Are your products and services meeting your customer’s requirements? More importantly, how can you tell that? The answer lies in whether or not, you know how to measure customer satisfaction.
Where customer satisfaction is the only accelerating force that keeps your business moving forward, having an idea of how satisfied your customers are can be a game changer. Unless you can afford to have 91% of unhappy customers who will never buy from you again
Most prospering brands across the globe focus on measuring customer satisfaction. So, let’s discuss how you can measure customer satisfaction and keep taking your game forward.
1. How to Measure Customer Satisfaction?
To have loyal customers, you must keep your customers happy. To know how happy they are, you must measure it. So, we decided to help you measure your customer satisfaction in a few simple steps. Let’s take a look at what they are.
1.1. Determine Your Business Objectives
As a company, you run numerous campaigns on a regular basis. In all these campaigns, one thing is common- “why are we doing this?”
When you know what your customers expect out of your business, you will know what your next step should be. You get ground to satisfy your customer’s expectations by providing them with what they are actually looking for. Therefore, identifying the factors that affect customer satisfaction will take your business to another level.
While you try to understand customer psychology, you will automatically set the right goals for measuring customer satisfaction. Focus on the right purpose such as upgrading customer service quality and enhancing product and service quality.
1.2. Outline a Plan
Once you know your objective, the next thing to do is devise a plan for measuring customer satisfaction. The step involves getting versed with your target audience based on their demographics, needs, or behavior to understand their overall customer experience.
Based on the information you collect; you can send survey questions to your customers. Trigger the survey at the right time to obtain the right response. Also, segment your customers correctly to send the right survey forms. This will also aid in customer needs assessment.
1.3. Prepare the Right Survey Questionnaire
Obtaining people’s responses is not as easy as said. You must have a clear purpose for asking for customer feedback. Whether you want to know how satisfied your customers are or enhance your product features, you need honest customer feedback to thrive.
The best is to ask direct and specific questions. The responses will help you understand what is working and what needs improvement.
Make sure that your questions are aligned with the type of service or product you offer. Asking the right questions is the key to getting useful feedback. So, keep your questions open-ended.
1.3.1. Quantitative Feedback Questions
For detailed feedback, open-ended questions can do wonders as their responses are original and unique. For example:
- How was your experience on our website?
- What challenges do you think our product will solve?
- Have you tried other solutions?
1.3.2. Qualitative Feedback Questions
Such questions are generally multiple choice or ratings format and you may not obtain much information from these. For example:
- Will you recommend our website to your friends?
- How likely are you going to shop with us again?
- How would you rate our customer services out of 5?
Whether you choose qualitative or quantitative feedback questions, you can prepare questions as per your products and services to gauge customer satisfaction levels.
Also, you can ask questions through online polls and surveys to collect qualitative feedback to improve user experience. This will eventually help your business grow and enhance conversions.
1.4. Choose The Right Communication Channels
Selecting the right channels of communicating with your customers is crucial. Based on your business goals and the plan you have created; you must identify the channels that your target customers will use to give feedback.
Know your customers’ preferences and choose the channels your customers usually use to communicate with you. You can use these channels to send the survey questions and acquire their feedback.
Let’s take a look at the different channels that you can use as customer satisfaction measurement tools for your business.
1.4.1. Chat Surveys
With the help of live chat surveys, you can easily measure the performance of your support representatives. Ask your customers to rate the chat experience at the end of each conversation. This customer feedback can help you provide better product training and improve the interpersonal skills of your reps.
1.4.2. Email Surveys
In general, such surveys help you collect quantitative feedback. You can judge the likelihood of your customers promoting your brand. Email surveys make a great way of sending out your regular product and service-related surveys.
If need be, you can also use NPS, CES, or CSAT questions along with your email to collect more feedback. Or you can prepare your survey campaign and send it to your contacts and obtain feedback from your customers.
1.4.3. Website Surveys
Such surveys help you collect feedback about your website experience. You can ask questions about your website or determine their sales experience after they have made a purchase from you.
1.4.4. In-App Surveys
This type of survey helps you understand how well your app is doing (SaaS or mobile). Based on the survey data obtained, you can improve user experience.
1.5. Calculate Key Customer Satisfaction Metrics
Regardless of the type of business you operate in, identifying the key metrics to measure customer satisfaction is crucial. You must choose the right metrics that you can use to measure the level of customer satisfaction.
Here are different key customer satisfaction metrics that you can use for your business.
1.5.1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT has to be the most important metric that helps measure customer satisfaction. This type of survey targets customers through live chat, email, and phone to ask them basic questions.
Some basic CSAT questions are:
- How satisfied are you with our product? (Answer can be Very Satisfied, Unsatisfied, Moderately Satisfied, etc.)
- Did our product/service help you with your needs? (Answer can be Yes, No, Partially, etc.)
- On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate our product/service?
Though there is no specific formula you can use to measure client satisfaction scores, the following formula can help determine a portion of satisfied customers.
A higher CSAT score means your customers are highly satisfied. Try out different ways to collect both qualitative and quantitative feedback and know what is working and what needs to be improved.
With the help of NPS, you can measure the overall customer experience. All you need to calculate the NPS is the key question- “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you going to recommend our brand to someone?”
The customer responses can be broadly divided into three categories:
- Promoters (9-10): They are your loyal customers who will keep buying from you and refer others with good word of mouth.
- Passives (7-8): They are your satisfied customers but may be vulnerable to competitive offers and deals.
- Detractors (0-6): They are the unsatisfied or unhappy customers who can have a negative impact on your brand through negative word of mouth.
To calculate NPS, use this formula:
NPS is a good loyalty metric and is closely associated with increased business growth. So, make use of every rating to grow your business.
1.5.3. Customer Effort Score (CES)
A lot of people compare CES to CSAT. But the difference between the two lies in the fact that to calculate CES, you ask your customers to evaluate the ease of their experience with products and services.
You are still measuring satisfaction but you are gauging the customer effort. The simple assumption here is that the easier the product or service, the better the experience will be.
As a business, you must focus on making the experience as low-effort as you can. This can decrease their frustration and increase loyalty. So, put your best effort into maintaining a relevant score.
1.6. Analyze the Collected Data
Your job is not limited to collecting data from your customers. Instead, you must hand over the data to professional analysts who will generate valuable insights for you. On the basis of these insights, you can improve your product, service, and customer satisfaction ratings.
These insights will also help you plan for your future. Here’s all that you can do with the feedback received.
- Improve the quality of services or products.
- Identify the gaps between your customers and business. Build new strategies to minimize the gaps.
- Talk to all our team members to know their views on customer expectations.
You would already know that social media is the most powerful tool people use for sharing their ideas, experiences, and opinions. You can track your social media channels to get an idea of our brand reputation.
The Next Scoop research says that 90% of businesses are expected to use social media for better customer service. Social media channels can help your business boost its visibility and reach out to a bigger audience.
This can also help gain insights and make better business decisions. You will also know what your customers are thinking and talking about your brand.
To make the most of the social media channels, you can use social media monitoring tools and measure customer satisfaction.
1.8. Make Adjustments
Because you want to improve the way you do business, you must listen to customer feedback and change what is going wrong.
After you collect the feedback and analyze it, implement it in the areas that need to be improved for better customer satisfaction. Your customers will love that your brand took the feedback seriously and improved for the better.
So, implement the feedback as soon as you can and focus on improving your customer satisfaction scores.
2. FAQs
2.1. What Is Customer Satisfaction?
In simple terms, customer satisfaction can be defined as the way of determining how happy your customers are with your brand. When you can assess customer satisfaction, you can easily identify the areas that are a plus for your business and the ones that have a negative impact.
Based on these metrics, you can gain valuable insights into your overall business health and take measures to improve the areas that need to be improved.
2.2. Why Should You Measure Customer Satisfaction?
Measuring customer satisfaction offers several benefits. Let’s take a look at some of them so that you know why you should measure customer satisfaction.
2.2.1. Unsatisfied Customers Can Prove Expensive
By now, you would have understood that customer satisfaction is not something that only your customers look forward to. But as a business, you equally care about having satisfied customers.
Simply put, one dissatisfied customer can make a financial dent. Imagine, if their number increases!
Your business may incur both direct and indirect costs because of customer dissatisfaction. Direct costs in the way that they won’t buy from you again and affect your sales. And because they will buy from your competitors, this will result in indirect costs.
In addition to this, all the resources that you spend to get those customers will also go in vain.
Without a doubt, tracking customer satisfaction is a proactive move that will help capture about-to-churn customers. Further, you can identify the reason for customer dissatisfaction and change your strategies accordingly.
2.2.2. Satisfied Customers Mean Repeat Business
It’s no secret that satisfied customers make repeat purchases from businesses. They continue buying from that brand until they have a great time and need its products or services.
2.2.3. Bad Customer Experience Affects Your Reputation
When you are measuring customer satisfaction, understanding bad experiences is as important as understanding good experiences. An unpleasant experience can make a customer spread bad word of mouth about your brand, tarnishing the rapport you have worked so hard on.
Negative experiences posted online spread like wildfire. A few bad reviews can influence your potential customers too.
Before the situation becomes this bad, you must measure customer satisfaction before it leaves a big dent in your company’s market rapport.
2.2.4. Customer Satisfaction Can Help Improve Customer Experience
Reasons such as receiving a faulty product or unpleasant customer service can become reasons for your unhappy, unsatisfied customers. But when you consistently measure customer satisfaction, it can help improve customer experience before your customers leave your brand forever.
You can also determine if the customer retention strategies you implemented are working or not. If they are not, you can easily redesign the whole process and make improvements.
2.2.5. Win Over Competitors
Businesses these days are in a neck-throat competition trying to convince the same set of customers. They keep working on their marketing game to be on top of their sales and improve their customer experience.
Besides all this, businesses also need to measure customer satisfaction to stand out from the rest. Your satisfied customers will keep getting business, unlike unsatisfied or new customers.
If you keep working on improving your customer satisfaction rate, you won’t have to worry about losing your customers to your competitors. They won’t leave your business as long as they are happy and satisfied with your brand.
2.2.6. Reduce Churn Rate
When we are talking about churn rate, it’s not always about the price. Some brands sell their products and services at high prices but still manage to have a low churn rate.
It’s about offering high-quality products, services, and customer service. If your customers get all of these, there is no reason they would leave. If you can’t offer your customers what they actually, even the lowest prices won’t be able to bring them back.
2.3. What Are Some Tips for Measuring Customer Satisfaction?
There is a way of asking your customers to share their feedback, respecting their time. Here are a few tips that will help you measure customer satisfaction the best way you can.
- Ask Relevant Questions: Your questions must be open-ended so that you can get an idea about what your customers think about your products and services.
- Use a Simple Feedback Process: You must not annoy your customers and save time. So, avoid general, repetitive fields like name, email, etc.
- Keep Minimum Questions: Your questions must be short and focused so that you can get accurate answers. As a result, more customers will complete them.
- Be Kind: Show appreciation to your customers for their time and feedback. If possible, offer them discounts, coupons, and good offers.
- Do It Consistently: Sending feedback forms consistently will help you collect more information about the problems and work on them in time.
3. Wrapping Up
Customer satisfaction plays a crucial role in maintaining healthy relationships with your customers so that they keep coming back to you. This won’t just improve your retention rate but you will also be able to get new customers.
Measuring customer satisfaction can help you predict what your customer wants and how you can turn them into loyal customers.
