Measure your customers’ satisfaction

Measure your customers’ satisfaction

1. Decide the goals for measuring your customers’ satisfaction by creating a list of positive and negative customer feedback. Identify the areas to improve so that you can provide a better customer experience.

Consider the customer interactions you have observed, such as reviews, in-person feedback, and comments or messages you have engaged with on social media. What positive and negative feedback have you received from customers about your products, services, or customer service? Are there any complaints you’ve received about any aspect of your business? Customer satisfaction surveys are a great way to get valuable information from your customers to see whether they are pleased, complacent, or frustrated with a certain aspect of your business or products. If any issues are identified through this process, you can use it as an opportunity to fix them to improve your customers’ experiences and overall satisfaction with your brand.

2. Measure the quality of your customers’ experiences by using a CSAT survey.

A CSAT survey measures Customer Satisfaction Score. This is conducted by asking participants to rate their experience from 1-10, on a scale ranging from poor to excellent. Use a tool like SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics to create and deliver CSAT surveys quarterly, bi-annually, or annually to measure customers’ satisfaction during various stages of their buyer journeys. Consider sending a customer a survey within a few days after receiving a purchased product or service to give them enough time to begin using the product or service, and collect their feedback while their first impressions are still top-of-mind.  For example, if you wanted to measure your customers’ satisfaction with a software service your business offers, you could send out a CSAT survey to customers who have purchased that software.

3. Use a CES survey to measure the ease of use for a specific area of your business.

A CES survey measures Customer Effort Score. This type of survey asks a customer to rate their experience based on a scale of how easy or difficult something was to use or complete. Consider setting up an in-app or email survey to ask for customer feedback directly after an interaction with your customer service team to identify the quality of their experience and pinpoint whether there are issues within that process that need to be improved. For example, you might have an automated survey pop up for a customer who just finished asking questions and chatting with a member of your customer service team on your website’s live messaging feature. The survey could ask the customer to rate their experience to collect data about how helpful your live customer service is for your web visitors.

4. Measure your customers’ brand loyalty by using a NPS survey.

An NPS survey measures Net Promoter Score. This kind of survey asks a customer how likely they would be to recommend a product or service to a friend. For example, you could survey a group of long-term customers by sending out a simple email asking them to rate how likely or unlikely they would be to recommend your business to a friend.

5. Keep surveys short and easy to complete to increase the likelihood of customers filling it out.

Any questions on a survey should be relevant to a specific goal that you are trying to accomplish, to save time both for your customers and your team when analyzing the results. In most instances, surveys are no longer than 3 easy-to-answer questions. Any more than that and you increase the likelihood that customers will opt to not fill out the survey at all. For example, if your business has a service-based app, it could be as simple as having a CSAT survey appear as an overlay when a user opens the app, and all they would need to do is click an option from 1-10 to rate their experience with the app, or tap elsewhere on their screen to opt out. This would be a quick, easy to complete or opt out, and non-disruptive to their overall experience.

6. Determine when it is appropriate to send a customer satisfaction survey to collect the most accurate results.

Avoid sending customers too many surveys; you don’t want to impact their user experience negatively by bombarding them with survey requests or pop-ups. Choose a time frame when the customer will still have the experience front of mind, but is non-disruptive to their experience. For example, you might send a survey 24-48 hours after a customer receives a product or begins a service. That way, the customer has time to develop their first impression of the product and their opinion is still fresh in their mind.

7. Choose where it is appropriate to send a customer satisfaction survey to be the least disruptive to their user experience.

Popular ways to deliver a survey are through email, in-app, or on your website after a specific action is taken, such as talking to customer service or purchasing a product. Requesting survey participation should avoid disrupting your customers when they are actively using an app or a feature on your website.  For example, email surveys to measure CSAT or NPS are ideal because you can use carefully segmented groups of your email list to make sure your survey is being delivered to the right portion of your audience. In-app surveys can be effective for quick, direct feedback after a customer service interaction via live messaging.

8. Collect your survey results, compile them into a comprehensive report, and analyze the responses.

Keep a detailed record of your survey results to help you analyze the responses in the short term, but also to use as a benchmark to compare your customers’ satisfaction with future surveys. Compile quantitative data such as the number of each result in a 1-10 ranking survey to get a percentage breakdown and overview of how your customers responded.

9. Draw conclusions from the survey data you've collected to identify any potential problem areas that your customers routinely experience.

Using the information you’ve learned from your surveys, take steps to address any issues to improve your customers’ experience. For example, if a significant amount of survey results indicate that the automated chat support on your Facebook page was unhelpful, you should edit the automated responses for better accuracy, or assign a team member to provide live chat support on that channel.