Is Your Business Measuring the Right Customer Satisfaction Metrics? 5 Ways to Do It.
Today, more than ever, customer satisfaction is essential to your success. After all, a happy customer is a loyal customer—and loyal customers not only purchase more frequently from your company, but they tend to spend more, too. They’re also more likely to recommend you to their friends and family, which can bring you even more revenue without a corresponding increase in your sales and marketing budget.
On the other side of that equation, failing to satisfy customers leads to higher rates of customer churn, and that can be costlier than you may think. According to the Harvard Business Review, it can cost as much as 25 times more to bring in new customers than keeping the ones you already have.
“It can cost as much as 25 times more to bring in new customers than keeping the ones you already have.” Share on X
There’s a real bottom-line benefit, then, in nurturing customer satisfaction. Yet, too many efforts to track and improve this important aspect of your business focus too much on operational aspects and not enough on the real drivers of customer loyalty and engagement.
As important as they are, traditional customer satisfaction metrics, such as average call handle time and first-contact resolution, are more about your operational efficiency than about how happy your customers are. So, in an age where consumers are savvier and more demanding than ever, how do you go beyond those basic operational factors and measure the customer satisfaction metrics that really matter?
5 Customer Satisfaction Metrics You Should Be Measuring
#1: CSAT and Net Promoter Score
The first and most obvious step to accurately measuring customer satisfaction is simply asking people for their opinions. And, though there’s some debate over the most effective means for doing this, the most popular and widely used methods are customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
The most simple and effective way to find out how satisfied your customers are with your business is asking them in a survey.
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The appeal of the NPS is in its simplicity and reliability. By asking two basic questions—how satisfied someone is with your business, and how likely they are to recommend it—you can quickly get a sense of how many people are truly satisfied with what you’re offering. It’s also a long-term, customer satisfaction metric that measures not just individual experiences but cumulative performance.
Read more about the Net Promoter Score
The CSAT is more detailed and customizable, asking more specific questions that give you an in-depth look at your strengths and weaknesses. This feedback can yield useful insights into how to improve certain aspects of your operations or customer service, but it’s also more likely to reflect satisfaction with a specific transaction than overall, long-term performance.
Read more about the CSAT
As far as how to administer either the CSAT or NPS, you have a number of options, ranging from popups on your website to “how can we improve” post-transaction messages to regularly sent email surveys. Which method is most likely to yield the highest rates of participation depends on your specific industry and unique customer base.
#2: Customer Effort Score (CES)
Your customer effort score, or CES, measures how much effort people have to spend to get the transaction they want from your business. When administered as a survey, it typically asks one simple question about how easy or difficult it was to resolve their issue, whether that involved making a purchase, receiving support or a review, or some other basic interaction.
It should be easy to resolve issues for your customers, whether that was making a purchase, get support, or a basic interaction.
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Some experts value the CES over the CSAT and NPS, arguing that it’s more important to offer customers an experience that’s fast and easy rather than one that tries to make them happy. “Instead of providing a series of bells and whistles in customer interactions, companies need to reduce the amount of effort customers make,” as a well-known customer effort report by the Harvard Business Review puts it.
“Instead of providing a series of bells and whistles in customer interactions, companies need to reduce the amount of effort customers make.” Share on X
To get the most honest and timely feedback on how well your services are being delivered, a CES survey should be administered immediately after each transaction. As such, like the CSAT, the info you get will tend to be more specific to single transactions rather than your overall performance. But, over time you’ll receive a valuable overview of your overall performance across multiple sectors of your business.
#3: Social Media Metrics
Being active on social media is a key part of customer communications today, giving you a valuable opportunity to interact with your customers in more personal and immediate ways than ever before. It also provides an unfiltered (and sometimes unwelcome) perspective on their opinions of your business.
Tracking your presence on social media provides unique insight into the customer experience you offer.
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Tracking your presence on social media provides unique insight into the customer experience you offer, such as the frequency of brand mentions you receive, the ratio of negative to positive comments from customers, or the amount of feedback you get involving technical difficulties. The latter metric can let you know whether your traditional support mechanism is succeeding or failing, for instance.
Social media can be difficult to parse. The anonymity of some platforms can make it a breeding ground for negativity, which doesn’t necessarily reflect your true rates of customer satisfaction. There are tools, however, that can be set up to monitor certain customer satisfaction metrics on social media that can provide valuable insights into how your customers really perceive you.
#4: Frequency of Upsells and Cross-sells
There’s no doubt the extent to which your customer service agents achieve upselling and cross-selling goals speaks to the quality of those representatives. It also can be a highly useful gauge for measuring customer satisfaction.
The higher the customer service quality will equate how much they can upsell.
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Because they signal the willingness of customers to expand their relationship with you, higher rates of upselling and cross-selling also demonstrate a satisfaction with the initial product or service for which a customer originally did business with you. As such, these goals not only improve your overall revenue, but also drive customer satisfaction.
#5: Customer Retention Rate
As research has consistently shown, you’re much more likely to sell to an existing customer than to a new one, which directly affects your immediate profitability. As pointed out by a Bain & Company report on customer loyalty, a modest increase of just 5% in customer retention can produce a profit increase of 25% or more.
“A modest increase of just 5% in customer retention can produce a profit increase of 25% or more.” Share on X
On top of that obvious operational benefit, focusing on your rate of retention also gives you a powerful customer satisfaction metric to track. After all, if you’re retaining most of your customers, that’s a huge indicator they’re satisfied with the service you’re providing and gives you the chance to expand that relationship to better understand what customers like most about the services you provide.
Like so many of these customer satisfaction metrics, a big key to retaining customers is working to offer the best possible customer experience. That means focusing not just on improving the operational aspects of the service you offer, but making sure you’re providing the best possible customer care, too.
Pro tip: How to Improve Customer Experience with On-demand Contact Center Services
Need Help Measuring Customer Satisfaction Metrics?
If you’re feeling intimidated or overwhelmed by the prospect of measuring these customer satisfaction metrics, worry not—we can help. With more than 20 years of experience helping businesses of all sizes, and across all industries, achieve the best possible experiences, Working Solutions is well-positioned to help your business implement the customer satisfaction strategy it needs to succeed.
Interested in learning more? Contact us here to schedule your complimentary consultation with a Working Solutions expert.
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Published on October 24, 2019
Published on October 24, 2019
