According to research, 77% of customers have had positive experiences with businesses over the past year.
It’s a no-brainer that your business will fail if you don’t keep your customers satisfied. It’s also true that growing businesses prioritize customer engagement and satisfaction more.
In fact, companies with decreasing or constant revenue don’t prioritize customer satisfaction as much. As such, you must be mindful that happy customers can become your best salespeople. It is by their recommendations and referrals that you can grow your customer base.
A leading indicator of customer churn is bad customer experience. They can even negatively affect the growth of your company. You must gauge customer satisfaction to eliminate customer churn and enable your business to grow smoothly.
In this article, you will come to know all about customer satisfaction. You will understand why it’s important, how you can measure it and how CRM enhances customer experience.
The Importance of Customer Satisfaction for a Business
Understanding customer satisfaction gives you an insight into what a customer thinks about your company.
Of course, no business wants its customer base to shrink. However, building a customer base can be quite a difficult task. Thus, you must make customer satisfaction a priority.
Here are some reasons why customer satisfaction is so important:
1) Products
Even if you think that your products are perfect, customers might not agree. For example, your customers might point out a safety flaw in the products, which you didn’t consider. They might also be using your product in a way that you hadn’t expected.
Regardless of the scenario, you will need input from your customers. This helps you understand if there are any changes to be made. You might also decide to do away with a product after suggestions from your customers.
2) Services
Regardless of the way you intend your customer service to be, your customers might interpret it otherwise. For example, you may have a service for consulting, but most of your customers may not want it.
They might want more or fewer services from you. That is why you must take customer satisfaction into account.
3) Operations
Consider the business hours of your company. Do you believe you might boost sales if you stay open for another hour? If you’re facing such a dilemma, the best course of action would be to ask your customers.
You can have your customers fill out a survey to determine an adjustment of business hours, internal processes, etc. Thus, this way you can make decisions about other relevant aspects of your business.
4) Marketing
It is of utmost importance to understand your customers when you are trying to market your products. One excellent way to understand what your audience wants is by surveying their interests.
Once you understand their preferences, you’ll be able to offer them solutions through your products.
Also, read 6 call center problems and How to overcome them.
How do you measure Customer Satisfaction?
It’s very important to measure customer satisfaction as a business. However, you must be wondering how to measure such an abstract idea. In reality, you actually measure customer satisfaction through scores.
Customer satisfaction scores are especially necessary to track, as customers are your main source of revenue. As mentioned before, your company will suffer if your customers are not happy.
Now, how can you as a business owner collect data on customer satisfaction? You can measure customer satisfaction by making customer surveys.
With technology, you can easily make use of digital analytics. These show you how customers are navigating your website, what features they’re interacting with, the challenges they’re facing, etc. However, you need to be more thorough.
Here are the three crucial metrics that you can use to measure Customer Satisfaction:
1) Customer Satisfaction or CSAT scores
This is the most important metric to find out about customer satisfaction and your customer experiences. The CSAT score gauges whether the services and products that you offer to meet your customer’s expectations.
A CSAT survey basically asks customers to rate their experience after they use a product or service. The rating scale ranges from 1 to 5 in most cases. Most surveys also show customers the reason behind their ratings.
2) Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is a very commonly used metric to measure customer satisfaction. It’s also the most popular of the three metrics to measure customer experience. Generally, this metric asks only one question from a customer.
First, NPS will ask your customer how likely they are to recommend your brand to others. Next, it will ask an open-ended question to gauge all the reasons that led to a customer’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction. NPS scores lie between 1 to 100.
3) Customer Effort Score (CES)
Yet another metric used to measure the customer satisfaction level of your brand is your CES. This score measures the amount of work that customers need to put in to solve their challenges. Basically, it helps understand whether customers are getting adequate support from the company.
The best way to do this survey would be to use multiple channels. That would enable you to cover the maximum of your customer base. Moreover, it will also ensure you receive the maximum number of responses.
