All the businesses in the world have no better friend or worse enemy than their customers.
Win over their trust and you get the most valuable brand ambassadors for your company. Treat them with disregard they could become the end of your business. A discount or offer doesn’t promise any guarantee for customer satisfaction. Studies show that most of the dissatisfied customer doesn’t voice their opinion, they simply stop coming. Customer satisfaction is not always about the quality of the product or services. It reflects what the customer feel about how they were treated. Once the customers churn, begins it becomes nearly impossible for you to win them back. It is evidently difficult to stay objective while evaluating your own customers’ happiness or satisfaction. Customer Satisfaction cannot be measured with a 100% accuracy.
What makes it tricky is that it is not just the number of customers you have to count but also you have to assume that they are being honest. When satisfied many people wouldn’t feel a need to contact the company and share the good experience, while some others will quietly grumble about their dissatisfaction in the service or products and give up on a company without actually voicing their complaints or seeking remedies.
The requirements for satisfaction varies from individual to individual and can be extremely challenging to quantify. Another thing to note is that customers usually use these different ways to measure customer satisfaction by making them a vent to show their frustration with the experience they had. Hence the results can be biased. It is only a group of your customers that are participating in it. According to a study conducted by Opinionlab, 80% of the customers abandon a survey half through. It is similar statistics for almost all other metrics available to measure customer satisfaction.
Why is Measuring Customer Satisfaction Important?
The key to business and increased profit is not acquiring new customers. It is about retaining the already existing loyal customers. An increase of 25 % to 95 percent will be visible with just a 5% increase in Customer retention rate.
Customer loyalty is paramount to a long and successful business relationship. A major factor that influences customer loyalty is customer satisfaction, though it doesn’t necessarily promise Customer Loyalty. So figuring out how to measure customer satisfaction is necessarily more important than ever, since it can be either an indicator of growth and success or a glaring warning measure against churn. Futile attempts to measure customer satisfaction could hide patterns and trend implying customer churn and it might go unnoticed. There is nothing more than a customer churn to hurt business, no matter how big your company is.
It is these metrics that help us to understand which habits you should be kept on doing and which you should stop immediately. The immense amount of data collected, however biased and complicated it seems to be can help you a lot to make informed decisions that are data-driven. Unusual activities and discrepancies in the patterns will be notified at the right time. You don’t have to make business decisions based on hunches and assumptions anymore.
Here, in this article, we will discuss the 6 ways of measuring customer satisfaction like a pro!
1. Customer Satisfaction Score or CSAT
The customer satisfaction score, or CSAT, is considered to be the most straightforward method amongst the methodologies used to measure customer satisfaction. 80% of the companies use CSAT score to measure customer satisfaction. It is calculated with variations of a very basic question: “how would you rate your experience interacting with our customer relations executive?” There is a corresponding survey scale from 1 – 3, 1 – 5, or 1 – 10. Or a scale ranging from ‘very unsatisfactory’ to ‘very satisfactory’.
The more the positive answers are given, the higher your score is. It is as simple as that. The versatility of CSAT lets it relate to any interaction of a client with your business. Its strength lies in its simplicity. It yields you a closed loop of customer interaction and helps you to determine whether or not you were successful in creating happy customers. It’s also immediate because you will get precise feedback relative to a certain experience. The CSAT is most useful to track short-term changes in customer approval before and after a change or new initiative. If the score shifts notably, you will have an inkling of what did or didn’t go over well. However, these questions cannot be used to cover an overarching impression of your company. Since it’s such a quick survey, you would be able to present it across multiple customer experiences and helps to get a big picture of how your customer feels at various touch points during the customer journey.
On the downside, its results tend to be very much biased, since mildly satisfied or dissatisfied customers tend to disregard the question itself. Though an unavoidable metric, you cannot depend solely on CSAT for it cannot predict the customer behavior in future and also doesn’t calculate your business’s potential for growth.
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The NPS calculates the probability of a customer referring it to a friend and rightfully the most popular way of measuring customer loyalty. NPS score will be high when the customers believe that you are capable of keeping them happy a longer time, which is essential customer loyalty. It was introduced to account for the lack of predictive power of CSAT. The question is straightforward and very easy to answer since it is not asking about the customer’s emotion about the product, but about their intention to refer the company. On the downside, NPS is largely one dimensional and the respondents don’t have to take a leap and refer your company without any incentives or credits.
3. Customer Effort Score
The Customer Effort Score takes a different approach while measuring customer satisfaction. It asks the customer: “how hard did you have to work to get a problem fixed? The scale is usually from 1 to 5, one is very easy to 5 is very difficult. The lower the score, the higher satisfaction is.
96% of customers with a high effort score showed reduced loyalty in the future, whereas only 9% of those reported low effort scores.
It was in the HBR article Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers, the idea for a customer satisfaction metric was introduced. It claims that excellent customer service doesn’t equal exceeding customer expectations. The customers are likely to punish a bad customer service than rewarding a good customer service. They also proved that while the payoffs are of minimum, the costs of exceeded customer expectations are high. Instead of encouraging to put all the effort into making a customer delightful, they should invest in transforming the customer experience and problem resolution to be as seamless as possible.
Relevance is vital here. The question has to be asked at the right time that is right after the experience so that the feeling you have about the customer experience is not forgotten. It can be asked via email or a live chat
4. Monitoring the Social Media
You cannot escape from social media these days and it would really help you if you have a strong social media presence. Customers share every good and bad that is happening in their life in the social media. They would do the same when it comes to sharing the experience they had with you. This makes it the best platform for you to listen to the voice of customer. With the right tools, you can track these activities and analyze it. When I say social media do not restrict yourself to Facebook or Twitter. Be sure to mark your presence in reviewing sites like Yelp, Quora, TripAdvisor, etc.
Google Alerts notifies you when your company gets into prominent position. A mention is a freemium tool that helps you immensely with tracking somebody mentioning your company’s name in the web. Another interesting tool called Socialmention helps you with the ratio of positive to negative comments or the likeliness for your brand to be discussed on the web.
5. Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Customer Satisfaction Surveys are the standard approach used to collect the feedbacks to measure customer satisfaction. With or without follow-up questions, the survey consists of questions regarding different touchpoints in the customer journey. The various types of surveys target customers from different demographics, fetching you different results every single time. Here’s a guide on how to interpret the results from your customer satisfaction surveys. Automated online surveys are getting popular with many companies. They’re affordable, simple, and sure have the potential to reach much larger audiences than the in-person surveys. You have to be creative while presenting them so that it is engaging for the customers. Three variations available are In-app survey, Post service survey, and Long Email surveys.
In-app surveys integrate feedback system into the system with one or two questions. It is one of the methods with the highest responsive rates. Post Service survey focuses solely on the service experienced by the customer just then. You could use an email support or a live chat to mark the responses. Since you collect these feedbacks right after the delivery, the customer is able to give a more accurate response. Email Surveys are when you need deep insights into the customer experience management and measure customer satisfaction. Although they have a very low response rate of 10% to 15% they do allow your customers to take their time to answer multiple questions.
6. Things Gone Wrong
Originated from the Lean Six Sigma approach this metric measures the number of complaints, or “Things Gone Wrong”, per 100, 1000, or up to a 1,000,000 units of survey responses, units sold, or other.
The standard approach to calculating “Things Gone Wrong”, is through grievance sections in the customer satisfaction surveys, but you can also use it to maintain the internal metrics too. When you are using TGW, your worst case scenario is when you score 1 or higher, implying that you have got one complaint per chosen unit.
Wrapping Up!
The companies hear only 4% of their dissatisfied customers. For every customer who registers a feedback, 26 customers remain in silence. And 96% of customers share their bad experiences with the community. This sheds light on the fact that customer satisfaction surveys cannot be trusted blindly. It has excluded a major portion of your audience that you find in the survey may not be what the majority of the actual audience suggests. And it is not the fault of the surveys or metrics you are using. You have to put in as much effort as possible to bring in higher rates of engagement in completing surveys by offering them incentives or other rewards. The metrics discussed here are for fulfilling different purposes in measuring customer satisfaction and you should select the one that would help you get the kind of answers you want. With customer survey platforms plenty around you, you shouldn’t have trouble gauging how your customers feel about you.
Happy Measuring!
