As many businesses know, customer service is a vital part of organizational success. When customers are happy, businesses should be happy. In turn, measuring customer satisfaction has been a core focus for customer centric companies.
What is Customer Satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction is defined as a measurement to determine how happy customers are with your services. Measuring customer satisfaction can give you valuable insight into how you as an organization perform, as well as help you identify any areas of improvement.
Why is Measuring Customer Satisfaction Important?
When customers are satisfied, it usually means business is doing well. Organizations should strive to not only satisfy their customers, but ensure they become loyal because acquiring new customers is much more difficult than retaining current ones. Some of the key benefits of measuring customer satisfaction include:
- Reduce customer turnover rates: keeping customers happy will reduce customer churn
- Word-of-mouth advertising: when customers are happy, they can be the best brand advocates. Many customers will share their positive experience with friends or family.
- Increase customer lifetime value: when one-time buyers are happy and satisfied with your product or services, they can transform into loyal customers
5 Ways to Measure Customer Satisfaction
Define Your Business Objectives
The first step to measuring customer satisfaction is to determine what your business objectives are in doing so. What do you wish to gain from measuring customer satisfaction? Some common goals include:
- Finding areas of improvement in customer service
- Enhance the products or services you provide for better customer satisfaction
- Gain customer loyalty
- Reduce customer churn
- Increase brand awareness from word of mouth
Create a Plan
Once you have your objectives lined out, the next important step is to plan how to measure customer satisfaction. This includes identifying your target audience to determine their behaviors and needs.
You also need to determine when you want to acquire customer feedback in order gain data for measurement. Here are some examples of when to request feedback:
- At the end of chat sessions
- After a successful transaction
- After a support ticket is resolved
- After a product demo
Prepare the Questions
When it comes to surveying your customers, you want to ensure you’re asking the right questions to gain feedback that will help you in your measurements. Your questions should be tailored to the kind of service or product you offer in order to get honest and useful feedback. There are two kinds of questions you can ask, qualitative and quantitative questions.
Qualitative feedback questions are usually open-ended and require the customer to provide their original and unique response. Quantitative questions are typically multiple choice or ratings on a scale of 1-10.
Identifying the Metrics
When it comes to actually measuring customer satisfaction, you have to choose the metrics for performance measurement to analyze the level of satisfaction in the overall customer journey. The Customer Satisfaction Score (SCAT) is one of the most widely used metric for measuring customer satisfaction. SCAT is a type of survey that targets customers by asking questions through different communication channels about their experience.
Analyze the Data
Once you’ve rolled out your survey and gathered data back from customers, the data must be handed over to professional analysts who can help generate valuable insights for you. Once you have these insights, you can use them to create a better product or improve customer service. Once you receive customer feedback, you need to:
- Identify the gaps that are occurring between your business and customers
- Discuss gaps and feedback internally to create a plan for moving forward
- Involve all necessary team members to proceed with adjusting product or services to cater to customer expectations
Customer satisfaction plays an important role in the long-term relationships and success of your business. While measuring customer satisfaction may seem like a lengthy task for new organizations, it’s good practice and can help you in the long run.
Measure Customer Satisfaction Tailored to Your Unique Business Goals
At ARC, we can design a customer survey that caters to your organization’s needs and helps you identify areas of improvement. Target particular product segments, customer demographics, or geographical regions to find out the very best ways to serve your valued customers.