- Learn the value in admitting mistakes
- Start a rewards program
- Embrace a culture of proactive support
- Nail your product experiences
Nail your customer persona
Understanding and catering to your target audience is the cornerstone of inspiring customer happiness. By crafting your customer personas, you can tailor your products, services, and tone to address specific needs and pain points.
Begin by engaging with your customers through surveys, interviews, and feedback channels. Combine with data and web analytics to curate an archetype to represent the critical traits of large audience segments. Then, your messaging, product development, and support team can meet customer expectations and inspire care beyond satisfaction.
Empower your customers
Feedback is a direct view into understanding your customer’s experiences, needs, and desires. By actively seeking input, not only will your offering improve, but you will also demonstrate that their opinions matter and you’re invested in improving their experience.
Practice the art of active listening
Opening up feedback channels is only the first step in understanding your customer’s concerns and improving their experience. You must take communication further by mastering the art of active listening.
Once you’ve established readily available means of receiving feedback, you must show empathy and genuine interest. Respond promptly, acknowledging their reaction, whether it's positive or negative. Then, encourage an open-ended conversation, digging deeper into their needs and expectations.
When you actively listen, your customers will feel valued, and you’ll gain the insights necessary to improve your products and services.
Personalize experiences
This is essential in keeping your customers happy.
Utilize customer data to provide a personal support system. Address customers by name, send tailored offers, and provide recommendations that address their needs.
Going beyond satisfaction is the goal. So, you must ensure your messaging and tone don’t sound generic, and that your support team isn’t sending cookie-cutter responses to every customer inquiry. Personalized interactions will make your customers feel special and achieve happiness.
Make every customer feel like a VIP
Understanding the value of customer retention should encourage VIP treatment. When your customers feel they are getting the support they can’t find anywhere else in the market, it boosts loyalty, retention, and CLV.
Here are some ways to provide VIP treatment:
- Quick responses
- Exclusive, personalized offers
- Dedicated support or account managers
- Frequent communication
- Access to beta features
- Sharing success stories on social or on your blog
- Special events and webinars
Express gratitude
You not only want to thank your loyal customers directly or through deals, promotions, early access, etc., but you must create a culture of gratitude. Your team needs to understand the importance of customer happiness, loyalty, and retention.
Encourage all departments interacting with customers to express their gratitude. In addition, reward agents that demonstrate going above-and-beyond in their interactions with customers.
Continually measure metrics and improve
While implementing customer happiness strategies, collecting, measuring, and analyzing your data is essential. Using metrics like CSAT, CES, and NPS can help you make data-driven decisions rather than simply going with your gut.
Data collected from customer interactions empowers you to spot trends, allocate resources, and ultimately gain a competitive edge. In addition, using metrics to improve your CX holds teams accountable and ensures efforts aren’t wasted.
There’s value in being consistent
Consistency builds trust, loyalty, and brand reputation. Setting the bar of quality service reduces churn by fostering a reliable customer experience. You want users to go into interactions expecting high-quality care tailored to their needs.
Don’t make promises you can’t keep
Avoid overpromising at all costs.
In business, especially tech, overpromising is almost encouraged; however, when dealing with customers, you must always deliver on promises and commitments.
The saying, “under promise and over deliver,” can’t be overstated. Set realistic expectations and follow through when promises are made by understanding your audience, product, and resources.
Learn the value in admitting mistakes
Unfortunately, mistakes are unavoidable. Capitalize on these (hopefully rare) instances to provide transparency, rectify errors, and improve your offering. The path to customer happiness is far shorter when mistakes are admitted early rather than waiting until acknowledgment of an error is unavoidable.
Start a rewards program
Loyalty or rewards programs are highly effective in fostering customer happiness. Here are some strategies to consider:
- Segment your audience and offer personalized rewards
- Create a simple, easy-to-understand program with clear objectives and rewards
- Promote the program across all platforms to keep users engaged
- Add an element of fun, competition, or interactivity for gamification
- Incentivize word-of-mouth advertising through referrals
- Track and analyze user activity
Embrace a culture of proactive support
Addressing customer needs in the most comprehensive and timely manner possible fosters happiness. Therefore, embracing a high-quality, proactive support culture requires tools to empower your support team.
CX software like Fullview can help your team achieve this goal through a suite of tools such as:
- Cobrowsing: A collaborative effort using multiple cursors allowing support agents to interact with a user’s screen in real time and solve problems collaboratively. Think screen sharing, but more interactive.
- Session replays: Agents can review past interactions, pinpointing where customers encountered challenges. Session replays break silos by offering developers a recording of real interactions users have had with your product instead of bug reports without context.
- Console logs: Full access to technical data highlighting potential software glitches. The tool provides instant context into problems, reducing resolution times.
Adding these intuitive tools to your customer support team’s capabilities allows them to record and continually monitor user sessions. Fullview’s solutions empower agents by identifying bugs or frustration signals like rage clicks faster without relying on customer messages.
When an agent is aware of a session where a customer needs assistance, they can immediately initiate a cobrowsing call. The tool allows the agent to take control of their screen and solve the problem collaboratively with the user. Resolution times fall, and users are left feeling less frustrated about the situation, leading to increased happiness.
Nail your product experiences
Finally, work to build a quality product or service with a premium customer experience. There’s no substitute for an offering that meets expectations. Your customer support team can only get you so far if users are consistently running into problems.
Wrapping things up
In your CX efforts, customer happiness should be your end goal. The result builds a foundation of loyal users who have an emotional connection to your brand. Achieving this goal isn’t easy, but if you follow our list of strategies to inspire customer happiness, you can foster an elevated experience that leaves customers inspired by your product or service.
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Sources last checked on date: 22-Oct-23
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