When you run a business, customer satisfaction is crucial to your success.

Satisfied customers are more likely to buy from you again and share their positive experiences with friends and family. They’re also more likely to leave your business positive reviews online, which will influence potential customers.

If you’re interested in improving customer satisfaction, be prepared to do some hard work. It takes more than a good product or service to make customers happy; you also need to manage your customer relationships, including all customer service interactions.

This is more easily done with technology.

Manual efforts to improve customer satisfaction can only go so far.

For example, you’ll provide better service to customers through a Contact Center AI because everything will be centralized and your agents can collaborate in real-time to solve complex customer issues fast.

When customers’ needs are met quickly, they’re more likely to be satisfied. With all the complexities that make up the customer experience, technology is an excellent assistant for improving customer satisfaction, and here’s why.

Technology can hold and process more data

Improving anything requires collecting and analyzing data because you need to know the reality of the situation to make good decisions. Data provides you with the facts so you don’t have to do any guessing.

The problem is that the data you need to collect to improve the customer experience is vast and the way it needs to be processed into meaningful insights is complex. While it’s certainly possible to manually perform complex calculations, it’s not sustainable.

Technology, like software applications, can hold infinite amounts of data and process that data quickly and efficiently – much faster than manual methods. There are software programs that will calculate data as it comes in. All you have to do is run a report to see the results.

Technology provides better data accuracy

The benefit of holding large quantities of data and processing that data quickly is getting fast, accurate, and in-depth insights into your business. When it comes to customer satisfaction, you can use this data to find opportunities for improving your customer interactions.

For instance, if customers tell your chatbot they didn’t find answers to their questions, you’ll know it’s time to improve your automated responses and self-help system. If customers abandon their efforts to check out after filling out part of your form, you might have a difficult checkout process.

You can discern a variety of possible snags your customers are experiencing just by collecting and analyzing data, and technology, namely software, will turn that data into meaningful insights much faster than any manual effort.

From there, you can address each issue and see if anything changes.

Cloud-based technology gives customers 24/7 access to support

One of the most pressing reasons to use technology is to give your customers access to support around the clock. However, you don’t have to have a full-time team of agents working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

You can use AI-powered chatbots to field support requests before a live agent is called. Most of the time, a customer’s needs will be met through self-help options provided by the chatbot. This means your agents will have a smaller workload, and you may not need to employ a full team.

Since customer satisfaction is closely tied to how quickly support requests are resolved, it makes sense to use technology to make the process more efficient. You might be surprised to learn that most customers actually prefer self-help options and they want to solve their own problems.

Today’s customers don’t usually want to talk to a live support person unless there’s no other option.

Technology makes real-time support possible

Now that businesses are used to using Facebook Messenger to provide customer support, people are getting used to live, real-time support.

Even when the company’s response is delayed by a few minutes to an hour, getting support over a chat box still feels like it’s happening much faster than email communications.

Real-time support makes customers feel like they’re being taken care of immediately and that they’re being prioritized. Customers are more likely to feel satisfied when they feel like a company cares about their experience enough to respond right away.

Customer satisfaction equals better business

At the end of the day, when you increase your customer satisfaction, you’re improving your business.

Satisfied customers turn into loyal fans, repeat business, and sometimes even brand ambassadors, so don’t ignore the important role technology can play in boosting customer satisfaction.