Most business owners worry about constantly bringing in new leads for their manage small business but often neglect the ones they have. In actuality, it’s less time-consuming and less expensive to retain an existing customer. Besides, the actual secret ingredient for sustainable growth isn’t acquiring new customers—it’s customer retention. And to retain customers, you must keep them happy.
The good thing about retaining customers and keeping them happy is that it fuels acquisition in the long run. But how do you optimize for happiness? First, you need to understand how to measure customer satisfaction.
First things first—what is customer satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction is a measurement businesses use to quantify the extent to which a customer is satisfied with an experience, product, or service. It measures a customer’s feeling about a brand interaction. Below are strategies for measuring customer satisfaction.
1. Define Your Goals
Before starting to assess customer satisfaction, it’s important to ask yourself why you’re doing it. As a business owner, you should weigh the cost of collecting information against its value. Honestly speaking, if you don’t change a thing after collecting the customer satisfaction information, you’re better off not doing it.
Collecting customer data will cost you time and effort, so use the gathered information. Depending on your company’s abilities, there are many ways to use this information. You can use it to measure the extent that a segment of your customers is unsatisfied and do something about it.
Your key goals could be improving the quality of customer service or your product or service quality. It can even be improving touchpoints such as website navigation.
2. Create a Plan to Measure Customer Satisfaction
One of the first steps in planning is identifying your target audience by looking at certain attributes like needs, behavior and demographics. Use the insights obtained to generate survey questions for your customers.
There are many different scenarios to measure client satisfaction by asking for feedback. For instance, you can trigger a survey to customers immediately after a successful transaction. You can also ask for client feedback at the end of a chat to gauge their overall experience.
Better yet, obtain feedback after a support ticket is resolved. You also should consider the frequency to access customers. Also try segmenting customers based on when they did business with you can help.
3. Choose a Metric
Choosing the right measurement tool puts you in a good position for winning. Among the best metrics to help you understand customers’ perception better and assess their overall satisfaction include:
Net Promoter Score (NPS)- This popular metric aims to ask clients how likely they are to recommend your brand to people. With only one question, this metric measures a consumer’s emotional attachment to a company. It shows whether a client’s loyalty is strong enough to become your regular customers.
Customer Effort Score (CES)- This is another great metric of how to measure customer satisfaction. CES allows you to examine how easy it is for a customer to perform individual actions like ordering your company product online. This metric helps businesses to identify and solve shopping barriers that discourage further interaction.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)- This survey measures client satisfaction with a service, product, or latest interaction with a particular brand. With this type of metric, customers are asked to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5 (very satisfied, very unsatisfied, satisfied, unsatisfied and neutral). This customer experience metric allows you to investigate the extent to which your business meets the client’s expectations so that you can implement the necessary action.
4. Analytics
You can use the traffic to your website to measure customer satisfaction. Published content on your site can drive traffic to your site. Analyzing this traffic will provide you useful insights into your customers’ habits.
Track the time spent on your website and content shares to discover the interest in your upcoming features. You should also assess the bounce rate of your newsletters.
You can circulate and monitor product information across various channels using a centralized system like Performance Information Management (PIM). Discover more about what PIM is and how to use it.
One of the major contributors to client dissatisfaction is inconsistent data across channels. A PIM software ensures the information you share stays consistent. It ensures your business achieves information uniformity by providing you with reliable, traceable and updated data regardless of the channel your customers choose.
5. Surveys
One of the simplest ways of figuring out what customers want is by asking them through a client satisfaction survey. This technique allows you to collect information pertaining to other satisfaction metrics directly.
Keep in mind that all surveys don’t function the same. They also target different demographics, target customers at various stages of buying, and produce varying results.
In-app surveys, for example, targets customers who are in the process of using your service. They are often characterized by quick reactions and possibly high response rates. These surveys must then be inserted into the interface seamlessly─ otherwise, you’ll end up messing user experience.
Email surveys are also a great way to measure customer satisfaction. Emails serve best when you’re looking to ask your customer broader questions regarding their experience with your customer service. Although emails aren’t known for high response rates, they allow customers to share their entire experience.
6. Client Advisory Group
Like focus groups, a client advisory group provides a good way to get informal feedback from a group of customers and prospects. The information obtained from these groups can help you improve customer service, encourage repeat business or even develop an entirely new business.
You may also create a more-involved focus group. Just invite 5-10 customers and have them react to a particular material or answer questions. This way, you’ll have an opportunity to collect information about reactions to your company and customer needs. You’ll also get Family Business ideas as your customers react to each other’s responses.
Learn How to Measure Customer Satisfaction
Satisfying clients in today’s technology-driven and hyper-connected world means offering a superior and compelling experience. You can do many things to make customers leave you high scores but it all starts with understanding how to measure customer satisfaction. Use some of the strategies here to help you achieve that.
For more tips and advice for running your business, check out other articles on our blog.
