12 Underrated Ways to Boost Customer Satisfaction

When customers are spoilt for choice, it reduces the margin of error for businesses. So much so that even one bad experience could persuade customers to look for other options. 

When Shep Hyken, customer service expert and NY Times bestseller, appeared on Hiver’s podcast – Experience Matters – he stressed on why providing average service won’t boost customer satisfaction anymore. 

“Average is not good enough. You have to create a moment of magic—better than average service. It could also be offering the expected—a consistent, predicted experience where customers say things like, “They always get back to me,” “They’re so knowledgeable,” “They’re always friendly.” The key is the word ‘always’ followed by a basic expectation, making it better than average, and this is going to make your customers come back.” 

So, if your business is looking to standout from the crowd, check out these 12 underrated strategies that can help you improve customer satisfaction. 

Table of Contents

• 12 Underrated Strategies to Boost Customer Satisfaction
  • 1. Create a Customer Advisory Board
  • 2. Implement a Surprise-and-Delight Program
  • 3. Use Data Analytics for Personalization
  • 4. Foster Community Engagement
  • 5. Gamify Customer Interactions
  • 6. Offer Self-Service Options with AI Support
  • 7. Utilize Multi-Channel Communication Effectively
  • 8. Conduct Regular Customer Satisfaction Surveys
  • 9. Follow Up Proactively After Purchases
  • 10. Train Employees in Empathy and Active Listening
  • 11. Leverage Predictive Analytics for Anticipating Needs
  • 12. Create Exclusive Access Events for Customers
• From Satisfaction to Advocacy: Your Next Steps
• Start using Hiver today

12 Underrated Strategies to Boost Customer Satisfaction

1. Create a Customer Advisory Board

Want unfiltered feedback? A Customer Advisory Board (CAB) is exactly what you need. CAB is a group of key customers who are selected strategically to provide feedback on your product and services. They help refine your strategies, whether for product or customer expectations and help you identify pain points that may not be apparent through traditional feedback channels.

This collaborative approach strengthens your relationship with them and helps you get close to 9% more new business from customer members by the second year. 

Beyond unfiltered customer insights, CAB offers several other benefits: 

• They often become loyal advocates for your brand 
• They help validate/refine your ideas, features, and updates based on real customer needs
• They provide direct inputs on marketing messaging and positioning  
• They help gather marketing intelligence 

2. Implement a Surprise-and-Delight Program

Surprise and delight programs go beyond the standard loyalty programs by delivering unexpected value that fosters emotional connections. When customers are delighted, they share their experience, which leads to organic brand advocacy and higher referrals. 

MasterCard’s ‘Priceless Surprises’ campaign is a perfect example of how effective surprise-and-delight is. The campaign rewarded customers with unexpected gifts—from cupcakes to concert tickets and celebrity meet and greets. It increases the intent to use MasterCard by over 300%. To date, #PricelessSurprises has delighted over 97,867 cardholders across 25 countries, creating brand advocates organically. 

Once a social media campaign, it has now turned into a program delivering unforgettable experiences to MasterCard holders.

To make surprise and delight as effective as MasterCard’s campaign, consider these: 

Use customer data like purchase history and preferences to provide personalized surprises. 

Recognize specific milestones like the 1000th API call, completing 100 projects in your software or achieving a certain usage level with personalized messages, special discounts, and exclusive offers. 

Surprise customers with rewards that are in trend when they bring you business through referral. A Coldplay ticket would do the trick here, for sure. 

Introduce VIP perks like early access to new products or discounts to make customers feel special.

Go beyond rewards by including a freebie in their order or solving a support ticket faster than expected. 

Here’s another surprise and delight customer support example that turned a poor experience into an appreciation post!

3. Use Data Analytics for Personalization

According to McKinsey, 71% of customers expect their experiences to be personalized. What upside do businesses have? Well, the same research found that personalization drives a 25% increase in revenue. 

Data analytics allow you to personalize customer experiences and deliver tailored messages and services. CRMs become your ally in gathering all-around data and implementing insights. 

By integrating analytics with CRM systems, you create a 360-degree view of customers. You get relevant data from multiple sources like purchase history, website analytics, feedback, customer support, and social media interactions. 

Once you have the data, you can segment it based on shared characteristics– behaviors, demographics, and preferences. This helps you target each group with tailored offers and content. 

• Leverage predictive analytics tools to anticipate future needs. For example, you can anticipate when a customer will likely reorder a product. You can send reminders or bundled discounted deals based on their buying cycles.
• Monitor changes in usage patterns like >20% decrease in usage, to send a personalized message to check-up or engage them. Ensure to optimize your communication for the timezone.
• Use AI and ML to deliver dynamic experiences on the website by adapting the interface to show personalized recommendations like what Amazon does. 
• Use analytics to analyze past interactions and provide more personalized solutions. For example, analyze support tickets to identify common pain points and proactively send targeted how-to guides, or use purchase history to customize product recommendations and search results for each customer’s preferences. 
• Measure the impact of your personalization strategies to refine your approach and evolve based on customer expectations. Track these metrics–engagement rates, customer satisfaction, and conversion rates.

4. Foster Community Engagement

Strong communities transform customers into advocates. About 88% of professionals feel that access to the community improves their customer experience. And when customers have a positive experience within a community, 71% of them are likely to recommend your brand to others.

But how can you create a thriving community that turns customers into advocates?

• Host live Q&As, workshops, and meetups to connect with customers in real-time. For example, Salesforce conducts workshops to help businesses get the most out of their platform
• Recognize and reward loyal customers or create an ambassador program
• Invest in charity and just causes, just like Microsoft, which has a philanthropic division overseeing contributions to scientific and medical research, education, poverty and disease alleviation 
• Invite co-creation and feedback from customers on product ideas, new launches just as Lego does, through its Lego Ideas user innovation platform. 

5. Gamify Customer Interactions

Gamification has the potential to transform mundane business interactions into fun experiences and increase engagement by 47%. 

Elements like quick challenges, brainteasers, spin wheels to offer rewards, and leaderboards throughout key customer touchpoints create engaging experiences. This encourages customers to participate more, improving their overall satisfaction with your product.

It basically creates a sense of accomplishment for customers, tapping into their need for recognition and turning an ordinary interaction into a memorable one. 

How to gamify customer interactions, you ask? 

• Offers badges, loyalty points, rewards, and exclusive perks for completing certain actions after signing up for the newsletter 
• Create interactive challenges like quizzes, trivia games, or missions to collect certain collectibles, similar to Amazon’s trivia or GooglePay’s collectibles
• Add leaderboards to your gamification strategy to encourage productivity like Trello which uses elements like achievements and progress bars

6. Offer Self-Service Options with AI Support

Customer satisfaction is directly proportional to fast customer support. In the US alone, 12% report their biggest service frustration is ‘lack of speed’. No customer wants to wait and demands a ’round the clock’ solution, and AI-powered self-service options make this a reality. In fact, given an option, 67% prefer self-service over speaking to agents. 

Source: McKinsey & Co

Self-service enables customers to find information themselves. AI-enabled tools like chatbots, virtual agents, and intelligent FAQs empower customers to solve issues independently and deliver highly personalized experiences seamlessly. 

“Self-service is a huge driver for customers. People just want things fixed quickly and get their jobs done fast. It is one of the biggest takeaway from out customer effort”  

Marti Clark, Senior Program Manager at Salesforce 

Some of the ways to implement AI-based self-service options: 

• AI Chatbots and Voicebots enable instant, human-like conversations that can resolve issues, recommend products, and guide customers. They efficiently manage high-volume queries, automatically resolve standard problems, and seamlessly escalate complex issues to human agents across multiple languages.
• Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) offer immersive support experiences, allowing customers to overlay digital information in real-world scenarios or interact with products in virtual spaces. These technologies provide interactive, visual guidance that goes beyond traditional text-based support methods.

7. Utilize Multi-Channel Communication Effectively

Customers need 24/7 support, but is it enough to provide support services only on your website? No. 

Giving customers the option to interact with you using a channel of their convenience – chat, phone, social, or messaging apps – improves their experience with your company. 

Here’s how you can approach multi-channel customer experience:

Use a helpdesk like Hiver to centralize all customer queries across channels. This helps create a holistic view of all customers and ensures you don’t have to switch tabs or apps.

Integrate AI chatbots and automated responses with your website, CRM systems, and helpdesk platforms to manage FAQs instantly.  

Keep your messaging and information consistent across channels. Do not confuse customers with multiple responses to the same query on different channels

Track engagement metrics of different channels to understand which channels are preferred the most and accordingly enhance their efficiency  

8. Conduct Regular Customer Satisfaction Surveys

To improve your customer service continuously, you need feedback. Customer satisfaction surveys reveal pain points and immediately give you insight into the customer’s interaction with your product and customer service team. 

Track these key metrics to gauge their satisfaction: 

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): CSAT measures customer satisfaction with a specific interaction, product, or service. It’s typically captured through post-interaction surveys asking, “How satisfied were you with [X]?” on a 1-5 scale. This real-time feedback helps identify areas for immediate improvement in customer support.
  
  For example, using Hiver’s CSAT surveys, you can collect feedback right after support interactions. 

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): A powerful longitudinal metric designed to measure customer loyalty and predict business growth potential. NPS evaluates customers’ overall perception of your brand and their likelihood to recommend it to others.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): Focuses on the ease of customer interactions, measuring the amount of effort required by customers to resolve issues, complete tasks, or achieve their objectives with your product or service.

Tips on getting the most out of surveys: 

• Keep them short and targeted. Remember, no one has the time for a long questionnaire.
• Time it right for each survey type: 

Collect feedback right after product delivery or implementation 

Conduct surveys at key adoption points like use of a major feature for the first time 

Establish a rule to survey enterprise clients every 90 days to track their satisfaction 

? Gather feedback from customers departing from your brand with clear follow-up protocols to understand the reason for exit

• Make responding easy with one-click ratings or multiple-choice questions 
• Analyze and act fast on the feedback received via surveys. For example, if you find in your surveys that onboarding is challenging for customers, proactively create step-by-step walkthrough guides, videos, and FAQs to make onboarding seamless.
• Do regression analysis on the user journey to find out which steps influence the customer effort and fix the steps by providing them . 

Try Hiver’s CSAT surveys for actionable insights

9. Follow Up Proactively After Purchases

Your relationship with your customers shouldn’t end at purchase. You need to reach out to them proactively to understand how they find your product or service. This helps you identify gaps or bottlenecks in the post-sale experience and stay on top of your customers’ minds.

How do you follow up after a purchase?

Day 1: Send an automated welcome and setup guide to familiarize customers with the basics

Day 3: Have an account manager personally check in to address any immediate questions or concerns

Day 14: Collect usage reviews from customers and provide optimization suggestions to enhance their experience

Day 30: Conduct a comprehensive review, assess progress, and outline next steps 

10. Train Employees in Empathy and Active Listening

A study reveals that 56% of customers say their satisfaction with a company is influenced by whether they feel understood and cared for or not. If your staff lacks empathy or motivation, customers will notice, and they’ll leave. 

Intentional listening and empathizing with customers are the key to making them feel cared for. 

Here’s how you fix that:  

Make customer satisfaction a core mission and communicate it consistently. When management leads by example, employees follow.

Demonstrate how a good experience looks like to your employees and create a model behavior for everyone to follow or replicate. 

Train employees regularly on adjusting their tone, using positive language, acknowledging customer’s concerns, and not being dismissive. Incorporate AI sentiment analysis to guide employee interaction.

Train employees to ask open-ended questions like “Can you walk me through the issue?” to uncover customer needs, and use clarifying questions like “Just to confirm, you’re looking for X, right?”

Use customer interactions to simulate high-pressure scenarios and how to respond to them and practice role-playing. 

11. Leverage Predictive Analytics for Anticipating Needs

Predictive analytics recommendations influence customer orders by 26.34%, and when combined with marketing analytics, it helps improve customer satisfaction by 76%. 

By analyzing past data, behavior trends, and customer sentiments, you can shift your approach from reactive to proactive. It helps anticipate customer needs, resolve issues before they arise, and flag customers who may need support. 

It also allows you to proactively analyze potential churn, implement retention strategies, and adapt your product to market trends to meet customer expectations. 

Use data analytics to forecast support needs and redirect in-person support beforehand to any predicted issue.  

Use predictive analytics to identify signs of disengagement, like a drop in order size or purchasing frequency. Reach out to them with offers like bulk discounts or additional services to retain them.

Use predictive analytics to track market trends to anticipate emerging needs and adjust offerings before competitors.

Use predictive analytics to sift through feedback and find repeated customer requests about certain features and prioritize them based on business alignment.

Use predictive analytics to identify friction points, such as long response times or unclear product documentation, and optimize the process, offering more targeted solutions. 

12. Create Exclusive Access Events for Customers

Exclusive events are excellent in strengthening customer loyalty and making them feel valued. Whether in-person or virtual, these events are hosted to provide customers with special access to new products or experience them before launch. 

For example, Apple hosts micro-events for industry leaders, influencers, and trade presses, offering a more immersive experience. 

SaaS brands can host private webinars offering beta features to selected or premium clients like User list’s Happy Hours SaaS hangout event for sharing stories, problems, and questions. 

Levere events to cater to different customers by: 

Offering technical customers a deep dive with the engineering teams, addressing questions in real-time.

Hosting user-group meetups (virtual and in-person) to create a community 

Give selected users early access to Beta test programs and involve them in feedback loops  

From Satisfaction to Advocacy: Your Next Steps

Customer satisfaction is not only about meeting expectations– it’s about exceeding expectations by going above and beyond. That’s when you tap into customer satisfaction, which translates into long-term loyalty. 

These 12 strategies might seem simple, but they come with the ability to turn your customers into real advocates. The key is to remember that customer satisfaction comes with consistently providing value and showing up for your customers. 

But how do you know your efforts are forging the results you expect? Hiver’s CSAT survey helps you measure customer satisfaction in real time. It helps track and compare reports and generate insights that help you train your teams better.