Customer satisfaction is vital to any business, no matter what product or services you offer. This is why you need to ask yourself: “Are my customers unhappy?”
Besides being a prime factor that affects customer loyalty, customer satisfaction gives businesses a point of comparison as they find ways to innovate and improve their offerings.
In other words, it allows you to:
- identify which customers are dissatisfied;
- reduce negative feedback; and
- improve customer retention.
Here, you will learn the common reasons behind customer unhappiness and how analytics can help you create a better customer experience.
Table of Contents
Why Are Customers Unhappy?
There are many possible reasons why customers are unhappy, but two are most common across the board: not knowing what to expect and not getting what they expect.
A customer will remain dissatisfied unless they know what to expect of a product or service. Furthermore, they may also become unhappy in case the offering does not live up to their expectations.
The ever-changing needs of customers and their high expectations could also be factors that lead to customer unhappiness.
Of course, there are many other potential reasons for customer dissatisfaction in every unique industry or niche. This is why you need careful analysis of what’s happening not only inside your store but also in the minds of your target market.
How Can Analytics Help Boost Customer Satisfaction?
The first step every company needs to take to deal with client dissatisfaction is to identify customer pain points and define what makes them unhappy. A good starting point for this is their wants and needs.
As a product or service provider, you must come up with offerings that satisfy them. But since not everyone has the same needs and wants, how can you know the reason behind a group of people’s dissatisfaction?
Simple: Use analytics.
What is analytics?
Analytics describes a continuous exploration and investigation of data collected to assess performance and provide insight into the business’s specific aspects.
Business analytics may come in forms – from predictive analysis to data mining. However, one form of statistical analytics is often underrated despite its usefulness in determining the cause for customer unhappiness: footfall analytics.
Footfall analytics
Footfall analytics is a type of statistical analysis, but basically, it’s a fancy way to count the number of people who visit a store.
Tracking customer footfall has been done since time immemorial. Traditionally, an employee – sometimes a security guard – is assigned at the establishment’s main entrance to tally the number of people entering and leaving the premises by clicking on a manual customer counter.
With footfall analytics, this is done using a footfall counter and other technologies that count customers and track their movement within the establishment.
Why is footfall analytics important?
While it may sound very simple, footfall analytics does more than just count how many people pass by or enter the store; it also provides insight into certain things you could use to examine customer satisfaction. This includes:
- the items that customers browse;
- how customers browse;
- customer psychology;
- whether they walk out happy or frustrated; and
- virtually anything else that can be assessed just by counting people.
In other words, footfall analytics counts people to create a better customer experience.
So, whether you’re planning to implement 3D mapping or rearranging product aisles for better sales, footfall analytics should be helpful in making smart decisions for your company’s growth.
4 Ways to Use Analytics to Boost Customer Satisfaction
Once you’ve gathered all the data needed, it is time to improve customer satisfaction with analytics. Here are four ways you can do so:
- Monitor KPIs
KPIs – or key performance indicators – transform data from analytics into a measurable value used to determine whether the company is effectively achieving some of the primary objectives of the company.
KPIs are used in multiple aspects of the business as it practically shows how much a company has progressed through their journey in reaching their goals.
When used with analytics, KPIs can show you many things, including:
- the amount of customer exposure your products and services get
- the rate of successful transactions
- the percentage of customer drop
In short, analytics can give you a reason behind the change in KPI numbers, allowing your business to adjust accordingly.
- Personalize marketing
Analyzing consumer behavior through analytics helps companies determine the type of customer experience they must provide across all channels – from marketing down to sales and services.
For instance, customer service strategies can be improved by analyzing previous interactions and keeping track of any improvement during real-time customer interaction. In other words, you get to know your customers better to learn how to woo them effectively.
This also applies to the so-called “hyper-personalized marketing” that focuses on giving customers the correct message at the right time and in the appropriate channel. Without analytics, this would practically just be an unending cycle of trial-and-error.
For this reason, business experts consider analytics as both an art and a science:
- Art because it entails carefully curating elements so that they work together well into creating the best possible customer experience you can offer.
- Science because it can be used to create the right combination of prices, categories, selections, shipping methods, and other crucial details for customer satisfaction.
- Identify at-risk customers to reduce the churn rate.
Customer churn – also known as customer attrition – describes the percentage of clients who decided to stop acquiring a company’s offerings for a certain period. Basically, these are once-loyal customers that end up canceling subscriptions or services or no longer visit a certain store.
This is a critical metric in any type of business, primarily because it costs less to retain the customers already loyal to your brand than to attract new ones.
With analytics, you can identify at-risk customers and take proactive measures to keep them with you. This way, you get the chance to make things right by them.
- Improve resource management.
General analytics can also aid organizations in allocating resources in a smart and efficient manner.
By combining insights from logistics, footfall counts, and customer behavior, businesses can plan staffing and inventory schedules ahead of time. This will allow the customers to enjoy quick service and a better overall shopping experience.
Of course, this isn’t limited to product-based businesses. Analytics also help service-oriented companies allocate personnel hours better by reducing useless or futile steps and optimizing their processes.
Turn That Customer’s Frown Upside Down
Customer unhappiness can turn into customer churn, but that doesn’t mean all hope is lost.
You can still turn that frown upside down by making use of analytics efficiently.
