You have the dream cupcake store you always wanted. You have 10,000 followers on Instagram and another 25,000 on Facebook. That’s a long way from your first post in January 2020.
What’s more, Google reviews have put you at a decent 4.4/5. You should be breaking even in 3 months at the rate business is going. You even managed to get your actual physical store last month. But something seems amiss.
Why? Maybe it’s time you got tangible customer satisfaction metrics. In other words, you ought to measure customer satisfaction in numbers.
When it comes to customer satisfaction metrics, there are a lot of numbers you can crunch. The trick is in figuring out which are the right metrics and how you will track them.
What types of metrics measure customer satisfaction? Scroll down to know more. Learn how your business can improve your customer service, build relationships, and decrease churn rate with the right CSAT metrics.
What is Customer Satisfaction, and why is customer Satisfaction Important?
Customer satisfaction refers to the measure of how a company’s products or services meet or surpass the expectations of its customers. It represents the extent to which customers are happy with the product, service, or experience they received, and it plays a pivotal role in determining the likelihood of customer retention and loyalty.
High levels of customer satisfaction often lead to repeat purchases, positive word-of-mouth, and increased brand loyalty. Conversely, dissatisfied customers might switch to competitors and share negative feedback, which could harm the company’s reputation.
Measuring customer satisfaction is essential for several reasons:
- Feedback for Improvement: It provides insights into areas where a business might need to make changes to improve its products, services, or overall customer experience.
- Loyalty and Retention: Satisfied customers are more likely to continue doing business with a company, leading to increased customer lifetime value.
- Word of Mouth: Satisfied customers often become advocates, sharing positive experiences and recommending the company to others, which can lead to new customer acquisition.
- Competitive Advantage: In industries where products and prices might be similar, customer satisfaction can be a differentiator.
- Financial Performance: Higher satisfaction often correlates with increased sales and profitability.
- Reduction in Customer Churn: Understanding and addressing dissatisfaction can reduce the number of customers who leave for a competitor.
- Strategic Decision Making: Customer satisfaction metrics can guide business strategies and resource allocation.
8 Customer Satisfaction Metrics You Need to Track in 2024
Customer Satisfaction is integral to understanding the Customer Experience (CX).
The goal here is to identify the touchpoints in the Customer Experience journey where a customer will likely face issues and drive your customer satisfaction metrics around it.
Here are the 8 tried and tested Customer Satisfaction metrics. Now, let’s see how to measure customer satisfaction.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- Churn Rate
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- First Response Time (FRT)
- Call Wait Time
- Customer Reviews
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Now, let’s see how these metrics help our business, shall we?
#1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score reflects how likely customers are to recommend your business to others. Hand it to your customer as they leave the store, website, or Facebook page to rate their overall experience with your brand.
NPS surveys are short and easy and can also be used during any customer life cycle stage. For example, your NPS question(s) can pop up:
- After a customer books a sitting,
- When a user makes a purchase/has a tasting,
- While a user takes a specific action on your website – E.g., clicks on the Contact Us;
- Whenever you want to see how your relationship with your customer is going,
- A few weeks before your customer’s loyalty subscription is nearing its end.
These questions can be done through email, chatbots, text messages, live interactions, etc.
How Do You Measure Net Promoter Score?
Net Promoter Score is measured through a customer satisfaction survey that asks your customers how likely they are to recommend your company to others, usually on a scale of 0–10 – where 0 is unlikely, and 10 is highly likely.
One typical question you can ask your customer is: On a scale from 0 to 10, how probable would you recommend our desserts to a friend or colleague?
By using this kind of scale, it is possible to classify customers into 3 categories:
#1. Detractors:
Detractors are those who rated their likelihood at 6 or lower. You can tell they are not particularly interested in spreading positive words about your services.
#2. Passives:
Passives are those who gave a score of 7 or 8. They could be willing to recommend your products but also wouldn’t hesitate to switch a brand.
#3. Promoters:
Promoters are those who gave a score of 9 or 10. Are your brand’s evangelists, as they repeat some interaction with your product or service and would happily recommend it further?
Calculating your NPS is quite simple. First, convert the customer categories into percentages of your total respondents. Then, you need to subtract the percentage of detractors from your percentage of promoters.
Your NPS will fall between -100 to 100 depending on your customer’s perception of your brand and their loyalty towards it.
When Is Net Promoter Score Useful?
Net Promoter Score helps you anticipate churn, measure loyalty, and measure satisfaction at touchpoints.
The best time to conduct your survey would be:
- When they call your customer support number (if you have one)
- If they spend more than a few minutes on the landing page of your website or are going to exit your page
- And/or if they have liked/followed and engaged with you on social media, follow up with a survey. You are likely to get a more genuine and sincere response.
Now that you know when to survey your customers, you need to know about the specific areas you need feedback for.
Here are some questions that broadly cover your areas of business:
- How satisfied consumers are with your products(or services, if any)
- What is their loyalty quotient with your brand
- How likely customers are to recommend your company to others
Simultaneously, you can use this customer satisfaction metric to predict your customer churn rate and determine what incentives could improve loyalty.
Many studies and examples have already shown that NPS results significantly impact the business. In American Express, the management started to evaluate its service reps by their NPS results.
What happened when they applied these results to their business? 10-15% increase in customer spending and 4-5 times higher brand retention.
Translated to our cupcake business, your customer will likely go for a fancier cupcake party. Also, more than two people will contact you the next time they think of cupcakes.
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#2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer Satisfaction Score, or CSAT, is a widely-employed customer satisfaction metric. CSAT is used to rate the overall satisfaction with the product or services received by a customer.
Unlike an NPS, customers have to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5. Each number corresponds to a specific level of satisfaction, with low numbers indicating low satisfaction and high numbers indicating high satisfaction.
When we can have text conversations, even an entire movie made of emojis, how can surveys be left behind? Lately, emojis have also been used to improve the level of interaction, especially in B2C interactions.
When Is CSAT Useful?
CSAT helps you understand how happy customers are with a particular action or aspect of your products. In the case of our cupcake business, this could be the first sitting for new customers.
To give an example, consider an average CSAT of 3. Customers provided the score after they were asked to rank their satisfaction with a recent interaction with your service representative, who took the brief of what kind of cupcakes they want.
Such a low score would indicate that most customers are getting excellent service, but there is at least something your team isn’t getting right.
CSAT also measures your customers’ satisfaction with your post-purchase service.
You can measure CSAT by seeking customer feedback whenever they interact with your business. You can do this via forms, pop-ups, live chat, or online surveys. Pop into SurveySparrow’s customer satisfaction survey templates and tools and customize them to fit your business.
You can have a standard rating scale and a few questions in these surveys. When you maintain the questions over some time, it will help you identify improvement areas and prioritize enhancements.
While customer service satisfaction does not give you a wholesome picture, it helps find the most asked queries and concerns.
#3. Customer Effort Score (CES)
What is CES?
CES reflects the effort a customer puts into interacting with your brand.
High effort suggests low satisfaction due to poor CX. This customer satisfaction metric is typically collected by asking customers a single question that asks them how difficult it is to perform a specific action.
These could include the ease of scheduling an appointment, making a purchase, leaving a review, or contacting the customer support staff.
How Do You Measure CES?
CES surveys measure the ease or difficulty of brand interactions, such as customer support or purchasing. These are usually on a numeric scale from 0–5, where 0 represents something difficult, and 5 represents something easy.
When Is CES Useful?
CES surveys highlight areas of poor CX so that you can focus on improvements. To give an example, consider an average CES of 2 in response to a question about your tasting session.
This would indicate that customers found the tasting session confusing or lacking the variety they were looking for. Or, it may suggest that this is a hurdle to customer retention.
The primary benefit of the CES survey is the very focused nature of the question.
You get a clear picture of a particular aspect of your customer experience process that may need improvement. In other words, having a tasting experience or providing unique flavors can improve the customer experience.
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#4. Churn Rate
What Is Churn Rate?
In simple words, the Churn Rate reflects how many customers you lose over time.
How Do You Measure Churn Rate?
As we said earlier, NPS can measure Churn Rate.
There is also a simple formula: The number of customers at the beginning of the month minus the number of customers at the end of the month, divided by the number of customers at the beginning.
When Is Churn Rate Useful?
Churn rate gives a direct insight into your Customer Experience and satisfaction. If both are high, churn should be low.
To give an example, consider your bakery. Say you had 1000 customers at the beginning of the month and 800 at the end of the month. The churn rate would be 1000–800/1000 = 20 percent.
Now that you know that 20 percent of your existing customers leave every month, you can tell something wrong. Then, you can improve customer satisfaction and cut those losses.
#5. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
What is CAC?
CAC is another customer satisfaction metric that you should consider. It tells you how much it costs to gain new customers. Primarily used in sales and marketing, it can also be crucial for customer satisfaction.
How to measure CAC?
To calculate CAC, divide all of the marketing expenses by the number of customers gained in a particular period. It goes without saying that if the costs are too high, maybe you need to revisit your marketing strategy and customer satisfaction factors and see what needs to be changed.
When is CAC valid?
It is one of the main KPIs analyzed while the company is scaling up. It is used for A/B tests of acquisition channels and is also valuable for Customer Segmentation.
Sometimes, it doesn’t take a lot to change some details, which can affect the whole experience. It will eventually decrease acquisition costs and keep customers loyal and happy.
#6. First Response Time (FRT)
The first response time, or first reply time, is the time between when a customer initiates a conversation and when a customer support team gives an initial response.
Time is a premium. So, it goes a long way in creating an impression about the efficiency of the customer support team – this is also one reason why chatbots are preferred. Short response times can lead to greater customer satisfaction.
“At Geckoboard, we have found that timeliness and speed has a direct correlation with satisfaction”.
Luis Hernandez, VP of customer success at Geckoboard
Training your customer support properly can keep First Response Time optimal. According to Zendesk, 12 hours is an excellent first response time for email, two hours or less for social media, and an hour or less for live chat.
How to Calculate First Response Time
The most straightforward formula to calculate is the sum of first response times/Number of conversations = Average first response time
FRT can reveal two crucial insights:
- How fast can you address customer issues? Along the same lines, you can infer if you need to train/retrain, hire, or resize the customer support team.
- Set realistic timelines to resolve customer issues. You don’t want to commit to having problems resolved within 30 min if it takes an average of 2 hours to address them.
#7. Call Wait Time
This measures the time customers expect to be actively engaged with your employees but are “on hold” or otherwise disengaged. Simply put, it is the time in minutes your customer will hear the “Please hold while we connect your call” message.
Call wait time occurs at the beginning of the support interaction (while waiting in the queue to connect with someone) or during the interaction as the support, agent goes off to research something or the call gets transferred. Excessive call wait time can cause customer frustration.
Frustrated customers need to be pacified to avoid an agitated tone in the interaction. Otherwise, it will lead to a poor perception of the support process.
Call wait time applies to more than just the phone call. Digital engagement – chat, email, web – gets counted in the process, too. So is the time spent waiting in line for in-person support at your store.
#8. Customer Reviews
All these numbers that we have discussed come from the business end. Today, you can have the most satisfied customers on paper.
But reviews from customers can be game-changers. One day, you were a small bakery with a little over 20 customers a day. One fabulous review, one lip-smacking video by a delighted customer, and you would need staff to manage the long queues outside your store.
So be mindful of how your brand is discussed online.
Ensure you have positive reviews and recommendations online on websites, social media, or portals that your potential customers may visit. Encourage your existing customers to review you on Google, Facebook, Amazon, or other such avenues.
According to a recent study, over 90% of buyers value product reviews over product descriptions.
Since customer reviews are not entirely in your control, it may be tempting to shut down a review with paid reviews. But that’s not the way to go with social media.
Firmly but politely, try to address the issue. This approach will tell prospective customers that their problems will be addressed even if they have a problem. The importance of reviews cannot be overstated.
Wrapping Up
Keeping your clients happy is one of the most crucial factors in maintaining a successful business. The benefits are immeasurable, but to collect them, you have to manage your customer’s feedback.
When working with customer satisfaction metrics, it is elementary to develop tunnel vision. Seeing your NPS and CSAT scores improve even by a little is very gratifying — it’s like getting a level-up when playing an MMO.
But you shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees.
Your top priority has to be improving the business, not the customer satisfaction metrics. It’s challenging but not impossible. Tailor the metrics you need according to your business.
By evaluating multiple points along your CX journey, you can make more informed business decisions and take note of the effectiveness of these changes as your business develops.
The better you’re analyzing and optimizing, the more impressive it will be for your customer service. Therefore, you’ll be able to provide a better overall customer experience.
