Importance of Customer Satisfaction

Happy customers are what most SaaS companies strive to achieve, but many fail. The truth is, with the competition high, the consumers call the shots of who to buy from, so you can’t afford to lose a customer that you may have spent a lot of marketing dollars to acquire. 

Dissatisfied customers sometimes churn without telling the company why, making it crucial for businesses to measure customer satisfaction. Unhappy customers normally tell nine to fifteen people about their poor experience with your brand. They are likely to write negative reviews online about it for all to see, which could be detrimental to your business.

Satisfied customers become loyal to your business and a great marketing asset as brand advocates who do a significant amount of marketing for your company for free. 

Here are some facts to back up the claims:

• Repeat customers typically spend sixty-seven percent more than first-time customers 
• Eighty percent of your future revenue may solely come from existing customers. 

If you want to grow your business and lead your industry, you must focus on customer satisfaction. Keep in mind, acquiring a new customer could cost five to twenty-five times more than retaining an existing one, making focusing on keeping your customers satisfied and coming back extremely important for a business’s success. 

Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a critical metric to understand how your customers feel about your products or services. The way you grow happiness and increase retention will be unique to your business but measuring satisfaction is the same. 

To measure satisfaction, you’ll need to connect with your customers to get their feedback. Here are some ways to measure customer satisfaction:

Email Surveys

Email surveys are effective because you can get a more in-depth answer, making it an excellent way to measure customer satisfaction accurately and determine the reason for their ratings.

In-App or Website Surveys

Sending surveys in-app or on your website gets you the highest response rate. Customers can give their feedback while they engage with your company or at the end of interaction with your online chat representative. 

Adding a feedback bar on your website with two questions is a simple way to present the survey.

After-Service Surveys

After-service surveys are sent to the customer immediately following any service interaction, including email, live chat, or phone. It could be a simple “How would you rate the service you received?” or “Are you satisfied with the service you received?”. 

When you ask immediately after service, it’s still fresh in their mind, so you’ll get an accurate rating. Asking for feedback after resolving an issue shows the customer that you genuinely care about how they feel and their level of satisfaction with your brand.

Customer Satisfaction Metrics

OK, the results are in. Is your score good or bad? Unfortunately, there’s no concrete good or bad CSAT number to measure against, but ideally, your team aims for customer satisfaction of 100%. 

If you are getting many low ratings, you could assume your process and service are a complete mess and need serious attention. After collecting the data for some time, you will see your average numbers and then set action plans and goals to improve total customer satisfaction.

Customer Satisfaction Score

The customer satisfaction score targets the customer with variations of a simple question. There’s not a standard way to ask your customer's satisfaction level. It could be a question like this: “How would you rate your overall satisfaction interacting with [our service department, sales representative, production team, brand]?” Asking your customers to use a one to five scales such as:

1. Very unsatisfied
2. Unsatisfied
3. Neutral
4. Satisfied
5. Very satisfied

To dig deeper and get a more clear understanding of the reason for the first rating, you could ask them to rate you on a score of one to five on the following:

1. Level of knowledge
2. Effective communication
3. Professionalism
4. Responsiveness
5. Understanding of the issue
6. Timely resolution
7. Effectiveness of the resolution

Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score was introduced because the CSAT does not provide a clear prediction of customer loyalty. This question is straightforward:

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend?”

• Promoters (score 9-10) are typically your most loyal and enthusiastic customers who will keep buying from you time and time again and refer others. Many of these become brand advocates and add to the success and growth of your company.
  
• Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied with your product or service but not overly happy and potentially vulnerable to competitors’ offerings.
  
• Detractors (score 0-6) are customers unhappy with your product or service and unlikely to buy from you again. These customers can damage your brand’s image with negative word-of-mouth and online reviews. 

Calculate your score by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters to determine your Net Promoter Score. The scores range from a low of -100 (if every customer that responded is a Detractor) to a high of 100 (if every customer that responded is a Promoter). So, the higher your score, the better.

Keep in mind; dissatisfied customers tend to respond to customer sentiment surveys or customer satisfaction surveys more often than satisfied ones. Getting zeros or low numbers isn’t the worst thing, but it points to areas that need improvement. And it’s an opportunity to try to win back an unhappy customer by fixing whatever went wrong. 

When you receive low scores, it’s critical to take action to fix any issues and save your brand’s image.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score is a different approach to measure customer satisfaction as it asks the customer about the ease or difficulty of your service. The question looks like this: “How hard did you have to work to get a [problem fixed/query answered/service rendered]?”

The scale typically goes:

1. it was super simple and easy
2. it was easy but not amazing
3. there were some difficulties, room for improvement
4. pretty difficult, don’t recommend 
5. it was a monster headache 

The lower your score, the better. The Customer Effort Score is a good indicator if they may churn unless you effort to save them. Of course, nobody likes to jump through hoops to solve issues in the buying process. Saving them time and effort helps add to a positive experience and increases customer loyalty.

Since the scale is close-ended, it’s helpful to add an answer box for the customer to add additional details of the reason for their rating. The feedback received allows you to pinpoint areas of your process or service which need improvement to satisfy your customers better.

Survey Best Practices

Getting the most accurate feedback from surveying your customers could be tricky while using the methods above. Here are some tips for pulling off effective survey campaigns:

• Keep your questions relevant to your ultimate goal of total customer loyalty.
• Keep it effortless, so they are more likely to complete it.
• Keep your questions short and to the point. 
• Don’t use leading questions.
• Keep your rating scales consistent and transparent. 

Indirect and Volunteered Feedback

We’ve gone over ways to reach out to your customers to get their feedback and gauge their happiness. However, there are also ways to measure customer satisfaction without directly involving your customers. 

Getting customer feedback directly from them is necessary to understand their level of happiness with your brand, but some alternative, less intrusive methods are also effective.

Volunteered Feedback

Rather than directly asking your customers what they think, volunteer feedback gives you feedback without prompting them. Volunteered feedback could be a dedicated email address that lets your customers know they can email to provide feedback on their experience. 

It’s critical to respond to every email that comes in to let your customers know you heard them, that you appreciate their feedback, and that you will fix any issues they presented. 

Acknowledging your customers makes them feel like you care and could win over an unhappy customer by doing so.

Customer Service Analytics

You can use your website traffic to get an idea of customer satisfaction. For example, how many times someone visits your site and how long they stay on each page. Keeping a close eye on pages that are solely for customers, keeping track of shares of your content, unsubscribe rates, and the bounce rate of your newsletters is also beneficial. 

You gain valuable insight into your customers’ habits when you closely monitor your website’s analytics.

Cover Every Channel

There are multiple channels to consider when measuring customer satisfaction. Every way your customer interacts with your company is an opportunity to get feedback. It’s important not to neglect channels like SMS and social media, which are extremely common ways people communicate today. 

Giving your customers the ability to contact your company in the method they prefer, even informally, makes them more comfortable and possibly more willing to provide feedback. Keeping track of your social media followers, shares, and likes on every platform will give you an idea of your customers’ loyalty and overall satisfaction with your brand.

Key Steps to Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Now that you have some options to measure customer satisfaction, it’s critical to approach this task correctly. Here are steps to follow to ensure your efforts go smoothly and effectively. 

Define Your Focus

Before you start the process of measuring customer satisfaction, you will want to set clear goals. Without a definite focus, the data you receive will not help you achieve your goals. When you start your process, you will receive a lot of data. When you have a clear plan and set goals, you can take action on the user data to receive optimum results.

Choose Your Customer Survey Metric

You may decide to use many metrics to measure customer satisfaction or just one. Either way, ensure the metrics you use are set up initially to be consistent and effective so you get the most out of your efforts.

Create Your Surveys

Creating your surveys is an important step you should take your time with as it will determine your survey response rates and the critical data you need to measure customer satisfaction. 

Remember, you do not want your surveys to be long and complex. Keep them short and simple, asking only necessary questions that will give you the data you need to know where your business may be falling short. 

Review Data

You could plan to review the feedback as they come in or on a weekly or monthly basis. It’s vital to review the data received from all channels and methods used. The data gives you a clear understanding of the areas within your processes that need improvement to satisfy your customers and the areas performing extremely well. 

Create a Plan

Creating a plan to reach your customer satisfaction goals is essential. However, you can’t plan too soon as your actions should come from the feedback you gathered. Your plan may include improving your customer support systems, additional training, improving your website navigation, or streamlining or changing your processes.

Improving Customer Satisfaction 

You’re on your way to improving customer and customer acquisition reducing your churn rate if you’re using various metrics to track it. However, what you do with the data is what matters. Improving customer satisfaction translates to company growth and increased revenue. 

Here are a few tips for improving customer satisfaction:

Pay Attention to Problem Areas

With the data you receive from measuring customer satisfaction, you may find areas in your processes causing dissatisfaction. You must act quickly to fix the issues to ensure it doesn't keep happening. After you implement changes to handle problem areas, be sure to track the results to improve customer satisfaction. 

Remember, you can’t change what you don’t know, so tracking the results of the changes you made will help you see if it’s working or not. 

Focus On Customer Experience

The customers' experience with your brand matters and should be the top priority for everyone within your organization. The customer-first attitude starts from the top and then is adopted from all employees when they know what’s expected. 

Even if you have to go out of your way at times to make a customer happy, do it as it will pay off in the long run. Thanking customers for their business, showing them you care and want to hear their feedback, going above and beyond to ensure their experience with your brand is a positive one goes a long way for a consumer. 

In fact, consumers are willing to pay more to receive better service, so it's a win-win. 

Invest in Your Staff

Employees are the backbone of an organization. They add to the success of your business or add to the failure of it. Investing in your employees means investing in your business’s success. 

When your employees feel valued, they are motivated to do their best and put the customer’s needs first while working towards the organization’s goals. 

When your company culture is upbeat, it for sure will be felt by your customers. The truth is, employee satisfaction will add to total customer satisfaction. 

The Takeaway

There’s not just one foolproof way to measure customer satisfaction to ensure your customers are happy. To get the most accurate data, you need to use a few metrics across multiple channels. 

However, the effort pays off as the findings could bring to light issues with your products, services, or processes that are falling short. It’s vital to immediately address any issues or concerns for a completely smooth and positive customer experience moving forward. 

With a bit of fine-tuning and elbow grease, you will see the needle move in the right direction to an awesome customer experience every time with happy and satisfied customers. 

Of course, this is not a one-time task; it should be a consistent and standard process for your organization. Remember, just one unhappy customer gives your brand a bad rap with negative word of mouth and online reviews. 

Whereas a happy and satisfied customer is loyal, willing to spend more for your great service, and becomes a brand advocate referring others to you. In a nutshell, focus on customer satisfaction, and your business grows organically. 

Are you ready to streamline your service to ensure your customers are happy and satisfied? If so, contact Awesome CX today, and we’ll show you how awesome we are! 

Sources:

The Secret Ratio That Proves Why Customer Reviews Are So Important

How To Make More Money Without Making More Sales

The Value of Keeping the Right Customers