What is a customer satisfaction survey?
In the broad sense, customer satisfaction is a vital HR metric that gauges the level of satisfaction & happiness a customer has with a product they used, the services they received, and the experience they had with a brand. Without measuring customer satisfaction, it is impossible to determine if your customers are happy with you and, importantly, if your product & services are at par with industry standards. That’s where a customer satisfaction survey comes in.
Because let’s face it. If you treat your customers right, they come back again. One bad experience, and they’ll not think twice to abandon your brand. In fact, more than ninety percent of customers will never make a recurring purchase after a bad experience. Which brings us to the point that customer satisfaction is the lifeline to achieve two important things:
- Keep your customers happy & loyal.
- Improve your brand as a whole- products, services, and experience.
What are the best ways to measure customer satisfaction? There are various methodologies to gauge customer satisfaction, and one of the popular and best methods is online surveys. Customer satisfaction surveys, or CSAT, allow you to draft up pertinent questions you wish to get answers to and collect the data from your customers. Analyze the data to know the pulse of your customers, and you can take it from there to make amends and immediate improvements for your service, product, and any aspect related to your brand.
Types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys
You can broadly classify customer satisfaction surveys into the following three categories:
- Net Promoter Score® (NPS)
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
Each of these customer satisfaction surveys measures something different, helping you use the appropriate one based on your survey objective and the touchpoint you place the survey at.
Net Promoter Score
Almost every company out there, big or small, employs NPS to gauge customer satisfaction. It is a straightforward approach that involves asking the customers the likelihood of them recommending that brand to a friend or family on a rating scale of 0-10 NPS measures customer satisfaction and, more precisely, customer loyalty in-depth. The audience is categorized into various groups based on the score they give as :
Promoters (9 or 10): These are your happy customers who will tell others about you.
Passives (7 or 8): They’re okay with your service but aren’t excited about it.
Detractors (0 to 6): These customers are not satisfied and might not say good things about your business.
To find your NPS, you subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. This number shows how well you’re doing in keeping your customers happy and loyal. You can even find free online calculators to help you figure out your NPS.
What You Should Consider Using NPS
- Identify Loyal Customers: By distinguishing promoters, NPS helps identify your brand’s loyal customer base.
- Quick Insight into Customer Experience: NPS offers a rapid assessment of where your customer experience stands.
- Benchmarking Opportunity: Comparing your NPS score with competitors provides valuable insights into your market standing.
- Transform Customers into Brand Advocates: Recognizing and nurturing promoters can convert them into vocal advocates for your brand.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT is all about asking customers how satisfied they are with your product or service. It’s a quick way to see if you’re meeting their needs and expectations. You usually ask a simple question like, “How satisfied are you with our service?” Customers then give a rating, often on a scale from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10.
What You Should Consider Using CSAT
- Immediate Feedback: CSAT gives you a snapshot of how customers feel right after they interact with your service or product.
- Spot Problems Quickly: If you see low scores, you know there’s something you need to fix fast.
- Measure Changes: When you make changes in your service or product, CSAT can show you how these affect customer satisfaction.
- Easy to Understand: It’s a simple score, so it’s easy for everyone in your business to understand and use.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES helps you understand how easy it is for your customers to do something with your product or service. It’s about finding out if your customers can get what they need without much hassle. For example, you might ask, “How easy was it to solve your problem with us today?” Customers usually answer on a scale like ‘Very Easy’ to ‘Very Hard’.
What You Should Consider Using CES
- Ease of Experience: CES tells you how simple or complicated it is for customers to interact with your business.
- Identify Pain Points: High effort scores mean something is making it hard for customers, and you need to fix it.
- Improve Customer Loyalty: Customers are more likely to stay with you if they find your service easy to use.
- Streamline Processes: It shows you where you can make things smoother and more efficient for your customers.
Tips for Crafting Stellar Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Creating a CSAT survey is simple, but crafting a customer satisfaction survey that’s winning needs some thought too. That’s precisely why we have rounded in on these proven tips to make your CSAT surveys hit the ball right out of the park.
Converse, Don’t Interrogate
Would you like to be interrogated? Absolutely not. The same goes for your customers. Throwing a whole stack of “feedback” questions that make your respondents hit the radio button (and the snooze button) is never going to fetch you any positive results. Instead, engage them in a conversation. Ask them why they love your brand, what can be improved, and more. When you ask in earnest, they respond in earnest. So keep in mind that conversational CSAT surveys are the way to go!
Keep in short & relevant
It is effortless to get carried away and throw a bunch of questions at your customers to gain lots of data. Wish to know why it doesn’t work? When you don’t have a specific area in mind, you induce survey fatigue by making your surveys unnecessarily long. Most customers shy away from taking surveys; then you can realize the importance of keeping it precise and short. Set a goal in mind, and stick to questions surrounding that objective. This is precisely why NPS surveys are ultra-popular.
Avoid Leading/ Double-barreled Questions
“The service we provide is excellent, isn’t it?” is an example of a leading question. You are forcing your respondents to align their thoughts along the direction you hope to get answers for. Double-barreled questions essentially handcuff the respondents. Now look at this question-“What do you think about the product and customer support.” The customer might have conflicting opinions about the two factors, and including them in one question is a bad idea. So opt for diverse question types like MCQ, Opinion scales, star rating, etc.
Share, Share, and Share
If you want your CSAT surveys to taste success, you need to share them generously. Don’t stick to a single channel or two. Explore multiple options to get higher visibility & reach. This will dramatically increase your survey completion rates. Whether email surveys, social media, web links, embedding on a website, or SMS sharing, share your customer satisfaction surveys generously.
Identify the Nature of the Customer Pool
Unless you ask your customers how happy or unhappy they are, you will never know what they feel about your brand. Regularly deploying customer satisfaction surveys help to tap crucial data at various touch-points and analyzing the data will help you gain rich insights. You can use these insights to turn things around for your product.
Increase Retention, Reduce Churn
When you measure customer satisfaction, you can bridge the gap between what your customers expect and what you provide. As you meet or exceed customer expectation, it results in increased retention and reduced churn rates. Happy customers refer and bring new customers. Studies show delighted customers are your number 1 source of recruiting new customers and word-of-mouth publicity is the best marketing your brand can get.
Analyze, Identify, Act
Without measuring customer satisfaction, it’s difficult to identify the means to better your brand to provide the best customer experience. You must first know The type of customer pool you have. If you have unsatisfied customers, it’s a red alert to take immediate action. You can align your support and customer success team to work proactively to enrich the customer satisfaction & experience.
When Should You Send Customer Satisfaction Surveys?
The time to send your CSAT surveys is yet another parameter that needs to be considered. The time you ask determines the quality of the data you receive. The most common mistake companies make is asking too late.
So, when’s the best time to send CSAT surveys? Is it immediately after an interaction? Or should you send it out at the end of the purchase? Or rather, at different phases of repeating the customer lifecycle
Asking immediately after an interaction will help you get crisp data since the experience is fresh in the customer’s mind. Also, customers tend to be brutally honest when you ask about the experience after interacting with a brand. Asking for customer satisfaction after purchase will help you understand their overall experience with your brand at different touch-points. This will help you measure customer loyalty, brand affinity, satisfaction & happiness. Employing customer satisfaction surveys at different points of the lifecycle will help you gather how well the various departments of your company are functioning.
So naturally, you might be left wondering, is there any such thing as a not-so-perfect time to send out a survey? If yes, then when’s the WRONG time to send surveys? We have the answer. Well, it’s waiting until something has gone wrong. Instead, ask for customer feedback when there’s a chance to make an impact out of it.
Building CSAT Surveys with SurveySparrow
SurveySparrow’s customer satisfaction survey platform helps you build conversational CSAT surveys that fetch you over a whopping 40% increase in survey completion rates. So, how can SurveySparrow help you create stunning CSAT surveys?
World’s First Dual-UI Platform
SurveySparrow’s customer satisfaction survey platform is the world’s first Multi-UI tool that offers conversational forms and chat-like surveys. Choose the end-user view of your choice and send out sleek surveys!
Conditional Logic Branching
Raise only the relevant questions to your audience and hide the rest with the display logic & skip logic features of SurveySparrow. Conditional logic branching allows posing questions based on the respondent’s previous answers. In this manner, avoid asking a vegan their favorite cheese.
Diverse Question Types
SurveySparrow’s customer satisfaction platform has a bag of various question types to suit multiple purposes. When you opt for open-ended questions, you can expect a more significant number of responses and quality data. What you ask is equally important as the way you ask.
Reporting Module
SurveySparrow’s customer satisfaction survey platform has a robust reporting and analysis system that renders detailed reports to give you profound insights. Gain new perspectives and take the required course of action to enrich your brand.
Templates Collection
SurveySparrow holds a collection of the most sought-after templates prepared by experts after thorough research. Be it market research, customer pulse, or employee feedback, we have it all for you. This helps you get started with your surveys the moment you sign up. Use it as it is or give it your spin to fit your needs.
The right time to start measuring customer satisfaction is today. So, employ CSAT surveys to your customers and find out how happy they are!
Happy Surveying!
