6 Tips for Measuring Customer Satisfaction (Updated)

What is Customer Satisfaction?

Customer Satisfaction is the measure of happiness or fulfillment of the customers with your products and the services and their overall experience with your organization. Measuring Customer Satisfaction lets you know whether you are able to meet customers' expectations or not and to what extent.

By measuring Customer Satisfaction, you get to know the different aspects of your business and what is the effect of those aspects on your business. Measuring Customer Satisfaction enables you to find your Strengths and Weaknesses.

It helps you know what opportunities you have to improve your business and the threats to your business that can hamper your success. It helps you to make right business decisions and take strategic actions in case your business suffers any crisis.

How to Measure Customer Satisfaction?

Customer Satisfaction can be measured by obtaining Customer Feedback. Customer Feedback is the information provided by the customers about their views regarding your products and services along with their overall experience with your brand.

To obtain Customer Feedback, you need to organize surveys. It will help you to measure Customer Satisfaction through customer reviews and different types of metrics.

Let's list out some best practices and the information you need to find out in order to measure Customer Satisfaction.

Let's review how these best practices can help you measure Customer Satisfaction in an effective way.

1. Organize High-level Customer Satisfaction Surveys

To measure high-level customer satisfaction, you need to simply seek your customers for feedback and ask them how much they are satisfied with your products and services. High-level customer surveys are designed considering the same fact and help perform in-depth sentiment analysis.

There are three forms of high-level customer satisfaction surveys. You can choose among one or more depending upon your requirements. You choose that survey or combination of surveys which suits you the best. Let's review these different types of high-level CSAT surveys.

1. In-App Survey
   In App Surveys are those surveys which are taken while the customers are using your products and services. They generally contain one or two questions asking simply about their happiness with the product or services.
   
   The short length of these surveys is very good in terms of receiving a high response rate. This is due to the fact that they are very simple as well as less time-consuming for the customer to answer.
2. Post Service Surveys
   Post Service surveys are those which are sent to the customers just after providing a service to the customer or after an interaction of the customer with your internal team. This is an effective way to gather detailed feedback report.
   
   The best practice to send this post customer service survey is to send it just after providing the service or after the interaction of your customer with the organization. It is because the Customer Experience is fresh at that moment. You can take this survey by sending it either through an email or via a small chat session with your customer.
3. Email Surveys
   Email surveys provide a great opportunity to gather in-depth customer insights regarding Customer Satisfaction. Email surveys provide free time to your customer to fill the survey. They can think deeply before giving their answers.
   
   On email surveys, you can also get the advantage of asking open-ended questions in your survey so that you can get rich, detailed data about customer satisfaction and happiness.

2. Measure Customer Loyalty - Net Promoter Score

In order to measure customer satisfaction, you should also have an insight of customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is the attribute-based satisfaction along with consistently positive emotional experience with a brand and its products and services.

Customer Loyalty can be measured with the help of NPS i.e. Net Promoter Score. NPS survey usually has one question to be asked by the customer. The NPS survey question is,

How likely you will recommend our products and services to your family and friends?

The answers vary from 0 to 10 , 0 being 'Not at All Likely' and 10 being 'Most Likely'. Those who answer from 0-6 are considered as detractors, 7 & 8 being passives and 9 & 10 are the promoters.

To find out the value of NPS, you need to subtract the total percentage of detractors from the total percentage of promoters.

3. Measure Customer Effort - Customer Effort Score

You should also calculate CES i.e. Customer Effort Score to measure another aspect of Customer Satisfaction. This basically tells how much effort a customer has to put to get his work done or issue resolved. For this, you simply need to ask a simple question:

To what extent do you agree with the following statement: The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.

Like NPS scale, CES also shows a Likert scale to the customer usually ranging from 1 to 7 rating scale, where 1 being 'Very Low Effort' and 7 being 'Very High Effort". Your motive here would be to achieve a low CES which means customers do not have to make much effort.

Lower the CES, higher the Customer Satisfaction.

4. Measure Intention to Repurchase

Intend to repurchase is defined as the decision of the customers to engage in future activities with the same organization or brand. Intention to repurchase clearly explains whether the customer is satisfied with the product and services or not. To measure this, the question to ask the customers is:

Do you intend to return to the organization in the next 30 days?

While the time period may not be 30 days always, it may change according to the nature of the business. In case of a business like a restaurant , or a gym, or a spa, this question is very relevant and tells a lot about the position of your brand in the customers' views.

If many people like to visit again to your place, that means you are on the right path leading you towards success. Whereas, if most of the people don't want to return to your place or repurchase your goods and services that means you need to make important strategic changes. For online businesses specifically, upgrading your store may be necessary to enhance user experience.

5. Take Decisions on the basis of Customer Feedback

Customer Satisfaction is something which you must keep on top priority because without satisfying the customers, it is impossible to even survive in a competitive market, let alone running a business successfully.

Your actions should reflect that you prioritize Customer Satisfaction. Seeking customers for feedback and asking them about their satisfaction itself showcases that you care for them and want to make them happy and satisfied.

Moreover, try to implement as much as on the basis of customers' suggestions and make decisions according to the customer feedback and inform them that you are doing so. This will show in your actions that you value your customers and work as per their suggestions.

6. Use an Effective Survey Software

In order to create Customer Satisfaction surveys, you must use a good survey software. These surveys are easy to interact with and will give you the best feedback for your company. Nowadays, the market is flooded with survey tools, everyone claiming to be the best. But you should use a survey tool which provides you the most useful features.

An effective and powerful Customer Feedback software and survey app would enable you to create a customized survey, white-label it with your brand, and create surveys in different languages. It should provide you real-time notifications, analysis reports, and metrics like NPS, CES, and CSAT. It also enables you to send offline surveys without internet connectivity.