What is Customer Happiness and 6 Strategies To Keep Customers Happy

man handing a shopping bag to customers

Unhappy customers can cost your business a fortune.

Studies show customers can quickly stop buying from you after one bad experience.  So, the stakes are high, and businesses must do their best to please customers.

It doesn’t help that people have many choices. Unless you operate a niche business, you have many competitors vying for the attention of your customers and prospects.

It’s tough to stand out as a business with so much competition. You must offer high-quality products and services and understand what makes your customers tick to offer the best customer experience.

This is challenging because people’s wants and needs are constantly changing.

How can you determine what people want so that you can influence their buying decisions?

You can do this by measuring customer happiness.

1. Set goals

Every plan must begin with a goal. Start by determining the reasons why you’re conducting a customer survey. Ask questions such as:

  • What do I want to gain from this survey?
  • How can I use the information to improve my business?
  • Am I prepared to change aspects of my business after receiving feedback?
  • How much will it cost to survey my customers and implement changes?

Do your best to anticipate the possible outcomes of your survey before you start. For example, if you’re not prepared to rebrand your business website, there’s little value in asking your customers whether they would prefer you build a new website.

On the other hand, if you’re open to making changes, consider what you’ll need to do if customers respond favorably to such changes. This will allow you to prepare better when implementing those improvements.

You started your company, but its success and health depend on your customers.

Essential Branding Toolkit for Entrepreneurs

Build a stronger brand with our free guides. Get actionable insights to define your brand’s unique voice, understand your market, and stand out to customers. The guides are concise, actionable, practical, and tailored for the busy entrepreneur.

  • The Ultimate Branding Checklist
  • Crafting Your Unique Value Proposition
  • Build Your Brand Pillars Worksheet
  • Market Research Kit

Essential Branding Toolkit for Entrepreneurs

Build a stronger brand with our free guides. Get actionable insights to define your brand’s unique voice, understand your market, and stand out to customers. The guides are concise, actionable, practical, and tailored for the busy entrepreneur.

  • The Ultimate Branding Checklist
  • Crafting Your Unique Value Proposition
  • Build Your Brand Pillars Worksheet
  • Market Research Kit

Essential Branding Toolkit for Entrepreneurs

Build a stronger brand with our free guides. Get actionable insights to define your brand’s unique voice, understand your market, and stand out to customers. The guides are concise, actionable, practical, and tailored for the busy entrepreneur.

  • The Ultimate Branding Checklist
  • Crafting Your Unique Value Proposition
  • Build Your Brand Pillars Worksheet
  • Market Research Kit

2. Pick a survey type

There are different ways to measure customer satisfaction, and you must pick the one that works best for you. Here are popular methods you can use:

  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). This method measures the average satisfaction of your customers using a scale. The most common number scales are 1-3, 1-5, and 1-7 to measure the extent of customer satisfaction.
  • Customer Effort Score (CES). This measure allows you to gauge the customer’s ease of experience with your company. Great customer experiences will reduce customer frustration and result in lower customer effort scores.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS). This method asks, “How likely are you to recommend our company to your friends or family?” NPS typically shows the average of all responses on a scale of 1 to 100.
  • Product-Market Fit score (PMF). This method measures customers’ disappointment if they can no longer buy your product by asking, “How would you feel if you could no longer use our product?”

There are many survey tools available to help you conduct customer surveys. Examples include Typeform,  Wufoo, Zonkafeedback, and SurveyMonkey.

Pick the simplest survey tool and customize it to fit your needs.

3. Customize your survey

Personalize your survey and put in the questions you need answers to. Don’t just copy general questions that won’t give you the necessary feedback.

The layout of your survey is also important. Ensure the design is appropriate and you’re using your brand colors. Avoid using distracting colors or characters to avoid wasting your customers’ time.

Be mindful of the length of your surveys. You don’t want to overwhelm your customers and bore them with long questions. Only put in necessary questions that will be relevant to them. And ensure that your instructions are clear and easy to follow.

For example, avoid making it too long and straightforward if you’re surveying via email. Don’t overdesign; only use a short introduction to your emails to keep your readers interested. Use white space smartly and bold the important questions to make reading easier for your customers. 

4. Determine when to conduct your surveys

When you choose to conduct your survey is vital to its success. Understand who you’re sending it to and when you will be sending it to get the most responses.

Generally, you can conduct a survey anytime and anywhere. However, not being mindful about when you conduct your surveys might not get you the desired results. You should know when to fire a survey properly.

For example, you don’t want to send a survey form to a customer who purchased a product. It’s counterproductive and could confuse the customer. Timing is important to get the best results for your survey.

The best times to ask for feedback are:

  • One week after purchasing the product
  • After a user registers on your website
  • Post-customer support communication

The key is to find the balance. Don’t send out surveys too early, as customers have yet to experience your product or service. Avoid also sending too late as customers usually forget the longer you wait. 

5. Choose a survey medium

There are three main methods by which you can send customer surveys:

  • In-app or on-site surveys
  • Long email surveys
  • Post-service or post-purchase surveys

Choose which suits you best, or you can do all three like most businesses. Using all three mediums can help you get a lot of information to help improve your products or services. But be mindful of how often you send these surveys to avoid overwhelming your customers.

There are also best practices that you should follow depending on the survey medium you choose. For example, avoiding “Yes or No” survey questions is best when doing in-app customer surveys. They might be easy to measure and use for your customers, but they won’t give you the necessary information. Use scale questions instead to gather the best results.

When conducting post-service or post-purchase surveys, use open-ended questions to draw out the best feedback to help improve your product or service. You can also use scaling to measure customer satisfaction. Still, open-ended questions allow you to gather more information on what made the customer happy or unhappy about your product or service.

You can also use a sentiment analysis tool to collect feedback from public posts on social networks.

6. Analyze and put your data to use

Don’t just let your data sleep after gathering them. Start working on analyzing it ASAP.

Your customers also expect to see where their feedback would go and whether you heard their concerns. Show them that you weren’t wasting their time by making them answer all those questions.

Note all the important feedback and the negative testimonials. Use them as guidelines for improvement, and don’t take them for granted. Discuss with your team how you can implement these improvements soon.

7. Make adjustments and repeat

After implementing the adjustments to your business, repeat the cycle.

Remember that you will always have room to grow as a business. Conducting a one-time survey isn’t enough to help your company keep up with what your customers want.

Note the important things you noticed upon your first survey, such as the experiences that have made a group of people dissatisfied, and how you can improve that and follow up on your next survey. Or find out what is the most common experience your customers liked and leverage that for your future marketing strategies. 

Seven tips for achieving customer happiness

Customer happiness can’t be achieved overnight. You need to build a consistent habit that will help foster customer satisfaction and loyalty. Here are 6 tips for achieving customer happiness:

  • Be transparent about your pricing. Customers don’t want to feel taken advantage of. Make sure to price your products and services accordingly. It can cost your business if you overprice an experience and can’t meet customer expectations.
  • Measure customer satisfaction regularly.  Your customers won’t be happy or unsatisfied forever. Make measuring customer satisfaction a regular process. Doing so will help you adjust and improve aspects of your business frequently and keep your customers satisfied.
  • Provide multi-channel support. Make it easy for people to reach you. Offer customer support across all business channels, from your website to social media accounts. Prepare a script that you can automatically send to customers when unavailable, and use a conversational tone when talking to customers.
  • Actively ask your customers for feedback. Listen to what your customers have to say about your products and services. Take note of important feedback, especially those that improve your business. Share and discuss them with your team and put them into action.
  • Make a customer loyalty program. Repeat customers will likely feel more appreciated if you create a great customer experience and treat them well. Offer discounts or promos to repeat customers to increase loyalty and increase sales. Don’t forget to advertise your customer loyalty program to other customers to motivate them to join.
  • Build a community. It’s important to build a community around your brand to increase word-of-mouth marketing, and strengthen customer loyalty and brand credibility. Create a space for your customers to share their insights about your latest products or services. You can also leverage these shared insights and find helpful feedback from them to use for your marketing strategies.

Remember that you can’t please everyone as a business. All you can do is be consistent in your efforts to improve aspects of your company and maintain the good qualities of your business by measuring customer satisfaction.

But don’t just survey if you won’t take action to address problems. The best way to show appreciation to your customers is to analyze their feedback and concerns and improve your business to make customers happy.