Customer behavior and expectations are the two leading indicators for any business aiming towards customer centricity. The technology enabled customers of today are smart enough to choose the best possible services available to them. A deal or an offer is always a one-time thing that cannot fulfil all the parameters of customer satisfaction. According to a McKinsey study, “70% of buying experiences are based on how the customers feel they are being treated.” Hence, once customers defect to competition, chances of them coming back are negligible.
To counter customer defection and customer churn, it is important to measure customer satisfaction and work on the factors that directly affect customer euphoria. Your customers taking the time to write an email about how happy they are to receive your services clearly shows the superior level of customer satisfaction that your business is able to deliver. The book of a satisfied customer can only begin after a business is able to measure their customer service experiences.
Measure customer satisfaction and work on the factors that directly affect customer euphoria.
Let us have a close look at some of the leading metrics that can help you record customer satisfaction and boost your organization’s journey towards delivering great CX memories:
Number 1: Use Customer Surveys
To get accurate feedback and actionable items for customer satisfaction, survey your customers soon after the utilization of the service. There are different ways by which an organization can conduct customer surveys:
- In-app surveys
- Online surveys
- In-store surveys
- Feedback forms
- Offline surveys over the phone or SMS.
By integrating a contact center technology with a feedback tool, organizations can record surveys that ask customers to rate their services. Remember that your customers are very busy, and most of them hesitate to fill in surveys as it takes their precious time. To counter this, your surveys should be crisp and specific.
Number 2: Measure Customer Satisfaction Score
The Customer satisfaction score measures the short-term happiness of your customers. The scale typically ranges from highly unsatisfied to highly satisfied:
- Highly unsatisfied
- Unsatisfied
- Neutral
- Satisfied
- Highly satisfied
The above scale asks the customers to rate the service received from 1–5, where 1 represents customers who are highly unsatisfied and 5 represents customers who are highly satisfied. Some businesses increase the scale to 7 or even 10 to record more accurate results from their customers. Once the score is collected from the desired number of customers, the average number received is the CSAT score you can relate to. A higher CSAT score means higher customer satisfaction. But it has a limitation, as it only measures the recent transaction with the business. To measure the wider relationship let's drill down further.
Number 3: Measure Net Promoter Score
Imagine a situation where your customers are satisfied with your offerings but are not ready to recommend your business to friends. Such a situation arises when they are not sure of your longevity to keep them happy. To measure results and track customer loyalty, Net Promoter Score (NPS) was introduced. NPS measures the probability of a customer referring your business to someone. Thus it does not measure the short-term happiness as the customer is bound to think about the service provided to them over a time period and refer to a friend only in case of consistency. Thus, a simple question under NPS would look like:
Will you recommend us to your friends?
- 0–6 (Not a chance) - detractors
- 7–8 (Maybe)
- 9–10 (Very Likely) - promoters
To calculate NPS, just subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
A high percentage means that your customers have developed a sense of loyalty towards your brand and are ready to take you places, but a low percentage would mean that your customers believe you lack consistency to keep them happy.
Number 4: Track Customer Effort Score
The Customer Effort Score (CES) tells a different side of the story, where a customer is questioned about the amount of effort they have to invest in order to interact with the company and get their issues resolved. CES has two versions where certain businesses ask ”the personal effort put in by the customers” and others asking ”if the organization has made it easy for the customers to interact with the business.” While the first question can again take the rating level ranging from 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort), obviously 1 being the preferred rating. The second question just asks the customers if they agree or disagree with the statement. This makes it easy for the businesses to understand how well their customer service department is performing and where they stand in the race of customer satisfaction.
Number 5: Check Your Social Media Pages
Customers in recent years have found a new avenue to complain about services or products. Rather than complaining through customer service departments, they mention their issues on social media and discuss with the influencers so that the world is aware of the pros and cons of using a particular offering. With the potential of social media to reach millions of people within seconds, businesses should regularly monitor their brand over social media. Facebook and Twitter are the two most relevant platforms that a business should track. But for certain service related organizations, it is equally important to track forums and websites such as Quora, Yelp, Reddit, etc. There are so many tools available in the market that can help you track how your brand is performing on social media. The simplest result would look like:
- Positive Sentiments - 40%
- Negative Sentiments - 15%
- Neutral Sentiments - 45%
Such results explain where you are going wrong in terms of customer satisfaction. The higher the positive/negative sentiment ratios, the higher are the chances of incredible customer satisfaction.
Do you believe your customers love you? I know they surely do, but track it now to ensure they keep coming back!
Shaista Haque is a marketing enthusiast, formerly with
Ameyo
. She is extremely passionate about B2B marketing strategies for products that harness the web and social media as customer channels. Armed with this information, she writes about the latest industry technologies and how those technologies benefit organizations from small scale to global enterprises. Connect with Shaista on
Twitter
and
LinkedIn
.