“It takes months to find a customer… seconds to lose one” – Vince Lombardi

As you begin discovering newer ways of improving your overall customer satisfaction, you’ll discover only a few tangible methods of measuring CSAT scores that are capable of providing near-perfect data and insights.

Your competition and customers are well aware of the value of high NPS (Net Promoter Score) metrics and are constantly upping their game. To create happy customers, you need to start by acknowledging that every customer is an individual with unique wants, needs and preferences. This acceptance is essential, considering that expectations for personalized experiences increased from 4% in 2013 to 88% in 2020.

“Unless you have 100% customer satisfaction, you must improve” – Horst Schulze.

When done right, improving your customer satisfaction practices can directly lead to higher revenues. We have listed some of the most effective methods for measuring customer satisfaction:

Customer feedback through Surveys

Asking for customers’ feedback proactively, without interrupting their experience, is a great way to get on-ground insights as opposed to making assumptions. There are different kinds of surveys that you can try out:

In-App Surveys: These are great for capturing customer feedback without having them leave the application they are using. In-app surveys work well to capture feedback while your customer engages with your product and are attentive. Highly versatile, the trick lies in asking the right questions at the right time.

Post-Call Surveys: A Post Call Survey is typically a list of questions presented to the customer at the end of a call to gather feedback. The data collected can be utilized to improve your business. Surveys may need to go through a couple of iterations before you discover the most ideal set of questions. However, it is essential to remember that this is a constant process that requires continuous modifications.

Email Surveys: This is in long form and best used for long-term customers who are more likely to engage and respond to inbound emails. You can send the survey instrument, i.e., a list of questions or a link to the questions, and collect data to derive actionable insights.

Voluntary Feedback: This is when customers are proactive and give feedback voluntarily. It can be collected via third-party platforms like social media posts, website reviews and comments. This inflow of feedback must be gathered, categorized, and interpreted to improve your business strategies.

As you can see, there are many ways of gathering customer feedback through surveys. With so many types of surveys available, it may get confusing for you to select the right one at the right time. Of all the ones listed here, you may decide to choose one or multiple. It all depends on your goals. Surveys are used to understand your customers better to deliver what they want and make smarter decisions for your brand. Choosing which works best to help you meet your goals would be wise. The only thing that matters is gathering actionable insights on your customer satisfaction performance.

As you can imagine, manually processing large amounts of data that are flowing in from these surveys can be overwhelming. Thanks to certain AI analytics tools that are available in the market today, it is unnecessary to do this manually. Therefore, you may want to consider an intelligent way to automate this process.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

This is a pretty straightforward method to understand your customers. To illustrate, the question ‘On a scale of 1-10, how happy are you with our product?’ will give you a range of numbers that can help you interpret and determine where you stand as a brand. Lower scores reflect dissatisfaction and higher scores indicate satisfaction. In some cases, emojis replace numbers to make them more user-friendly. The aggregated data helps you understand what exactly triggers customer satisfaction upticks.

Net Promoter Score (NPS):

As covered in our previous blog on important call centre metrics to measure your customer service, the Net Promoter Score system lets you know the quality of the customer’s overall relationship with your brand/business. This is different from your CSAT scores, which focus on short-term and specific goals like improving a product or the ease with which a customer completes a purchase. Also straightforward, the NPS is more of a relationship study metric, whereas the CSAT is a transactional study metric. NPS exists in the form of short and easy surveys that can be sent at any point across the customer lifecycle through different channels such as email, text, web messages, etc.

Customer Effort Score (CES):

The CES focuses on another aspect altogether, i.e., the total effort a customer has to put in to resolve an issue. The right time to do a CES survey is quite similar to CSAT, where you send it out right after the customer interaction is complete. CES makes sense because it gives timely feedback and helps avoid negative feedback. We all know how one negative feedback can cause significant and long-term damage. This survey format is a quick and one-time way to understand customer friction and reduce the time to resolve queries.

Web-Analytics:

Gone are the days of retrieving incoherent numbers like unique visitors and page views. Instead, the scope of web analytics has turned broader and deeper. We now have advanced analytics models that delve deeper into analyzing user behaviour and user acceptance. The collated data is then analyzed to make the user experience more refined and personalized. This takes the guesswork out of the equation and drills to the core when detecting what caused specific instances of customer dissatisfaction. The data is represented in the form of tables, charts and graphs.

Social Media Metrics:

This article cannot end without mentioning social media — the place where customers discover, interact and even purchase from brands today. Social media is full of insights if you know where and how to look for them. Zillions of people interact and share their experiences, which emerge as powerhouses of focused customer insights. No matter what you’re tracking, there is at least one social media metric that will help you find answers.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffet.

With all the above methods of measuring customer satisfaction, let’s not misguide ourselves into thinking that customers will willingly fill in surveys and respond to other feedback mechanisms at any given instance. They might do it or choose not to do it at all. That’s one reason why many companies ask for feedback once the customer completes their desired action. The answer lies in asking for feedback at the most opportune moment and in the right format. Every step across the customer journey indicates a specific intention, and that’s the hook you need to seek out.