Most of the world is now reliant on the internet, which also means a big opportunity for companies of any size and industry to grow their business online. It’s especially important for businesses that are focused on acquiring large amounts of customers or use their website for transactions (such as e-commerce) to focus on customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction goes beyond offering your product or service online. Customer experience can make or break a company’s bottom line because customer satisfaction ultimately determines the size of the sale as well as repeat business for future sales. Here are seven features to evaluate a website for the best customer satisfaction experience.
Contact Page
A Contact Page is a standard page of every website, but how your customers can contact you is also key. Different people prefer to communicate in different ways, so having various types of communication opens more opportunities for customer satisfaction. Different forms of communication on your contact page can be an inquiry form, dedicated customer service email address, phone number, and street address if your company has a physical location or headquarters.
Live Chat
Live chat is one of the best customer satisfaction features for any website in any industry because most people are impatient and want an immediate response instead of waiting to receive an email back or having to pick up the phone. It’s easy to set up live chat on your website so that anyone on your staff can receive a notification that a customer wants to chat with you. You can even hire live human chat agents that can handle answering the chats for you if you don’t have an in-house staff available. Live chat systems also have the ability to give auto responses first to common questions, and if the customer still needs help then the chat will automatically route the conversation to a designated staff member or agent.
About Us Page
If you’re not a global name yet, your website needs an About Us page. An About Us page is the opportunity to tell your story and history and is used as a branding tool to help build a relationship with your customers even before they make a purchase. People want to know who’s behind the website and why they should give their money to this particular company, and an About Us page helps reflect your brand’s unique value and mission to increase customer loyalty and thus satisfaction in the long term.
FAQ
An FAQ page can save a lot of time going back and forth answering customer questions that tend to reoccur. After you’ve determined customer pain points or common issues they have, compile these questions into a dedicated FAQ. This helps convert them to a sale faster if they have all the information upfront and their questions answered without having to wait for an inquiry response.
Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are crucial for any business that has an online presence. Regardless of the type of product or service you offer, customer reviews are another key component to customer satisfaction because they help paint a picture of what they will be receiving when they spend their money with you. Customer reviews also legitimize the product or service, as well as the business itself, because they show how likely a customer can trust that they will receive what they expect (which in turn also decreases the return rate for physical products).
Order Status
If your website sells physical products, having an order status available can help with customer satisfaction after the sale is complete. The website will need the ability to create customer accounts that keep track of order history, and then each order needs to be tied directly into a logistics software or backend that keeps track of what’s going on with the order at any given time (processing, fulfillment, and shipped with tracking number). This increases customer satisfaction as it helps alleviate impatience if an order isn’t shipped right away. Some websites even display tracking details so the order can be followed as it’s in transit to the customer.
Wishlist and Favoriting
Another important customer satisfaction feature for a physical product website is a wishlist and favoriting. The majority of customers don’t convert right away and will revisit a website multiple times before making a purchase. Wishlists and the ability to favorite the items they’re considering is a crucial way for customers to engage with your website up until the purchase is made. Bonus points if your backend can accommodate multiple wishlists that are customizable so customers can create different wishlists depending on what they’re shopping for.
Customer satisfaction isn’t just about the customer loving your product or service. Their experience with a website before and after the sale also adds to the overall satisfaction, and adding customer satisfaction features to a website can greatly increase the likelihood of a positive experience with your business.
