Customer Satisfaction: Benefits, Examples & Importance

Customer satisfaction is crucial to the success of your business. No matter how innovative your product or competitive your pricing, if your customers are ultimately unhappy, they’re not going to stick around.

As such, it’s no surprise 45.9 percent of businesses surveyed in 2020 named customer experience as their number one priority over the next five years:

Customer satisfaction is a major priority for businesses

What exactly do we mean by “customer satisfaction?” Why is it so important, and what can you do to improve it? Read on to find out.

What Is Customer Satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction is a measure of how people feel when interacting with your brand. It can be influenced by any number of factors, such as:

perceived product quality
perceived product value
convenience
customer expectations
communication
complaint handling

Every brand, no matter how successful, wants to improve customer satisfaction. To do that, they need to define two things:

who their customers are
what it takes to satisfy them

Part one isn’t as simple as it sounds. Let’s take the example of a hospital. It might have two distinct customer bases:

the patients it treats
the insurance companies it sells patient data to

Clearly, those two audiences have very different goals, and keeping them happy requires two vastly different approaches. To make matters even more complicated, satisfying one audience may sometimes be detrimental to the other’s happiness.

4 Benefits of Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is more than just a “nice to have.” Getting it right has specific, tangible benefits, including:

1. Increase Brand Loyalty

Never take your customers for granted.

According to PwC, 59 percent of U.S. consumers who love a product or brand would ditch it after several poor experiences. More concerningly, almost one in five would do so after a single bad experience.

On the flip side, if you do everything in your power to keep customers happy, it stands to reason they’ll be more likely to stick around for the long term.

2. Boost Trust

According to Edelman, 81 percent of consumers say brand trust is a deal-breaker or a deciding factor in their purchase decisions.

Yet trust is pretty thin on the ground, with just 34 percent of consumers saying they trust most of the brands they use or buy from.

How do you make your brand more trustworthy? One way is to improve satisfaction. According to a study from Eastern University Sri Lanka, customer satisfaction logically precedes customer trust; those two things rarely exist in isolation.