Most of the brands firmly believe the fact that good customer service has a profound effect on reducing customer churn, and eventually the bottom line. Measuring customer satisfaction is becoming the core part of every customer centric company. When we talk about being customer-centric, it means that everything you plan and design should have the goal of fulfilling your customers’ needs and expectations. And to know if your customers are happy with your business you have to know how to measure customer satisfaction. According to McKinsey , “ 70% of the buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated. ” The brands prospering in the new global economy recognize that measuring customer satisfaction is crucial. It is a strategic weapon that can bring increased market share and increased profits. Let us discuss customer satisfaction assessment so that businesses hold on to the customers and attract new customers.
Customer satisfaction is defined as a measurement to determine how happy are your customers with your business. Assessing client satisfaction helps you to identify the white and gray of your products, services, and solutions. Measuring customer satisfaction metrics gives you valuable insights into your overall business performance. Based on the insights you can enhance on the areas you are doing well and improve the areas having loopholes.
Happy customers become your loyal customers. They become your buying customers and to know how happy your customers are you need to measure it. Let us walk you through the measuring process and how to determine the customer satisfaction level.
Understanding customer expectations is an important aspect that determines customer success. It provides a ground to satisfy their expectations by giving them the kind of product or service they are looking for. Hence, learning the factors affecting customer satisfaction will always help your business to grow.
When brands make efforts to understand customer psychology, it helps in defining objectives for measuring customer service satisfaction. You have to make sure that your goals should have a purpose such as:
After you have identified your objectives you can move to the second phase of how to measure the customer satisfaction index.
Planning is the next important stage of how to measure customer satisfaction. Here you have to identify your target audience based on certain attributes like demographics, behavior or needs and understand the overall customer experience.
Based on the insights you can trigger survey questions to your customers. Sending a trigger at the right time is very important to obtain the right response. This will prove very helpful in customer needs assessment as well.
It is not done yet. You also need to define the frequency like by segmenting customers who have made purchases in the last 30 days.
Nowadays, people are too busy to respond to feedback questions.
In order to value the time, knowing the purpose of asking feedback to customers is very important. Whether you want to assess your client satisfaction or shape your product roadmap, getting honest customer feedback is something you need to do.
Pro tip: It is advisable to ask direct or more specific questions. The responses will help you to know what works well and which areas of your activities need improvements.
Your questions should be tailored to the kind of service or product that you offer . Asking the right questions is the key trick to getting honest and useful feedback. For getting honest feedback it is recommended to keep questions open ended.
Quantitative feedback questions – If you want feedback in a broader or detailed way you can choose open ended questions. Generally, the responses to these questions are original and unique. Some examples can be
Qualitative questions – The feedback questions typically are multiple choice or ratings format. Some examples can be:
Based on your qualitative or quantitative feedback requirements, you can prepare questions to gain actionable insights to gauge customer satisfaction scores.
If you are a part of the holiday campaigns or sales & marketing strategies, asking the right questions via online polls and surveys helps you to collect qualitative feedback to create better user experiences. That eventually results in business growth and increases sales conversions.
Choosing the right channels is very important. Depending on your business objectives and outlined plan you need to identify the channels that your target customers are more receptive to for giving feedback.
Based on your customer’s preferences you can select those channels they find comfortable to communicate with you. You can send survey questions through the right trigger points to acquire customer feedback.
The different channels that can be used as customer satisfaction measurement tools are as follows:
Identifying the key metrics or KPIs to measure customer satisfaction is a vital part of every business. You have to choose the metrics that are used by businesses for performance measurement to analyze the level of satisfaction in the overall customer journey.
So, what are the types of metrics for calculating the user satisfaction rate?
CSAT is the most important metric for measuring customer satisfaction. It is a kind of survey that targets customers by asking a basic question through different communication channels such as live chat, email, or phone.
CSAT questions can be:
How to calculate customer satisfaction score?
There is no unified measurement of client satisfaction score but that being said one could execute this below formula to determine the proportion of satisfied customers:
The higher CSAT score indicates better satisfaction. Implement the ways to collect qualitative and quantitative feedback, that helps you know what is or is not working.
NPS measures the overall customer experience. NPS is calculated with the help of the key question – “How likely is that you would prefer the brand to someone?”. It has an index on a scale from 1 to 10.
The customer responses are divided into three categories:
In order to calculate your NPS score, you have to take the percentage of promoters (9-10) out of the total respondents and subtract it from the detractors (0-6).
The NPS metric is just considered a good loyalty metric but it is also closely associated with increased business growth. So never miss out a single opportunity to take your business to the next level.
The customer effort score (CES) is quite similar to the customer satisfaction score. The difference is instead of asking how satisfied the customer was, you ask them to evaluate their customer experience with their products and services.
Making an experience a low-effort one is one of the greatest ways to decrease frustration and increase loyalty. The easier customers find to finish the task, the better is the experience.
Like NPS, the CES is also directly associated with satisfied customers and business growth. So put your best effort so that the score is the lowest on the scale of 1-10.
Simply gathering data from customers won’t do you good for your company. The data must be further handed over to professional analysts who can generate valuable insights for you. Once you have these insights, you can use them to create a better product or to improve customer satisfaction ratings.
The customer insights will form the base of your future business planning as well. Essentially, once you receive customer feedbacks you need to:
Social media has become one of the most important channels to share ideas, opinions, and experiences. Tracking social channels plays an important role in shaping your brand reputation.
According to The Next Scoop research, “90% of businesses are predicted to leverage the power of social media for better customer service.” Using social channels helps businesses in boosting their brand visibility and allows reaching out to a bigger audience.
Social media listening helps to analyze brand conversations and use insights for better business decisions. It helps you to understand where these conversations are happening, and what customers think when they are mentioning your brand.
With social media listening, you can figure out where the customers are talking about you.
In order to do it right and keep a track on if your customers are truly satisfied. You can integrate social media monitoring tools for calculating user satisfaction within your social channels. The tools effectively monitor everything about user satisfaction and behavior.
Example of social media monitoring tools that can help in customer satisfaction assessment:
In order to improve their business, companies must listen to customer feedback and change what they do to improve customer loyalty. The real goal is to understand and improve the areas of the business that drive customer loyalty.
After the feedback data is collected and analyzed its time to implement to the areas to improve client satisfaction and overall brand image. Customers feel happy when they are valued and heard.
Once the feedback is implemented you can start focusing on the most important drivers that you can change in your business to increase and improve customer satisfaction scores.
Reaching out to customers for feedback respecting their time makes the difference in the responses they give. You can follow the below tips.
As we all agree, user satisfaction plays an important role in creating long-term relationships with people and having them come back to your business after the first purchase or contact. Not only does it influence your current customers and their retention but it’s the key to having more people choose you over the competition.
Measuring customer satisfaction is indeed a good practice for your business to identify the loyal and satisfied customers of your business. It also helps you to stay at the top of your business by bringing profits and secures you run things smoothly hassle free.
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Snigdha Patel is a customer experience researcher, author, and blogger. As part of REVE Chat, she focuses on helping organizations maximize customer experience using omnichannel messaging and conversational AI.
She creates contextual, insightful, and conversational content for business audiences across a broad range of industries and categories like Customer Service, Customer Experience (CX), Chatbots, and more.
Serving as the lead content strategist, Snigdha helps the customer service teams to leverage the right technology along with AI to deliver exceptional and memorable customer experiences.
Being a customer service adherent, her goal is to show that organizations can use customer experience as a competitive advantage and win customer loyalty.
