As many as 45.9% of businesses consider improving customer experience their long-term objective. Customer experience is the top priority for companies in the next five years, and rightly so. When you satisfy your customers, you get the chance to leverage consumer repurchase intentions and drive long-term loyalty.
But in this era when customers have a multitude of options to choose from, understanding their requirements, constantly engaging them, and achieving customer satisfaction can be challenging.
Over the years, QR codes have emerged as an effective tool to understand customer preferences and drive engagement. Let’s discuss how brands can use QR Code image for safer customer engagement and satisfaction in 2024.
Importance of Customer Engagement and Satisfaction
CCMC reports that unhappy customers are twice as likely to share their bad experiences than satisfied customers. You can’t risk offending your customers at this age when they have so many options to choose from. Here are some reasons why you should prioritize customer satisfaction.
- Retaining customers is 5-25 times less expensive than acquiring new customers.
- Customer satisfaction leads to positive customer reviews and personal recommendations, which boosts your brand’s reputation.
- Customer satisfaction can help you stand out in this crowded marketplace.
- Customer satisfaction is directly associated with long-term business growth.
- Satisfied customers lead to happy and confident employees.
How Can QR Codes Help?
While the benefits of improving customer satisfaction and experience are substantial, it’s hard to achieve. Winning the trust of customers is one of the biggest business challenges, and it continues to get harder considering the increasing competition.
QR codes can provide you with an edge when it comes to engaging your customers. You can use QR codes to share helpful content with your customers, offer better service, and send relevant promotional messages.
Some benefits of including QR codes in your marketing and customer engagement strategy are:
- Help drive action
- Encourages prospects to make a purchase
- Enables seamless lead generation
- Tracks and collects customer data
- Reduces printing costs
- Increases customer excitement
- Are easy to generate
How to Use QR Codes to Gain Customer Insights and Improve Satisfaction?
Now, how can you use QR codes to drive customer engagement? There are myriad ways to use QR codes. Let’s discuss the most popular methods to leverage QR codes for your business.
Discounts and Coupon Codes
Customers love discounts, so much so that about 93% of shoppers use a discount or coupon code throughout the year. However, things become tricky when it comes to in-store shopping. Let’s say you’re a restaurant business that provides discounts only to particular customers. How’d you determine which customers are eligible, and have they redeemed the discount before?
QR codes make the discount process hassle-free. You can provide discounts to your customers in the form of QR code coupons. Customers can scan the code using their smartphone and redeem the coupon.
Share Product Information
Customers nowadays are very conscious of the products they use. They need to know what ingredients a product contains and their impact on not only the user but also the environment. Providing so much information on a product package isn’t possible.
QR codes resolve this hurdle. You can create QR code and put it up on the product packaging. Link the code to a page on your website, which provides detailed information about the product’s ingredients.
Hershey’s, one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world, adopted SmartLabel packaging by putting up a QR code on their product packaging. The code linked to in-depth product information, thereby maintaining complete transparency with its customers.
Share Engaging Content
Sharing interesting and helpful content is one of the best ways to keep your customers engaged. Assume that you sell various types of pasta. A great way to engage your customers can be by sharing amazing pasta recipes with them. You can put up a QR code on the product package and link it to the product recipe on your website or YouTube channel.
Chef’s Basket is a good example of this application of QR codes. The brand used QR codes on its pasta products and linked them to their YouTube channel. By scanning the code, customers could watch and follow the recipe.
Seamless Product Returns
According to Invesp, 92% of customers would shop from a brand again if they had a seamless return experience. Also, consumers may want to talk to customer reps when they have questions or need assistance. But when it comes to product returns, they prefer self-service.
QR codes can simplify the returns process. You can use a QR code generator to make QR codes on product packaging and link it to a page on your website where customers can request to return the product.
Amazon has implemented this effective way of allowing customers to seamlessly return their products. To return a product, consumers can walk inside the drop-off location and scan the QR code. Amazon will then re-ship the product, and the refund will be issued accordingly.
Omnichannel Marketing
Using flyers, billboards, business cards, brochures, etc., can go a long way in increasing brand awareness and putting your business in front of people. However, these marketing materials aren’t actionable. Customers can’t take any action in real-time, which affects the overall engagement.
QR codes help you overcome this hurdle. You can put up a QR code on your offline marketing materials and link them to relevant destinations. For instance, let’s say your own salon business, and you use banner ads for advertising. You also have an appointment booking page on your website that allows customers to make appointments online.
You can put up a QR code on your banner ads and link it to the appointment page on your website. Customers will be able to scan the code and make an appointment from their smartphone, resulting in a superior and effortless customer experience.
Wrap Up
Improving customer experience is the first step towards customer satisfaction. By implementing QR codes in your marketing and customer service strategy, you can better engage your customers and provide them with a remarkable experience.
About the Author
Akshay Deogiri is an SEO outreach specialist at Beaconstac, enabling businesses to bridge their gap between the digital and offline worlds through custom QR codes.
