The yesteryears of our grandparents had customer satisfaction measurement through gestures and talks. The customers would smile after they bought something or revisit and that was the indication of customer satisfaction.
The same sentiment holds true today, with just a wee bit of difference. There is more competition, different consumer touchpoints; however, the need to measure customer satisfaction is more important than ever before. A Walker-based study predicted that the fag end of 2020 will see the price and product to be overtaken by customer satisfaction and experience as one of the prime brand differentiators.
Customer Satisfaction – Let’s understand it
It is essentially a feeling of pleasure and happiness when a service or product meets or goes beyond customer expectations. It is important to measure customer satisfaction as it is the first step towards understanding how your customers are feeling and how you need to attend to customer complaints and issues. This, also, helps you stop customer churn and also grow your business better.
What is the dependence between customer satisfaction and the growth of your business?
Customer happiness and satisfaction have a strong interrelation to the health of any business and that is the reason why customer satisfaction has gained the status of a revolutionary indicator enabling you towards driving business growth.
What is the need for happy customers? That’s because happy customers not just revisit you but are more likely to recommend you to others. A satisfied and happy customer will always share all his positive reviews and refer you to relatives and colleagues.
This is not just a point to strengthen your customer loyalty also betters your acquisition rate of customers and puts that positive impact on profit rate and business growth.
Customer happiness and satisfaction enable the improvement of business performance. When your customers are delighted, it indicates a level more than satisfaction and happiness for your customers. These predictions add further in helping improve the level of services and products. Customer reviews from the happy ones empower you to turn any and every customer of yours into happy customers before they think of churning.
How could you measure customer happiness and satisfaction?
Are there any specified metrics or KPIs for measuring customer happiness? In a recent survey by Bain & Co for 362 firms, they have found that 80% of the enterprises believed that they delivered a superlative experience to their customers. However, while surveying their customers, they heard totally different feedback, where only 8% succeeded in providing an exceptional customer experience.
So, you need to ask them directly or you would not be able to identify the gaps that have built a bridge between your business and your customers. You will need to know how your customers are feeling about your services, brands, business, or products.
Customer surveys are so far the most efficient way of collecting data related to your customers. Those days are gone when surveys were made of paper reams, huge question lists, and tedium that would end to nothing more than just the zero rates of response. The customer feedback software enables our businesses to work customer feedback in actual time and in a different manner. It provides several metrics of customer service that will help you to gauge customer happiness from several perspectives.
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Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
The condition of total happiness could be achieved using satisfaction. If your consumers are happy and satisfied with the interaction, services, or products, they would be considered as happy customers. And in case your happy customers come across a series of highly exceptional CX also satisfaction, they would be your loyal customers.
Your customers who are loyal to your brand advocate for your brand and their positive word of mouth spread can also convince your previous unhappy consumers and you can retain them back. Just 20 percent of your existing customers decide the future of your 80 percent customers.
The CSAT is one the most efficient method of tracking the level of satisfaction of your consumers at several touchpoints that includes post-transaction, post-payment, post-order, etc. CSAT software has helped you in creating real-time surveys for CSAT that could be used efficiently as transactional metrics. The CSAT survey calculates customer satisfaction were keeping a check of key touchpoints on consumers and product updates along with moments of the customer journey.
CSAT can be calculated using some of the standard CSAT questions – how much satisfaction do you find in the experience? On the basis of experience that customers perceived, they range their level of satisfaction either on a range of 1-3, 1-5, or even 1-10 using the simple CSAT formula.
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Net Promoter Score (NPS): Customer Loyalty
As the importance of customer satisfaction and happiness is growing, the measurement of customer loyalty has taken up an integral part in any business. Conducting loyalty checks on your customers will help you gather the different perspectives of your customers regarding your products, brands, services, or business, how would you measure customer loyalty?
NPS is one metric that can calculate customer loyalty through the measurement of customer willingness to recommend a company, its services, or products to others. The NPS ranges between -100 and 100. There would be one simple question for NPS – what is the likelihood of you recommending our business/service/product/brand to a friend? The customers are provided with a score scale that ranges between 1 and 10.
On the basis of their experience or even the perception perceived by them, the score of willingness can be counted. If the score given by them is between 1 and 6, then they are detractors or unsatisfied or unhappy customers. They are risky for your brand or business. If they give you a score between 7 and 8, they are then passives, neutral, and not harmful for you. Customers who give you a score between 9 and 10 are promoters and happy customers. They will advocate for your business outside. Customer loyalty cannot be acquired in a day. Moreover, the quality of your services and products needs to be the best providing an exceptionally unique customer experience to make sure maximum customer satisfaction can be achieved. There are a number of experiences that your customer has encountered throughout the journey of his/her shopping. So, your business needs to calculate customer satisfaction.
Post interaction or transactions, the NPS survey helps you to measure your customer willingness so that your product/service/brand/business can be recommended on the basis of instant experience. This right at the moment feedback enables you towards quick identification of the inconvenience inexperience in the process of buying, payment completion, cash counter billing, and so on.
You could create a highly effective Transactional NPS if you make a slight change in the standard questions of NPS. You could add in your NPS survey questions based on recent experiences like:
- On the basis of recent purchases, what is the likelihood of your recommending us to your family and friends?
- How likely would you recommend it to some of your family and friends based on your recent interactions?
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Customer Effort Score (CES)
Several parameters are available in the market that can evaluate the quality of your customer support service. One of them is the first contact resolution rate (FCR). It talks about the percentage or numbers of the contacts that get resolved within a business’ first interaction with their customer. If the chat or call gets extended to the second session, it would no longer qualify as FCR.
Thus businesses need to resolve at the first call to impact the CX. This would in turn alter the perception customer has built because of the inconvenience. The higher is the FCR results in higher ratings of customer satisfaction. You could also improve the FCR by training your agents for a long time.
Now the question is about improving the FCR, you would need to evaluate the quality of your customer support service provides. Hence, the CES metric enables you to calculate the quality of your services in customer interaction through inspection of the level of effort the customers are putting in to get their questions answered.
By taking CES feedback after the service interaction, after a ticket has been closed, or even a service has come to execution, helps you receive instant feedback regarding your customer interaction. Based upon these data, you could set the hours of training required for your agents to better FCR.
Conclusion
The methods mentioned to gauge the customer satisfaction levels or enhancing the customer experience are just a few of the customer feedback app. However, these are the most impactful and so far mostly used software that has given the best assessment. If used properly, the survey methods like CSAT, NPS, and CES can be the best software that can accurately tell you of the customer expectations, their level of satisfaction, the probability of churn, and the likelihood of customer acquisition.
