A Comprehensive Dive into Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Measuring customer satisfaction can help your brand deliver an improved experience to customers. Did you know that 90% of customers prefer companies offering tailored customer services and are prepared to spend more with them? Knowing this information, can you say your customers feel fulfilled when engaging with your product/brand/service and contributing insights through ratings and review creation? Could there be opportunities available to enhance or otherwise optimize the customer journey experience?

Measuring customer satisfaction can provide actionable insights into who your audience is and the most efficient ways of targeting it. Here we’ll review some of the main steps on how to measure customer satisfaction as well as potential uses of such measurements for products.

What is Customer Satisfaction?

Simply stated, customer satisfaction measures how highly satisfied customers are with a brand, product or service and can influence customer lifetime value (CLV). Customer satisfaction can refer both to individual items purchased as well as overall brand happiness; when customer satisfaction levels rise substantially for any particular brand, it indicates they are listening well and adapting as necessary; with customer satisfaction decreasing immediately alerting brands of changes needed with pricing, packaging or availability issues that need addressing as soon as possible.

Why is Measuring Customer Satisfaction Essential?

First of all, companies with customer experience as their focus generate 4-8% more revenue compared to others within their industries. Customer loyalty can be seen in retention rate, revenue growth and referrals. Happy and loyal customers are more inclined to repeat purchases from you, recommend you and spend money. They are less likely to complain or switch products when satisfied. In order to fully grasp the importance of measuring customer satisfaction for business growth purposes, it’s essential that you understand its results. See these five points that show just what impact incorporating measuring overall satisfaction has:

• Customers who are not satisfied incur direct and indirect costs. The prosperity of an enterprise is dependent on its customer success. Unsatisfied customers can be a serious financial drain on any business. Dissatisfaction with customers can have both direct and indirect business costs, making it a situation that is less than ideal. Dissatisfied customers who had a ”bad customer journey” will stop doing business with you. This directly affects your profits and sales.
• Recurring business comes from satisfied clients. Would you interact again with an organization and use its services if you are a satisfied client? Customers who are happy tend to be loyal to a business as long as the company offers them positive customer support interactions and a service or product they need and enjoy. It is easy to see that the success of a business depends on customer satisfaction ratings.
• Negative customer experience impacts your brand image. When learning about how to measure satisfaction, it’s important to understand the bad experiences of customers just as much as you do the good. Unpleasant experiences leave a bad impression in the mouths of customers, which leads to bad word-of-mouth spreading. This can damage the reputation of your brand, which you have worked hard to build over the years. It is more detrimental to a company if bad word of mouth is spread online. Negative reviews posted to social media could turn away many prospective clients and cause your company’s business to falter.
• Tracking customer satisfaction enhances the client experience. Numerous issues can lead to unhappy customers, such as receiving a defective product, experiencing software glitches or having negative interactions with customer service representatives. Measuring user satisfaction continuously can easily help increase satisfaction levels; doing this helps identify any problems early and fix them before customers give up entirely on you. Additionally, it reveals if retention strategies for increasing customer experience are working. Finally, you can review all processes involved and redesign if there aren’t significant improvements visible.
• Reduces Churn. When customers churn, we usually assume price is a significant factor, but that isn’t always the case. Some brands sell products or services at higher than average costs in their niche, yet still enjoy large and loyal followings. Why would customers leave you when your products offer superior quality, great user experiences and a responsive and delightful customer support team? If customers receive bad service, they are more likely to choose your competitor over you despite how tempting your offer may seem!

How to measure customer satisfaction—9 main steps

1. Find the right software to measure customer satisfaction

Finding an efficient platform is one of the best ways to measure customer satisfaction, and it should be your number one objective to make sure clients are content with the products or services you are offering them.

FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) is an exceptional platform designed specifically for client-oriented businesses. If customer satisfaction is at the core of what your organization stands for, FuseBase should be your go-to solution.

This platform offers features and tools designed to ease customer data collection processes, making customer satisfaction measurement simple and effective:

• Client Portals make providing quality feedback easy. Simply create customer satisfaction surveys in Client Portals so your clients can submit their thoughts. Customizable forms allow customers to provide more in-depth responses that give your company a structured method for measuring satisfaction.
• Utilize In-app Portal Analytics for Deep Insights. Leveraging customer interactions within your portal can provide invaluable data, including their duration on the portal, pages visited and client preferences. By analyzing customer satisfaction metrics and creating engaging content to draw them in further, you will gather insights that are vital to increasing loyalty and satisfaction with clients.
• Project Analysis with Data Dashboards. Your customer service team can use dashboards to track project progress, approvals and communication patterns—offering visual displays of any necessary improvements for increased client satisfaction.
• Continuous Improvement with the Power of AI insights. FuseBase AI nsights enable continual improvement by adapting strategies, refining communication channels and increasing service quality to increase customer satisfaction levels and ensure sustainable success.

2. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is one way of measuring customer satisfaction. CSAT can be calculated via an anonymous customer survey that asks unsatisfied/satisfied customers how satisfying/dissatisfying their experience was following an interaction, such as buying something. After purchasing something new, you’re often given post-purchase surveys asking about your thoughts—these can include phone surveys as well.

Customer Satisfaction Score measures experiences across an expanse, from negative to positive experiences, and responses may range anywhere between 0%-100% of CSAT responses.

Customer satisfaction surveys allow businesses to glean insights from customer responses by conducting follow-ups to understand why certain ratings were given. Here are a few open-ended question types you might use when conducting your own customer satisfaction survey:

• Why have you provided this score?
• How can we enhance your experience with our brand to make it better?
• Have you encountered any difficulties while shopping at our store? Please share your story if this has been the case for you.
• What would you like for us to change about our product/service/company?

3. Customers’ Feedback through Surveys

Customer satisfaction can be measured by customer surveys. It’s better for your call centers to ask how your customer feels and see what they think about your service directly than to rely on self-calculations. Start different customer surveys through various channels and focus groups. This is best done after the service has been provided. You can host surveys in different ways:

• In-App Surveys. It might be hard to gather feedback in this type of survey since most customers tend to avoid it unless they’re caught doing them. It is best to ask for honest customer satisfaction feedback while your customers are using your service on your mobile app. Start a customer satisfaction survey after completing a service or purchase. It is more likely that the customer will give honest feedback, and there is a higher response rate. These surveys shouldn’t interfere with the experience of the client when they use the service. The customer satisfaction survey must be brief, concise and seamlessly integrated into the application.
• Post-Call Surveys. CSAT surveys can be initiated as soon as an interaction is over. CSAT surveys are available as soon as the interaction is over. You collect data when callers give feedback simply by pressing a button. This information is then automatically sent to supervisors in a CSAT report.
• Email surveys. These are designed for repeat customers. Provide them with a survey featuring thoughtful questions that target what your customers desire. Make sure it resonates with what your customer desires to ensure maximum engagement and reduce response rates (though lengthy responses could hinder response rates), but do not let this demotivate you—surveys are an invaluable way of gathering customer insight!
• Voluntary Feedback. Sometimes users provide customer feedback without being specifically requested to do so, for a number of reasons—it could be because of excellent or negative customer experiences. An automated response would only discourage further interaction. To address this, either arrange to speak directly to the client, or ensure they receive personalized responses—positive customer testimonials can even serve to motivate other clients by documenting success stories. Happy customers are a lifeline!
  

4. Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer effort score measures how easily consumers can resolve an issue or get an answer. The CES can be used to measure customer satisfaction metrics at a higher level. This is because satisfied customers are more likely to remain loyal when the process of resolving an issue, getting an answer or completing a task goes smoothly.

When customers are unable to resolve their problem quickly or receive an answer, companies lose out on the chance to build customer loyalty and may even lose a person as a customer.

You might ask a question like this: ”I was able to solve my problem quickly and easily with {Business Name}”.

As with the customer satisfaction scores, you can use a response scale of 1-5, where 1 indicates “strongly disagree” and 5 “strongly agree”. Use the formula below to calculate CES.

If 75 of the 100 survey responses were positive (either a 4, or a 5), then you would have a CES of 75 percent.

5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the most popular answers to how to measure customer satisfaction. NPS, also known as customer loyalty, is an important metric for measuring satisfaction. This metric tells you whether customers are willing to refer you to others.

• Promoters are customers who score 9 or 10. These customers are loyal and recommend the business to other people.
• Passives are customers who score 7 or 8. The passives are not loyal and will switch brands if they have a better option.
• Customers who rate 0-6 on a scale of 1 to 10 are considered detractors. These customers are not loyal to the business and can even be critical of it.

The net promoter score can be used as a way to achieve customer satisfaction or to determine loyalty towards a brand. If you want to measure something else, then you may need to modify the question. Here are a few examples:

• How likely are you, on a scale from 0 to 10, to recommend this brand to other people based on the support that you received in terms of customer service?
• Please rate the likelihood that you would recommend our business/product to other people based on your experience using
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• How likely are you, on a 0-10 scale, to recommend us to other people after our most recent software update?
• On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you that you will use our referral system and recommend us to other people?

You can ask open-ended NPS questions, just like you would in CSAT surveys. This will help you understand the reasons why your customers respond in a certain way.

6. Social media measuring

Social media monitoring provides an effective method of gathering customer satisfaction data. Get indirect feedback by simply tracking brand social media posts to measure customer engagement and sentiment; listen for comments regarding products they dislike/like, as well as praise your products from consumers on these platforms.

Monitoring brand tags can provide insights into customer satisfaction. Customers might share their experiences after purchasing your service or product on social media channels like Twitter.

Though social measurement methods described above are passive, brands can still utilize social media platforms directly to measure customer satisfaction—perhaps using Twitter polls, LinkedIn surveys or Instagram voting features as direct measures of satisfaction.

7. Customer Churn rate

Churn Rate refers to the frequency with which customers leave your brand for various reasons such as age, interest loss, budget restrictions or customer dissatisfaction. Sometimes your product just doesn’t meet customer expectations. No brand can ever maintain zero customer churn over time. As long as tracking churn is an integral component of brand performance evaluation, it should remain important in monitoring brand success.

Calculating customer churn is straightforward: take the total number of clients at the beginning of every month and subtract that final total, before dividing that sum by its original total.

If your customer churn rate has seen an exponential spike, measuring customer satisfaction metrics might provide insights into why customers are leaving in droves. Monitoring levels of customer happiness across your organization will prove indispensable when looking to strengthen relationships and keep customers content.

8. Email surveys 

Email surveys provide another effective method of measuring customer happiness. Utilizing contact lists from newsletters or purchase histories, email surveys can be sent using this platform to deliver online questionnaires more reliably and quickly. They may also redirect recipients directly to a survey link.

Email surveys allow for effortless tracking of response rates. This is based on how many emails you sent and how many responses were received from your customer base.

9. Live chat

Have you ever visited a website and seen an icon asking if you want to chat live with customer service? Live chat can be an efficient way of providing service to customers.

Live chat surveys make an effective tool to ask simple, straightforward questions such as, ‘Please rate the quality of service that was received today’ to customers who are already visiting your website. Live chat also enables businesses to capture potential new customers who may come back later for more business from current visitors who already exist there.

Wrapping up

It is an art and science to measure customer satisfaction by gathering feedback surveys. You can see how the customers respond in real-time.

By using robust analytics to support such surveys, it is possible to accurately predict when and why your next customers will want to become loyal to you and also solve customer satisfaction problems the right way each time.

FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) makes measuring customer satisfaction simple with its tools that streamline the survey process while offering insightful customer satisfaction data to support intelligent decisions about enhancing the customer experience.

Companies utilize various approaches to achieve customer satisfaction, and it is critical for businesses to do so regardless of their survey goals, target demographic or desired KPIs.