6 Important Ways To Measure Customer Satisfaction

Customers are the fundamental asset of every business. Customer satisfaction is the primary catalyst that pushes a company forward, ensuring repeat business. However, contact centers of companies cannot plan their service strategies based on vague data or few interactions. One can only trust quantitative data. Nonetheless, thorough survey work and a few measuring parameters have to be employed to understand the standards of customer service. These metrics help in improving customer value while reducing the churn rate.

Customer-centric companies make it a healthy practice to determine the customer's satisfaction levels, very often. Contact center teams improve their strategies using this particular data. Such practices keep them far from service deficiency and place them ahead in the competition.  

There are several universal methods for measuring customer satisfaction. However, only a few of them fetch near-accurate data.

What Are Customer Satisfaction Metrics?

Customer satisfaction metrics are the scores and indicators a business uses to quantify how customers feel about a product, a service or a single interaction. In a contact center, they turn opinions from calls, chats and emails into numbers that supervisors can track and compare over time.

The three most widely used survey-based metrics are:

• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score): how satisfied a customer was with a specific interaction.
• NPS (Net Promoter Score): how likely a customer is to recommend your business.
• CES (Customer Effort Score): how easy it was for the customer to get an issue resolved.

No single score tells the whole story. CSAT shows how an interaction went, NPS shows loyalty over time, and CES shows where customers face friction. The six methods below explain how to collect and combine them.

Important 6 Techniques of Measuring Customer Satisfaction

1. Customer Feedback Through Surveys
2. Customer Satisfaction Score
3. Net Promoter Score
4. Customer Effort Score
5. Web-Analytics
6. Social Media Metrics

1. Customer Feedback Through Surveys

Surveys are an essential method of measuring the quality of customer service. It is better to for your contact centers to ask customers directly what they think of your service, rather than just self-calculations. Initiate different types of surveys on various channels, mostly after the service is provided.

Customer feedback can be collected in 4 ways:

a)  In-App Surveys

Customers often tend to ignore such surveys unless they are caught in the action. The best way to get honest feedback is while they are availing of your services on your app. Initiate a post-purchase or post-service survey. The response rate is definitely higher and the feedback is most likely to be honest.

However, these surveys should not hinder the customer experience when availing the service. The survey should be short and precise and smoothly integrated with the application.

b)  Post-Call Surveys

The best feedback is received as soon as the interaction gets over. CSAT surveys can be initiated as soon as the call ends. The caller can provide feedback by just pressing a key, which is automatically rolled up to the supervisor in the CSAT report.

c)  Email Surveys

These surveys are for long-time customers who have made repeat purchases. Email them a form-based study with insightful questions. Keep those questions relevant to the customer’s goal, for better engagement. The answers are often lengthy; hence the response rate might be low. But let’s not get demotivated! Send out those surveys. Whatever feedback you get is bound to be valuable.

d)  Voluntary Feedback

Sometimes customers tend to provide feedback without any nudge from your end. This can be for various reasons. Either they had a bad experience or an extremely good experience and they want to let you know. However, an automated response often repels them from further engagement. 

Thus, ensure a personalized response or arrange a phone call to understand the customer’s expectations. Furthermore, positive feedback can be recorded as success stories to encourage other customers.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score

The customer satisfaction score or the CSAT score is a universal metric used to rate a customer's recent interaction with the customer service team. The parameter ranges from 1-5, where the lowest number denotes highly unsatisfied, and the highest number indicates highly satisfied. The more positive feedback results in a higher CSAT score. 

CSAT is usually calculated as the number of satisfied responses (4 and 5) divided by the total number of responses, multiplied by 100.

The CSAT is an elementary method for contact centers to understand the quality of your service as it does not indicate any essential factors from the interaction that took place. More than often, customers vaguely choose either of the options cause the service was indifferent. However, CSAT should not be eliminated as it is still an essential indicator. Furthermore, other methods must be employed for a detailed understanding of the customer's expectations.

3. Net Promoter Score

NPS revolves around a simple idea: customers who find an experience easy and satisfying are more likely to recommend the brand.

NPS was introduced to fill in the gaps which CSAT couldn't. NPS determines how likely a customer will recommend a particular product/service to their friends.

The scale ranges from 0 to 10, where 0 denotes 'not at all likely' and 10 denotes 'extremely likely'. Scores of 9 or 10 are promoters, 7 or 8 are passives, and 0 to 6 are detractors. NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.

NPS is determined upon the basis of an emotionally motivated question. Thus, the response rate is higher and often unsatisfied customers never miss an opportunity to answer these surveys. Perhaps, contact centers should utilize this opportunity to retain certain customers and make an impact on them with unquestionable customer service.

4. Customer Effort Score

The customer effort score, or CES, is a customer-centric approach for understanding the quality of customer service. Here the customer is asked about the amount of effort he or she had to put to avail the customer service for getting an issue resolved. Alternatively, it is asked if the organization had made it easier for the customer to interact with the customer support team.

The scale commonly runs from 1 to 5 or 1 to 7. Teams define the direction themselves, so state clearly which end means "easy" when you design the question.

The CES is an appropriate parameter to segment customers in the future such that your contact center can shift their efforts more towards unhappy customers. Most organizations also add a text box after the customer effort survey so that the customers can elaborate on the issue, aiding the organization to improve specifically on those fronts. 

However, it must be remembered that all of these surveys, alone do not provide any stagnant idea. All the surveys together can converge into a bigger picture which is much clearer than any standalone factor.

CSAT, NPS and CES at a Glance

5. Web-Analytics

Analytics is a data-driven metric that works without any direct involvement of the customer. Web-analytics crawls your website traffic actively, reads the sales funnel, understands the customer behaviour, and predicts future conversions. In-built attribution models give better insights of touchpoints, most frequently visited FAQs, and more. These insights, if compiled and utilized smartly, can result in a successful customer service strategy that can be a crucial differentiator for your business in this economy.

6. Social Media Metrics

Customers are more vocal on the social media, today. They flaunt their purchases online while dissing the brands who dissatisfy them. Social media is a two-way sword. Keeping that in mind, it can be used to understand what the customers are saying about your product. Most social media platforms come with a business account facility that provide an analytics dashboard. Observe your audience and focus on their comments, on their recommendations. Customer support teams can gather these data and formulate strategies to improve the satisfaction/engagement levels for better social media presence.

6 Key Ways to Measure Customer Satisfaction

Boost CSAT with proven methods like NPS, CES, surveys & web analytics.

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How to Measure Customer Satisfaction Without Surveys

Many customers never answer surveys, so unsolicited and behavioral signals help fill the gap:

• Web analytics: repeated visits to the same help article, or drop-offs partway through a support flow, often point to unresolved questions.
• Social media and review comments: what customers say publicly shows sentiment that no survey question captured.
• Voluntary feedback: unprompted praise and complaints are strong signals because the customer chose to speak up.
• Repeat contacts: customers who come back about the same issue suggest the first interaction did not resolve it.

These signals are indirect, so use them to complement CSAT, NPS and CES rather than replace them.

Contact Center Indicators That Support Satisfaction Scores

Survey scores show how customers feel. Operational indicators help explain why. Contact centers commonly review these alongside CSAT, NPS and CES:

• First contact resolution (FCR): the share of issues resolved in the first interaction. Low FCR often goes hand in hand with high customer effort.
• Average handle time (AHT): the average time an agent spends on an interaction. Read it together with CSAT, because a shorter call is only better if the issue was resolved.
• Call abandonment rate: the share of callers who hang up before reaching an agent. A high rate usually points to long waits.
• Average speed of answer: how long customers wait to be connected.

Compare these figures with survey scores by channel, team and time of day to find what is driving satisfaction up or down.

Tools to Measure Customer Satisfaction

Most of the methods above can be run with a combination of survey or in-app feedback tools, post-call IVR surveys, helpdesk or CRM feedback forms, web analytics and social media dashboards. A cloud contact center platform can trigger a post-call survey as soon as the call ends, so the customer rates the interaction with a keypress and the result flows into the supervisor's CSAT report.

Conclusion

Customer service metrics are the fodder for every business. It is an imperative factor that enables the process of improvement. Methods for measuring customer satisfaction might vary across industries; however, the above-stated pointers are the most successful parameters that are used to guide a support team. You cannot improve what you don't know. Thus, measuring customer satisfaction must be a prevalent practice at businesses of all sizes, irrespective of industry.

C-Zentrix is a company that understands the importance of this practice and pushes a symbiotic support system for businesses across the world.