7 powerful techniques to improve customer satisfaction

This article walks you through seven techniques that'll help you improve customer satisfaction by deeply understanding your customers’ needs, blockers, and motivations. We show you how these techniques benefit your business and users, how to implement them, and how different companies have designed successful customer satisfaction strategies. 

7 techniques to improve customer satisfaction 

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) strategies help you benchmark your progress, highlight areas of growth, and elevate your product and customer experience (CX). And to define these strategies, you need to listen to (and understand) your customers. 

Remember: improving customer satisfaction isn’t a one-time job. Keeping your customers happy long-term relies on consistent efforts and regularly collecting and implementing user feedback—we’ll show you how. 

Use these seven techniques to empathize with your customer needs, refine your customer journey, and increase your CSAT score:

1. Understand your customer journey—firsthand

Your users interact with several key customer touchpoints throughout their journey with your brand, from clicking on your website and reading a blog post to watching a product demo. Taken together, these touchpoints reveal crucial insights into the customer experience. 

Customer journey mapping, where you map out the main stages of customer engagement with your company, gives you an overview of what this looks like. But to get a fuller picture of the customer experience—to understand where they get blocked and what they need—you need to go beyond mapping and experience the journey yourself. This reveals any points of user friction or frustration that negatively impact customer satisfaction—like areas where customers can’t find what they're looking for or have difficulty understanding or purchasing your product. 

How to optimize your customer journey:

• Map the customer journey to understand your customers, their journey, and key engagement areas

• Then, experience the customer journey yourself. Explore your website anonymously and test key actions—like making a purchase, clicking a call to action (CTA), or browsing for information, so you know what it feels like to walk a mile in your user's shoes

• Watch recordings of user sessions to supplement your understanding of the customer journey experience. For example, ecommerce teams watching user sessions on their website might notice their checkout process doesn’t convert visitors, despite an increase in clicks. This could alert them to users rage-clicking broken links, which just needs a quick fix to improve the customer experience. 

• Use these insights to improve your customer experience and remove any blockers or areas of frustration

2. Listen to your customers 

There’s no way of knowing whether your customers are satisfied with your product or not, or what they want you to update or fix, unless you ask them directly and actively listen to their response. 

Listening and responding to your users helps you retain more customers and build product loyalty. But without the right tools in place to actively listen to your customers, you could be missing out on important roadblocks in the customer journey, key user frustrations, and unique ideas for improvement. 

How to actively seek out customer input throughout the main touchpoints in their journey:

• Interview your customers about their experience and what you can do to improve their satisfaction with your brand and product. Include surveys on your website, or send them one via a personalized post-purchase email. 

• Run focus groups before launching a new feature, upgrade, or website design to gauge customer sentiments before they negatively impact the user experience and sales alike

• Place the Hotjar Feedback widget on key conversion pages (like landing, product, and checkout pages) during the customer journey to gather user feedback in the wild. For example, software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses use feedback widgets on popular product pages to improve PX by asking customers questions about their user experience.

• Show your customers you appreciate their feedback with loyalty points, reward programs, or a coupon for their participation

3. Offer proactive multi-channel support 

Multi-channel support options help you quickly answer customer questions, ease user frustrations, pre-qualify leads, and better onboard your customers. If a customer can’t find a quick answer to their question on the channel they’re using, they're likely to jump ship and find another solution. 

How to offer your customers multiple ways of communicating with you and keep them informed:

• Use live chat or chatbots on your website to collect user feedback, respond to frequently asked questions (FAQs), and pre-qualify leads based on question types and depth

• Provide pro tips or tooltips throughout the customer experience to help customers get the most value from your product, learn about new product features or upgrades, and drive product adoption

• Use social listening tools like Hootsuite and interact with customers on their preferred social media channels: answer questions in a live Q&A, reply directly to comments, and see what’s trending in relation to your product or brand

• Train customer service agents to provide a positive experience by actively listening to customer feedback, proactively providing solutions, maintaining transparency, and empathizing with customers

• Create a comprehensive help center on your website with user guides, video tutorials, or a knowledge base that offers product-related training, tips, and FAQs. For example, a SaaS company could take a page out of Hotjar’s book and introduce a learning center with tool-specific training that guides users to do more with the product.

4. Act on customer feedback 

To achieve your customer satisfaction goals, you need to turn customer feedback into a concrete business strategy. Acting on customer feedback promotes positive customer experiences, building customer loyalty and adding to their lifetime value.

How to effectively act on customer feedback: 

• Start by looking for trends in customer feedback and overall patterns in user behavior to determine which changes and decisions will most impact your customer's satisfaction, without sacrificing your brand integrity, product vision, or mission. For example, product teams might use feedback to prioritize product updates or add fixes to their product backlog.

• Use social listening tools and popular review sites like G2 to respond to negative feedback, using it as an opportunity to build a stronger relationship with your customers. Be transparent about your efforts to fix their problems, and provide possible solutions. 

• Integrate Hotjar with Slack to instantly share insights from Hotjar Feedback and Surveys with your teams so you can work together to take action

• Segment feedback into specific areas of focus: product, website, user onboarding, user experience (UX), etc. 

5. Personalize your user experience

A personalized user experience shows your customers that you’re committed to meeting their specific needs and promotes product loyalty.

Since no two customer journeys are the same, it’s important to adapt your messaging to specific customers and their particular challenges, needs, and goals with tailor-made product suggestions, content, and support. 

How to personalize your user experience:

• Develop an ideal customer profile (ICP) based on your ideal customer's pain points, purchasing behaviors, critical characteristics, and demographics, including job title, income, or geographic location. Then, segment your customers into the group that fits them best.

• Automate messaging to align with each customer and where they are in their journey. For example, a SaaS startup might use an automated email drip campaign that introduces new subscribers to useful content like product videos or user success stories.  

• Create a self-service experience to cater to a variety of customer needs and questions. For example, Hotjar empowers product teams, SaaS businesses, and entrepreneurs to use their tools with their product onboarding help center, where each customer type can find the resources they need to get the full value from the product. Use tooltips, interactive guides, tutorials, and product demos to educate customers about your product and platform in context. 

• Use artificial intelligence to monitor browsing and buying behavior and make product recommendations to customers. For example, after an unsuccessful online search, an ecommerce customer would be more likely to convert after receiving an email about related products from your store, which they didn’t find before. 

• Provide personalized content based on previous interactions and purchases. For example, after signing up for a free trial of their time-tracking tool, a SaaS company might send a new subscriber content related to ‘best time management practices’ to offer post-subscription value and drive customer engagement and, ultimately, satisfaction. 

6. Leverage NPS and CSAT scores  

Your net promoter score® (NPS) and customer satisfaction score are benchmarks that help you measure your customer satisfaction efforts against, and uncover areas for further improvement. 

Continually monitoring your NPS and CSAT scores gives you access to data that helps you track customer satisfaction over a long period of time. These scores also help you obtain qualitative insights about the user experience to find out what your customers like and dislike about your product experience, so you can improve the aspects of your customer experience that score poorly, and make sure your top-performing webpages or product features continue to do well. 

How to leverage your NPS and CSAT scores: 

• Use Hotjar NPS Surveys to ask users “How likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague on a scale from 0 to 10?” Then, go deeper by asking them extra questions like “What’s the main reason for your score?” and “What could we do better?” to supplement your numerical score with actionable customer satisfaction insights.

• Use Hotjar CSAT Surveys to gather short-term satisfaction data during key moments of your customer journey. Ask users “How satisfied are you with our product or service?” and give them a rating scale of 1-5, happy or sad, or strongly agree or strongly disagree. Then, ask customers why they gave you that score for a deeper understanding of their micro-experiences.

7. Follow up with your customers 

Post-purchase follow-up with customers directly impacts customer retention by reminding users of your product’s value on their path to product adoption.

Think of creative, consistent ways to convey value in your follow-up to keep your product top of mind, and take the opportunity to ask customers for their honest opinions so you can learn what they need.

Before you follow up with your customers, set up a strong customer relationship management (CRM) tool to store key customer interactions and notes, so your team can reference them for more personalized outreach. 

How to effectively follow up with your customers: 

• Send an email with frequently asked questions about product or site use, and include a video link with short steps your customers can follow to use and adopt the product

• Use Hotjar Surveys to ask satisfied customers why they made a purchase, and then use that information to help you write better, customer-centered copy for email campaigns and landing pages. Creatively weaving customer input into your messaging increases the likelihood that customers will relate to your content and the need for your product. 

• Ask dissatisfied customers about their product and user experience, and how you could do better next time. If a dissatisfied customer has a one-off terrible experience, reaching out to them about their experience might encourage them to give your product another try.

Boost customer satisfaction with product experience insights 

Having the right customer satisfaction strategies in place helps businesses measure their customer satisfaction efforts and continually improve their customer experience.

By understanding your target customers’ motivations and frustrations, you can boost customer satisfaction through techniques like: 

• Experiencing your customer journey firsthand

• Listening to your customers 

• Offering proactive multi-channel support 

• Acting on customer feedback 

• Personalizing your user experience 

• Leveraging NPS and CSAT scores 

• Following up with your customers 

By keeping your focus on your customers and turning customer-centered insights into action, you can turbocharge the customer experience—and your customer satisfaction scores.