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7 Key Ways to Measure Customer Satisfaction [Tried and Tested]

Last Updated: March 2024

Customer satisfaction – One of the key factors that contribute to customer retention.

As per research, 70% of companies say it’s cheaper to retain a customer than acquire one. So, making sure that your customers are satisfied and retained is better than spending your hard-earned money to acquire new ones.

But as customer satisfaction is highly erratic and a composite of many different aspects, it constantly keeps changing its shades.

This makes it crucial for you to constantly measure your customers’ satisfaction.

But how to measure customer satisfaction? This post will throw light on:

Let’s brainstorm a little and just take a better glance at WHY you should put a bounty on it.

Why is it important to measure customer satisfaction?

It is essential to measure customer satisfaction because,

  • Customer Retention: It indicates the loyalty of your customers and in turn, makes you see your status on customer retention.
  • Free ambassadors: It shows how many customers are inexplicably becoming your brand advocates who can levitate the mighty tool called word-of-mouth, which is a no-cost strategy.
  • Prediction is possible: It helps you to get a better view of the expectations of your customers making it completely possible for you to predict the next move of each of your customers.
  • Plots for plans: It also aids you in devising constructive plans to make your business flourish further by highlighting the areas you should be concerned about based on your customers’ feedback.

Some embellishments to take home: 

  • Companies which manage to increase their customer satisfaction by 20% are likely to see a 10 – 15% increase in revenue.
  • Customers will spend up to 40% more with companies that can achieve their satisfaction through awesome services.
  • It’s too crucial to measure customer satisfaction to save yourself from risking 9.5% of your revenue by providing constant bad customer experiences (unknowingly).

So measuring customer satisfaction should be an important part of your business processes.

8 metrics to measure customer satisfaction

#1 Online Surveys:

When-and-How-to-Ask-Customers-for-Feedback

Yup! The good ol’ method – Surveys.

Being a seed for the methods of getting feedback, online surveying is a method that still stands. Even a child knows that a set of questions and suggestions form a survey. And if it is being circulated via the internet, then it’s an online survey (as simple as that).

As per studies, nearly 87% of customers like to be surveyed if businesses follow through with the suggestions made or if their suggestions make a difference.

You can design your own survey by framing the questions that, according to you, are important to get a proper view of your customers’ satisfaction. 

Surveys can be personalized by taking up impressive interfaces. You can also customize your surveys as unique as your brands. Conducting a customer satisfaction survey is a good way to start measuring where you stand in terms of customer loyalty.

Benefits of Online Surveys:

  • High response rate: As per studies, internal surveys will have a 30 to 40 percent response rate on average, and external surveys have a 10 to 15 percent response rate. In fact, response rates can easily reach 85 percent or higher when the survey is well crafted.
  • Quick method: These surveys, mostly pop-ups, are the questions aiming to reap feedback from the customers which usually take a minute or two of their time. Hence, they are time-saving (isn’t it something that your customers are attracted to? the shortest and fastest way?)
  • Cost-effective: These online questionnaires are much cheaper and more advanced than the traditional methods. Your customers would love to give happy feedback when the survey itself has got a  cool enough style to hook them up without nudging or draining them to do so.
  • High accuracy: Online surveys are one of the very few methods which are more accurate, quicker to analyze, easier to use (for both hosts and the customers), more honest, and selective.
  • Real-time results: You will, without any interruptions, get real-time results in no time.

Tip: You can design your own surveys faster and easier with the help of user-friendly and advanced survey software like SmartSurvey at a snap!

Note: Make sure that your survey is not too long. As per a study, 52% of respondents say they won’t spend more than three minutes on a survey and by the 20-minute mark, the quality of data and attention of respondents greatly diminish.

#2 Churn Rate

Customer churn rate is the calculation of the number of customers who are preferably no longer your customers.

 As a business pro, you should know that your customers are the ones who believe in free will and switch loyalties (if you make a mistake), as quickly as lightning. 

Reportedly, some experts suggest that customer retention needs a sharp focus shift from gaining new customers as losing a loyal customer costs more than acquiring a new one.

A high churn means a high number of customers have decided to no longer indulge in purchases with you. It then becomes a roadblock to a fast-growing business firm and a retention strategy should be in effect.

Predicting the customer churn is too important a step to prevent rather than mourn the churn. Do you know why?

Because this is exactly where you can point out the soon-to-churn customers and save them from becoming extinct from your book of business.

How do you calculate the churn rate?

In simple terms, customer churn rate is the number of customers you have lost divided by the total number of customers. You should be considering the frequency of your customers’ purchases to categorize them accordingly. That is,

[box type=”shadow”] Customer churn rate = No. of customers lost / total number of customers (period) x 100[/box]

Apart from this, there are two potent methods you should know about to track and analyze customer churn. Here we go!

Number 1: Cohort Report

It analyses units of your customers and their churn rate over time. To put it precisely, a cohort is a unit or a segment (broken down from a large data set) of customers who purchased from your brand in a certain time frame, a month’s time is recommended.

Advantage: The cohort analysis produces clean numbers, not influenced by new customer acquisition and the second major perk is that it helps you identify a pattern in the customer churn.

Number 2: Churn by behavior

It’s all about determining the churn by closely observing the customer behaviors in the long chain of their purchases with you since churning doesn’t happen all of a sudden but happens at the climax part of an entire journey. It renders you a chance to optimize the customer service by analyzing their sentiments and in turn offering incentives to hook up the customers who are hanging at the precipice. 

#3 Social Media

customer-service-on-social-media

Social media being the largest behemoth in promoting businesses, it also plays a  vital role in derision of the same if the time and opportunity coincide.

 This century knows how much power social media tends to yield from the connections it can knot up across the globe as easily as a feather. 

And as it is an era that looks to push the limits of social media, you need to see the impact it can have on your customers (especially when you get to sail at the negative side of the feedback shores) and how in a flash it can indicate a customer trailing off!

How Social Media is a Good Way to Measure Customer Satisfaction: 

  • Social media, which can be called a goldmine of customer feedback, is completely capable of making your journey reaching your customers’ core as smooth as traveling in a metro.
  •  In a world where there are 4.55 billion people actively indulging themselves in using social media (not to mention the addicts), imagine how much of a help it will be when it comes to mustering feedback. 
  •  Social media monitoring makes everything plausible when it disguises itself as a tool for measuring your customer feedback. Making the best use of the top-ranking networks like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and Instagram can take you to the top in measuring customer satisfaction.
  • There are certain tools like the Facebook post-auto-reply bot that leverages the customers who already are the bricks of your business palace. 
  • This treasury has got a pretty good number of easter eggs such as social media contests, Instagram stories, autoresponders, conversational chatbots, and many more through which you can read your customer satisfaction as profoundly as you want.

Tip: Adopt personalization while interacting with your customers. As per research, personalization based on purchase history, user preferences and other relevant information that is usually found in the CRM system have a major impact on ROI. Companies that use personalization increase their turnover by an average of 14%. But still, only 5 percent of companies personalize extensively.

#4 Net Promoter Score

Net promoter score or NPS takes into account the readiness of their customers to recommend a brand to their peers.

It adorns a key question that demands an answer on a scale of 1-10.

For example: How likely is it that you would recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?

Once done with the survey, you need to segregate your respondents under three categories:

  • Promoters (score 9-10) are the customers who can be labeled as ‘loyal enthusiasts’ who will never in their lives give up on your brand, fuel your growth, and are your brand advocates reaped out of your sweat.
  • Passives (score 7-8) are the ones who are at the risk of switching loyalties anytime. Of course, they are your customers but they aren’t as enthusiastic as the former in promoting your brand. These stay open to suggestions!
  • Detractors (score 0-6) are the unsatisfied customers who can mar your reputation and stunt your brand’s growth through their word-of-mouth drenched in unhappiness.

How to calculate the NPS?

Net-Promoter-Score-(NPS)

Calculating NPS is simple. All you need to do is subtract the detractors from the promoters to arrive at your NPS score.

So, Net Promoter Score = (% of Promoters) – (% of Detractors)

For example, you’d have an NPS of 5%, if there were 25% Promoters and 20% Detractors with the rest being Passives. However, NPS scores can change rapidly over a period of time and multiple passes may be required.

#5 Customer Effort Score (CES)

Well, as the name suggests, this metric is used to measure the effort your customers have to invest to reach out to you.

Customer Effort Score or CES also becomes an indicator of customer loyalty as a good number of them are ready to switch loyalties if they find it (comparatively) difficult to get a hold of the marketers.

How to calculate Customer Effort Score?

This metric usually goes with the scale ranging from too easy to too difficult posing only one question on the lines of: How easy was it for you to reach us?

Customer-Effort-Score-(CES)

CES can be calculated by dividing the total number of responses by the number of yes responses.

Therefore, CES = (Total number of Yes responses X 100)/All responses

Here’s what CES scores mean:

  • 0-3 Needs Improvement
  • 4-5 Meets Customer Expectations
  • 6-7 Exceeds Customer Expectations

It is important to read through the comments left by customers to put the CES scores into perspective. For example, some customers may give you a passing score based on the final outcome alone, disregarding the number of attempts they may have had to make to reach a customer support agent.

How can you improve your CES score now? 

CES surveys are way too essential for you to closely monitor the touchpoints where your services miss the knack of satisfying your customers.

  •  Providing and optimizing the omnichannel customer experience is one of the countable potent ways to improve your eagle-eye view of your customers’ journey. A 360-degree view of your customers’ interaction (where they can reach you at any point in time) with you will help you identify your slips and rectify them in no time. 
  • Rendering the self-service tools to your customers will provide them a sense of independence which sometimes acts as a reward for solving their own issues and saving them from experiencing some irritating traffic as well.
  • Reducing wait times is another great option to please your customers, letting them be more enthusiastic about making more purchases with you. It’s better to save your customers before their brain terminals receive the signal saying “waiting is painful ”.

 

#6 CSAT

Well, we love short forms (like LOL for laughing out loud), don’t we? If you are wondering what CSAT can mean with regards to your customer service, it just stands for Customer Satisfaction ( yup! the key term of this post).

Just like the above-mentioned metrics, you will use a key question to loop your interactions with your customers, which is,

“How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [goods/service] you received?”

Or the like to directly muster the ratings which would later tell you if you can pat your back or not.

The respondents here will be given 5 options (usually) from which they can demarcate your score out of their experiences and interactions with you and the units of this ruler are,

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

How to calculate the CSAT?

Customer-Satisfaction-Score-(CSAT)

CSAT can be calculated by dividing the number of satisfied customers by the total number of responses.

So, CSAT = (Satisfied CustomersX100)/Total number of Responses

For example, if 50 out of 100 respondents rate you a 5, then you’d have a 50% CSAT score.

Next, how can you improve the CSAT score?

  • In the first instance, go completely customer-centered (if you are not already there)
  • Upgrade your VoC programs and fix the pain points 
  • Put more productive effort into mustering as much feedback as you can
  • Do not forget to ACT on the feedback
  • Personalization is too important, trigger personalized conversation at every touchpoint

Chiefly, it is crucial to get the hang of the above three metrics NPS, CES, and CSAT as they go hand in hand, before setting your sail in the ocean of online marketing which prioritizes its customers to reap success.

#6 Benchmarking

Do you know how important ‘comparison’ is, in your brand’s customer satisfaction analysis? If yes, then you really should know about the customer service benchmarking. 

It is the method of profound analysis to get an overview of your support team in order to see where they have room for some improvement by comparing various ratios from the reports. What kind of reports? Well, that depends on what kind of benchmarking you are aiming for.

Principally, we have two kinds of benchmarking which use two different types of methods but on the same lines. The two are Internal and external benchmarking.

  1. Internal benchmarking stacks up your CSAT records against the ones of your own organization on different time periods.
  2. External benchmarking, on the other hand,  unleashes your bull against your close competitors from a myriad industry to ensure an apples-to-apples kind of comparison.

By regularly benchmarking your services and performances, you can clearly follow the line of progress and your team can be appreciated for exactly the places where they excel!

#7 Repeat Customer Rate

Given the fact that the most substantial way to improve your customer acquisition is customer retention ( does that sound contradictory? doesn’t as long as it’s true ), it’s completely worth your time & effort to keep the customers who purchase repeatedly from you in the loop. And of course, the ones who repeat their transactions with you should be labeled as repeat customers. 

“A repeat customer has a 60 to 70% chance of converting.” – Paul Farris (Marketing Metrics)

So, this book, Marketing Metrics, brings out the fact that the conversion chances for repeat customers are extremely high, which means that you can save yourself from spending too much on conversion tactics.

How to calculate the repeat rate?

Repeat-Rate

Calculating Repeat Rate is very simple, all you need to do is divide the number of repeat customers by the total customers who bought from you in a given month and multiply it by 100.

It follows that Repeat Rate = (Repeat Customers X100)/Total Customers

For example, if you had 12 customers buying for the second or third time from your store out of a total of 40 shoppers, your Repeat Rate would be 30%.

Final Words

Achieving high customer satisfaction should be your priority because growing companies are 21% more likely to say that “customer success is very important” than their stagnant competitors who barely care about strategy.

Thanks to this positive outlook, 77% of consumers surveyed said that they had shared a positive customer service experience with a company during the past year. So it’s crucial to keep track of your customers’ satisfaction levels if you want to stand out from the competition that is thriving to provide customers with the best customer service experience.

If you feel overwhelmed, you can outsource your customer interaction/support to Helplama specialized professionals for a few hundred dollars per month.

Our team takes charge of your customer support needs right away, helping you create better value in the process. Our USP is a team of US-based, multi-domain experts who know how to efficiently and confidently drive positive outcomes for your business, whether it is answering customer questions or closing sales. What’s more, we don’t sweat the small stuff – you get our 100% zero-risk guarantee for unmatched flexibility at an unbeatable price.

Also, try Saufter – the customer service software that can help you automate and scale your customer support.

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