The Ultimate Guide to Customer Happiness

What is customer happiness?

Customer happiness is how satisfied your customers are after interacting with your brand or using your product or service. Customer happiness is an important metric for businesses to track because it can impact customer referrals, brand reputation, retention rates, and business success.

Happier customers are more likely to become loyal customers and recommend your business to their friends and family. They're also more likely to speak positively of your business and leave good reviews.

Why is customer happiness important for business growth?

Happy customers are more likely to stick around, and customers that stick around spend money, which helps your business grow. With a solid base of happy customers, your business is set for success.

But first, let’s examine the difference between customer happiness and customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction means your company's services have met, but not exceeded, your customers' expectations. Your team resolved issues and returned messages without exceeding the bare minimum. Satisfied customers are the first step to customer happiness.

Customer happiness, however, goes one step further. You make happy customers by providing an exceptional and memorable experience, and happy customers are loyal to your brand. They are your biggest cheerleaders and the best PR team. You want to make your customers ecstatic, not simply satisfied.

How to achieve customer happiness

Customer happiness contributes to business growth, but achieving customer happiness looks different for every business. This section will discuss how you can turn unhappy customers into happy ones.

Understand your customers

You can’t create a plan to achieve customer happiness without knowing who they are and understanding their needs. Part of that is researching and connecting with customers.

Start with these tasks:

• Understand their needs: When you know your customers' needs, you know how to help them. Look at their pain points, the goals they’re trying to reach, and how your products can assist in accomplishing those goals.
• Create customer personas: Not every customer is the same, so not all solutions will be effective. Take a look at your customer segmentation and create customer personas. A customer persona is a fictional profile based on various customer types. You can use these profiles as a role-playing tool to explore how each customer group will interact with your products and services.
• Customer journey mapping: A customer journey map visually represents a customer’s buying experience and interaction with a company. It helps you see what steps a customer takes to make a purchase. Engaging in this exercise also allows you to identify bottlenecks in the process, what things you can improve, and how you can provide better communication with customers.
• Listen to customer feedback: To understand your customers, you need to listen to their feedback. Does their feedback align with your research? Make sure you look at the good and the not-as-good reviews. Stellar reviews are great, but criticism can often shed light on issues you didn’t know about. You should always strive to provide great customer service.

Provide excellent customer service

They say happiness starts from within, so happy customers begin inside your business. When you provide your customers with a great experience, they’ll return for more. But to boost customer satisfaction, you need to provide excellent customer service.

Studies say that 89% of customers are more likely to make another purchase from a company when they have experienced great customer service. Here's how you can accomplish that:

• Build a customer-centric culture: Treat your employees the way you want them to treat your customers. Employees who feel good about work pass on those positive vibes to consumers. Another way to build a customer-centric culture is to focus on the best customers and go above and beyond to make sure they feel recognized.
• Train employees in customer service: There is a right and wrong way to approach customer service. Coach all employees–not just those in the customer service department–on best practices to resolve issues. You should offer exceptional customer service across all departments.
• Implement customer service best practices: Many customers will have the same problems, so your team should know what solutions will and will not work. Your support team should achieve customer happiness every time a customer asks for help.
• Resolve customer complaints quickly and efficiently: Have a playbook to reference for customer interactions. If you don’t have the answer, assure the customer you are seeking a solution. Communicate your progress with the customer frequently to make them feel special and ensure you haven’t forgotten them.

Improve the customer experience

We all want to think we can do everything perfectly, but there are always new things to learn and ways to improve. Put in the work to build customer relationships that will be long-lasting and meaningful.

You can improve the customer experience with the following tips:

• Personalize the customer experience: Make them feel special even if you’re not speaking face-to-face. Putting the customer’s name in an email can make a big difference. Customers are 50% more likely to open an email with a personalized subject line and 75% more likely to purchase based on a customized recommendation.
• Enhance the user interface: Look to your customers to see what aspects of your UX work and what requires improvement. Take their feedback to your team and make the necessary changes. Your customers will appreciate a better interface and will feel empowered that they were able to help.
• Simplify processes for customers: People don’t want a complicated product. If you can make your product easier to use without sacrificing quality, that’s a win.
• Emphasize customer engagement: Encourage employees to engage directly with customers. Create a rapport, be friendly, and learn about their business. Also, always follow up. Customers will appreciate the human-ness and feel like they have a friend.

Retain customers

New customers are great, but repeat customers are where you can really see a difference in your business.

A business with a high retention rate has a smaller chance of losing customers to a competitor, thanks to brand loyalty. Customer retention is also where you can work to increase a customer’s lifetime value and continue to bring revenue into your business.

Here are some strategies for retaining customers:

• Keep your customers happy: Part of customer happiness is keeping your customers excited to use your product. Offer existing customers exclusive deals and sneak peeks at new products, and check in with them often.
• Build customer loyalty: You can build customer loyalty through your actions, service, and experience. Practice transparency throughout your company. Deliver your promises to customers and own up to mistakes when you make them. Up to 50% of customers will leave a business after a bad experience, so saying “we’re sorry” and fixing the issue will go a long way.
• Develop a customer retention strategy: Customer retention is critical for business success. It costs less to market to existing customers, and current customers buy more often. Work on a customer retention strategy that will build brand loyalty that, in turn, will boost profits. Some examples include a company newsletter, email drip campaigns, and an omnichannel customer service program.
• Implement loyalty programs: Offer rewards for customers that are repeat buyers. Implement a point system or a loyalty program to entice customers to stay devoted to your business.
• Measure customer satisfaction: It’s vital to measure customer satisfaction to ensure your tactics work. A great way to measure customer happiness is by implementing customer surveys. You can ask questions to better understand your customer base and how they feel about your business.

How to grow your business through customer happiness

Once you know how to achieve customer happiness, you can use your customers to build and grow your business. A happy customer is your best marketing tactic.

There are several ways to utilize your happy customers for business growth, such as:

• Leverage customer reviews: Customer reviews are powerful marketing tools. Testimonials from satisfied consumers build brand trust and credibility. Over 70% of customers say positive reviews make them trust a business more, and 88% say they trust testimonials as much as personal recommendations. Add customer reviews to your email campaigns, social media plan, or other marketing materials.
• Encourage customer referrals: If potential buyers value testimonials from people they don’t know, they will heed the advice of trusted friends. Offer rewards to current customers who refer a friend and discounts to new customers who purchase through a referral.
• Expand your customer base: Through customer reviews and referrals, you can grow your consumer base and get even more happy customers. Send emails or other marketing materials to potential customers and work to convert them into buyers.
• Increase customer lifetime value: Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the amount of money a customer is estimated to spend during their relationship with your business. Customer lifetime value is essential for a few reasons. First, it implies customer retention, a financial boost for your business. Next, CLV means you create meaningful customer relationships, which can help you develop better products.

Boost business success by prioritizing customer happiness

Customer happiness is important for many reasons, from improving your brand reputation to increasing your retention rates. Your customers are the backbone of your business, so you need to do whatever it takes to ensure they're happy. Remember, a successful business is made up of happy customers.

Fortunately, Mailchimp has all the tools and resources you need to make your customers happy. With Mailchimp, you can access everything from email automation tools to customer surveys to make customer happiness your business priority. Check out Mailchimp today, and you can be on your way to achieving customer happiness tomorrow.