5 great ways to improve your customer satisfaction

There are 5 essential facts you need to know about customer satisfaction and trust level importance:

• Customers are twice as likely to share their bad experiences as their good ones
• You must work 12 times as hard to recover from 1 customer's poor experience
• New buyers cost your store 6-7 times more than repeat buyers to acquire
• The probability of selling to an existing customer is much higher than it is for a new buyer
• Loyal customers are 10 times more valuable than they were when they made their first purchase.

Fact 1: Customers twice more often share their bad experience, than good one

Pretend for a moment that you are not a store owner, but a customer.

You make several purchases in 3 different online shops. Everything is acceptable with two of your orders, but the last one is a total disaster: the wrong size, wrong color, a damaged package and unfriendly support!

What will you do next? Chances are, you won’t be thinking about your successful purchases (that goes without saying – all stores should work like that, right?)

And of course, you will return the items bought in the problem store. What next? From there, you're likely to take one of the two following paths:

• A: Forget about it (I give this a 30-40% chance of happening)

• B: Share the experience with friends, and probably post all about it on Facebook, Instagram, other social networks.

  I give this option a 60-70% likelihood!

  Everybody wants to protect his or her relatives and friends from losing money and wasting time shopping online.

Now let’s get back to you as a store owner.

Really, the only takeaway you can have from this experience is that you need to do your best to please unsatisfied customer!

There is always a chance of retaining them and avoiding any negative word of mouth.

If you succeed in addressing all customer’s need, one of the possible after-effects is that the satisfied buyer shares his/her poor experience, but gives the story a happy-ending! In this case, your store is onto a good thing.

Fact 2: You must work 12 times as hard to recover from 1 customer's poor experience

In other words, you need to satisfy 12 customers to cover 1 buyer's bad feedback. Sounds like an awful lot for one store, don’t you think?

Switch one more time to the customer’s side, and pretend that you’ve had an unpleasant experience with a particular shop and were totally unsatisfied with the customer service you received. You went on to tell your story to friends, as mentioned above, and forget this incident after some time.

But now, let’s say, you are the ‘bad’ store owner and your customer experienced some issues that your customer support team members weren’t able to, didn’t want to, or couldn’t resolve. From here, your shop needs to win 12 customers' loyalty just to cover for this awful mistake of customer support service!

To avoid such a sad situation, treat your customers respectfully, and address their needs as you would your own to increase customer satisfaction!

Fact 3: New buyers cost your store 6-7 times more than repeat buyers to acquire

This is a well-known, but still shocking fact!

Customers devotion can cost you a lot of money, should you lose it some unlucky day…

To save your reputation, money and customer satisfaction, you should:

1. Acquire the right customers and treat them well from the very beginning
2. Provide your store's shoppers with excellent support and customer care
3. Empower your support team with the right tools, information and authority to make decisions and act on the customer’s behalf.

These steps may seem quite basic to you, but don't get too secure in your customer service skills – there are lots of big and little things to consider, including the following:

• All customers are different – you can’t treat them as a monolith and expect them to be satisfactory
• The more engaged your support team is, the more loyal and satisfied customers they will win for your store
• Give your customers the opportunity to express their opinion on your store freely, since few unhappy buyers will share their poor experience with you, but they will tell their friends.

Fact 4: The probability of selling to an existing customer is much higher than to a new buyer

Existing customers are far more loyal to your brand and you have the opportunity to sell them more than the newcomers visiting your store for the first time.

Simply knowing this gives you a huge leg-up on getting to know your store's most devoted buyers.

Shopify suggests that you assume a “start thinking personality” instead of a “thinking brand”, and reveals 3 common store owner myths about relations with loyal customers:

This means that you need to try to underderstand your loyal and satisfied customers better before you can sell them more.

Make them think you really care about them, and you’ll get more sales in return!

Fact 5: Loyal customers are 10 times more valuable than they were when making their first purchase

Imagine this situation: a new buyer comes to your store and makes a purchase for $25. Were you expecting a somewhat larger purchase from this newcomer? If so, you're likely to label them a 'one-time shopper...'

Perhaps this is true, but now let’s look at this situation from a different perspective.

Maybe this customer was directed to your store by a friend, as that friend had a pretty satisfying experience while shopping in your store.

Make sense?

This buyer came to your shop with an open heart and mind, having been recommended it by a close friend.

Maybe this is just their first sample order to make sure your store is exactly what they were expecting.

And yet, you wrote them off entirely, impulsively placing them in the ‘One-time shoppers’ bin…

To avoid such situations, follow these simple tips:

• Acquire the most relevant target audience: they are likely to become your most loyal
• Do not label on your shoppers or put them into static categories
• Do not evaluate customers' loyalty potential based on their first purchase: even if it’s $25, he or she could well make a future order for $2000!

Let’s practice!

Remember how I told you about providing your customers with excellent support and service?

Here’s the ultimate solution for your customer service team to make your customers satisfied and stick around your store for a long time: Magento 2 RMA extension (Return Merchandise Authorization) and Helpdesk extension!

Here are 5 pros of RMA for your store customers and support team members:

1. Even guest users are able to discuss and add comments to their requests (no need to log in to a user account to watch an RMA inquiry)

   This is an extremely useful feature that will please all categories of customers! If your support team members are sufficiently engaged, they will recognize the different buyer types by the way they create RMA and communicate.

2. Refund option is also available for store customers to their Store Credit Account

   These feature helps to raise customer loyalty: when refunding on Magento 2 Store Credit Balance, your support team member can add some complimentary bonus, for example.

   Therefore, the buyer knows they have some money + extra bonus on their personal account and will shop again in your store!

3. Your customers can create one RMA inquiry to return or exchange items from different orders!

   This is a great feature for customers who are making several orders at a time!

   For instance, a buyer has decided to make 3 orders – for themselves, for relatives, and a gift to a friend.

   Unfortunately, the jacket they bought for mom was the wrong size, and the bag ordered for personal use was damaged!

   Your customer now can create just 1 RMA request and combine a jacket and a bag from the 2 different orders!

   It saves the buyes time, and shows you care about them.

4. Support team members can help customers any time in creating RMA order from the backend interface.

   This feature is useful in several common cases:

• Your customer experiences some technical issues and can’t create RMA order right now. He or she can call and ask a support team member to create it for them

• Your customer has some kind of disability (visual, for instance) and needs help in creating RMA order

• Your store is currently having some technical troubles, and your support team can accept all inquiries only by phone

5. Easy integration with Help Desk solution for further managing all RMAs in ticket system.

   Now you are able to use and integrate both of these modules!

   Help Desk MX + RMA is the perfect duo for growing customer loyalty and satisfaction.

   If you have installed both of these extensions, your customers can create a support ticket in any available way (email, Contact tab, Store Account Interface, etc) and your support manager has the option of converting this ticket into the RMA request by clicking the Convert to RMA.

   After converting to the RMA inquiry, all further emails related to the ticket will be automatically forwarded to the RMA extension and all correspondence will be delivered there.

Summary

The RMA extension is a must-have extension if you want to:

• Stay close to your customers, give them a hand any time they need and understand their values
• Personalize every RMA request and show you care about your store buyers
• Raise the number of satisfied and loyal customers
• Save substantial costs on selling to returning buyers instead of acquiring the new ones
• Give your customers better service and shopping experience in order to get good feedback.

The backend side is great, too, since support team can:

• easily create and manage RMA orders
• personalize notifications for every customer
• know your store buyers better and give them even higher quality help
• return more loyal customers.