Customer Satisfaction
Ensuring Customer Satisfaction in the Software Development Industry
‘The customers are always right.’
And if they’re not satisfied with your product or service — you might be wrong.
Good testimonials from customers are signs that your business is moving towards the right path. However, just receiving positive feedback is not the only KPI to measure the level of customer satisfaction.
In the software development industry, there are other ways through which you can improve your customer satisfaction regarding the software service offered.
High customer satisfaction is a business priority for any brand and the key to success. So if you’re reading this article right now, it means you probably agree on how essential customer satisfaction is for scaling and growing a business.
Now let’s explore the ways to ensure and enhance customer satisfaction in the software development industry.
Know your customer
It’s worth knowing about your customers a little more — not only in terms of CRM and tracking their activities but also in terms of their personal side. During some special occasions in their life, you may surprise them with a customized note or product.
This way, you can have a positive impact not only on their customer experience and loyalty (so much that they will become natural brand ambassadors) but also on your business brand.
Ex: While understanding their software requirements, try to acquire extra information about your clients. It can be anything that is not related to business. Let’s say you got to know that in the coming week, it’s your client’s birthday. So to make the bond strong, you can either send them a physical gift or offer them something unique regarding your software or services.
Understanding Customers’ Expectations
The first thing to consider which makes the customer happy — is to understand what business problem do they want to solve or ease using the software — and measure whether the activities that contribute to success are achieved.
The user experience reflects the entirety of end-users experiences as they communicate with a product or service.
These expectations include “effectiveness” (how useful is the software functions?), “usability” (how easy or budget-friendly is it?), "take UX into consideration" (how good or how interactive does it feel to use?) and “quality of relationship with the software firm that developed the product or service.”
Software Value
Highlighting how your software can offer the best features and usability that other software of the same category doesn’t — makes an impact on customer satisfaction.
What brings more value to your product/service than others? To address these questions, your analyst must seek out to the potential buyer for the product, because the consumers themselves are the ones who likes or dislikes the product based on their experience.
Determining what your consumer expects and then developing the software, makes it valuable.
Quality Assurance
Bring your quality management system to the norm ISO 9001:2000. It enables monitoring of the quality of the products, services, and other processes in an IT firm.
Credible information about the real quality of the company’s services and products helps manage production processes flexibly, monitoring and solving problem cases, and avoiding the same errors in the future.
Impeccable quality assurance in a software development company results in the following advantages:
· A customer willingly accepts the outcome of the developers’ work.
· A software services provider deals with no complaints on the quality of a product and services.
· There is no need to spend additional resources to correct mistakes that appear after a software/system launch.
Get your C-level to inquire about the experience and feedback
It feels exceptional for any individual or customer when a CEO, VP, or C-levels exec themselves sits or takes up a project status meeting online. So if you’re in a big company, it doesn’t have to be the CEO, but within your organization, it needs to be somebody in a fairly good position.
When any high authority shows interest in the customer’s project — it tells your customer that this project is essential to you, and your company wants to make sure that they’re performing to customer’s expectations.
Some interesting statistics
· 90% of customers regard an “immediate” response as crucial or very important when they have a customer service problem. 60% of customers label “immediate” as 10 minutes or less. (Hubspot)
· 35% of customers expect to get connected with the same customer support agent with whom they had interacted at least once — through any communication channel. (Groovehq)
· Eighty-seven percent of consumers agree that brands need to put efforts more to offer smooth and consistent service. (Zendesk)
Wrapping it up
In any business, customer satisfaction is considered as the most predominant. Customer satisfaction contributes to the setting of expectations that are important for software business development.
It is essential to ensure customer satisfaction in the software field. This needs to be tackled, and potential creative approaches must be sought to improve customer loyalty in the software industry.
To attain a high level of customer satisfaction, the organization must follow fundamental customer-focus, customer centrism, relationship management, and other critical customer-centric principles.
Software firms must keep an eye on quality control, ask questions, and encourage strong customer cooperation. These tips assure that you and your customers are on the same page, and eventually, you can deliver the best software service desired.
