To say that customer satisfaction is important is an understatement. In 2023, it will be a necessity. According to Gartner, 81% of marketers consider customer satisfaction to be the primary area of expertise in their industry.
But competitive advantage is not everything. According to PwC, 59% of customers will leave a company after several bad experiences and 17% after one bad CX. Yes, this also refers to loyal customers, since they will not return.
Therefore, the importance of customer satisfaction cannot be underestimated. It is the best way to ensure their loyalty so that they end up becoming brand ambassadors. Every company must treat customer satisfaction as an essential business factor and work to improve it.
What Is Customer Satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction is a measure that determines how well a company’s products or services meet customer expectations. It is one of the most important indicators of customer purchase intentions and loyalty. As such, it helps predict business growth and revenue.
While the above definition sounds pretty straightforward, in reality, it’s not that easy to define what “satisfied customers” really means for an organization.
This is where specific customer satisfaction metrics such as CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) come into play, allowing you to determine what exactly influences satisfaction, or lack thereof, among users.
In addition, a high level of customer satisfaction guarantees long-term customers and is a differentiating factor from the competition. It also allows you to avoid the consequences of a bad customer experience (CX): customer churn and negative word of mouth.
How To Measure Customer Satisfaction?
To track customer satisfaction, you need to set up a CSAT survey that asks users to rate their experiences with a business, typically on a scale of 1-5.
You can also measure a customer’s overall satisfaction with services or monitor specific touch points, such as making a purchase or contacting customer service, among others.
It’s also a good idea to include open-ended customer satisfaction survey questions after you’ve scored them so they can explain their choice and write specific feedback.
But CSAT isn’t the only customer experience metric out there. There are others that help measure customer loyalty and happiness with a company.
One of them is the popular NPS (Net Promoter Score) that monitors the probability that customers recommend a brand to their friends, family and immediate environment.
CES (Customer Effort Score) can also be used to measure how easy it is for your customers to interact with a company.
Measuring and analyzing customer satisfaction should become an ongoing action in a business, not just something done once in a while or to deal with a reputational crisis. As McKinsey & Company put it, the three Cs of customer satisfaction are “consistency, consistency, and consistency.”
In conclusion, customer survey software can help set up recurring surveys, collecting the responses and analyzing them in one place. This will make it possible to create a sustainable process for measuring customer satisfaction.