How to Improve Customer Satisfaction -Three Ego States

Back in the 1950s, Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne developed a psychoanalytical paradigm called Transactional Analysis. The theory intends to evaluate human behavior at various levels of social transactions. Here, individuals are segmented into different ego states based on their needs and conduct. Different approaches were also defined to attend them suitably.

Transactional Analysis into Customer Satisfaction Avenues

The transactional analysis helps greatly in identifying people’s personalities, standpoints and preferences. This, in turn,assists to make the best out of the proceedings with them, ultimately concentrating on mutual benefits.

Being an adept and classical premise to forecast human behavior and expectations, transactional analysis is adopted in various facets – like family relationships, organizational settings, etc.

Correspondingly, it also serves as a sensible and functional strategy to emanate extensive customer satisfaction in all kinds of businesses.

The Three Tiers of Customer Satisfaction

As mentioned earlier, transactional analysis classifies a person to one of the three ego states, namely:

The parent –They try to have a voice of authority that they’ve learned from external factors.

The child –They react profoundly in obvious manners to events.

The adult –They think logically before acting, with good reasoning skills.

Customers in each of these ego states have different needs and expectations. This implies that you’re required to modulate your approaches based on it.

1. The Adult – Needs Reasonable Resolutions

Customers in the adult ego state are good at logical reasoning. They analyze things carefully and make independent decisions. Hence, if you want to appeal to this level of connection – you should ensure that all required info and explanations are clearly distributed.

Tips:

Install Live Chat –Customers of this kind usually have a range of questions to be answered; these questions help them understand the product/service better. A live chat softwareoption, will be greatly helpful for them as it offers a:

• rich knowledge base,
• self-service option, and
• 24/7 support, etc.

Thus, having a live chat software on your website greatly appeals to customers at this ego state.

Stimulate Workforce Effectiveness – Another method to engage this type of customers in a positive manner is to stimulate your workforce to act pertinently. You can train your support and sales teams to establish detailed and prudent conversations responsibly.

2. The child – Needs Impulsive and Affectional Support

As the name implies, customers at this level behave more like a child, they exhibit relevant feelings and emotions according to the external events you propagate.

Here, businesses must make sure that they have the customers engaged with the brand, even when they’re not using it, so that the child within them emotionally connects with the brand, enhancing their customer experience.

Tips:

Companies should make use of social media to live up to these customers. Accordingly, they should push out interesting contents through social networking sites, email newsletters and even through business blogs. Moreover, they should roll out contests to induce the brands’ popularity.

3. The Parent – Needs a Sense of Paternity

It’s kind of tricky to satisfy customers at this state of ego. They actually expect a sense of belonging to a community and also like to have a satisfactory reason behind it. In most cases, bigger players and major brands do well with having this level of connection happier.

Tips:

• Identify and share values with them, according to their preferences and behaviors.
• Focus on what drives a higher level of loyalty.
• Come up with a mission and vision you want to achieve that align with their interests.

The Ultimate Goal – Improving Customer Satisfaction

In transactional analysis, making an interaction with someone is called a ‘transaction.’ There are three main types of transactions. They’re defined based on the ego states, from which each one in the conversation is making transactions.

Complementary Transactions-Here, the interactions are made in the manner of comforting each other, with a compliment, appreciation or soothing words.

Crossed Transactions-Here, the interactions usually end up in a bitter experience, due to the incompatibility of the ego states. Child to parent interactions for example.

Ulterior Transactions- This type of transactions involve people interacting from more than one ego state.

For effective communication and satisfaction, the interactions must be complimentary. Whenever a salesperson or a support agent contacts a customer, they’ll respond back from any one of the mentioned ego states.

So, the representatives must go to the most convenient ego state with respect to theirs’, to derive complementary transactions.

Conclusion

When your aim is to improve customer satisfaction, understanding how customers want to be accorded is fundamentally important. A better knowledge and understanding of transactional analysis will help you to conceptualize the prolific method of communicating with a specific customer. Thus, you can shrewdly achieve your anticipated outcomes, having the customers feeling happy.