Customer satisfaction is a critical factor in ensuring you meet customer expectations, and ultimately boost loyalty. To measure customer satisfaction effectively, it is important to understand the different metrics and data points available.
A common way to collect customer feedback is through surveys sent out via email or SMS. These often include a question asking respondents to rate their experience as a promoter (9-10), detractor (7-8) or passive (8-9).
1. Focus on Customer Effort
As business environments and customer expectations change it becomes increasingly important to keep a finger on the pulse of your customers. Unfortunately, many companies struggle to achieve this goal because they lack clear metrics and methodologies to measure it.
One great metric to use is customer effort score (CES). This simple question, asked close in time to the interaction, asks how easy it was for customers to engage with your brand. CES is a great way to identify critical breakpoints in the experience that are likely to lead to customer defection and churn.
CES also provides early signals that can be used to drive measures further down the funnel like repurchase rates and referral rates. By combining CES with transactional metrics (like asking the question after every support call or self-service transaction) you can get a more complete picture of customer satisfaction.
2. Use Customer Effort Score (CES)
Many companies rely on surveys to gather customer feedback, but these tools have value only when the results are converted into follow-up actions and product improvements. Adding the question “How easy was it for you to resolve your issue or find information on your website” to a survey allows you to measure customer effort.
You should ask this question close to the time when the interaction took place, for example immediately after they check out in a store or submit a support ticket. The response options should be simple, consistent, and aligned with your business objectives – for example, you could use a 5-point or 10-point scale.
Many companies also include a text box where customers can elaborate on the difficulty they experienced, which helps them understand why their score was low or high. Then they can improve the painful points of their customer journey and create more loyal long-term customers.
3. Use Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is a customer satisfaction metric that measures how likely customers are to recommend your product or service to others. It is calculated by asking a single question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend this company’s products or services to friends or colleagues?” Customers are then categorised as Promoters (9 or 10), Passives (7 or 8), and Detractors (0-6).
NPS surveys are often deployed via email, but can also be found on website feedback widgets, in-app prompts, and through face-to-face conversations with customers. It is important to consider the unique customer journey when determining how and when to survey. It is not good to overburden your customers with requests for feedback – they may start to ignore your surveys and stop providing valuable responses.
4. Use Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT surveys are a quick and convenient way to find out how happy your customers are with your product or service. They’re especially useful for identifying pain points throughout your customer journey and discovering data-based insights that you can use to improve your business.
To measure customer satisfaction, you ask a simple question such as: “How satisfied are you with [your brand’s products or services]?” Then, you calculate the percentage of respondents who answered either “very satisfied” or “satisfied” by dividing their answers by your total number of responses and multiplying it by 100. You can use CSAT surveys at various touchpoints in your customer journey, such as after a support interaction or a product purchase. It’s best to survey a representative sample of your entire customer base when using this metric.
5. Use Customer Effort Score (CES)
The CES survey helps you identify areas where your customers are having difficulty. It’s like a compass, pointing out trouble spots and providing direction to your team on how to improve. For example, if a large number of customers are giving you low scores because they’re frustrated by long wait times and a lack of clarity from your support staff, then that may indicate that it’s time to overhaul some of your workflows.
You can collect CES data by asking your customers to rate how easy it is for them to connect with your business, either on an emoji anger-to-happiness scale or on a numerical 1-5 scale. Timing is key here – you want to survey them right after their experience, so the experience is still fresh in their mind.
