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Customer Satisfaction

How to measure customer satisfaction to retain customers

15 March 2022
CSAT customer feedback

Market analyzes agree that satisfaction is a key indicator to measure, capable of generating a predictive meaning of the company’s performance as 91% of unsatisfied customers change supplier. Measuring customer satisfaction becomes all the more crucial if we consider that 96% of dissatisfied customers do not complain , so it leaves no warning to the company about its future behavior.

On the other hand, market research shows that loyal customers make a business grow faster than sales and marketing.
In 2017 Robert H. Yanker, partner of McKinsey & Company, calculated the costs of acquiring, maintaining and recovering a customer. A new customer, according to Yanker, costs from 5 to 10 times more than an old one, while if you want to bring back an unsatisfied customer who has gone over to the competition, the cost reaches 100 times more than what is spent on the management of a loyal customer.

In addition, a dissatisfied customer talks about their dissatisfaction or the treatment received, on average, to 10 other people. Each of these people speaks to 6 others; each of which, in turn, to other 3 …

For Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot and author of numerous best-sellers, the secret of Hubspot’s success is tied to this belief:
“Feedback is the breakfast of champions. If we don’t know what’s right, we can’t do more. If we don’t know what’s wrong, we can’t do better. Without customer feedback, we are doomed to fail. If we don’t know how our customers feel, what makes them tick or where they are frustrated … we will fail. “

So asking our customers for feedback allows us to understand what drives their satisfaction and if there are aspects that we need to improve to avoid losing them.
It all starts with collecting feedback from our customers.

 

 

The ACAF Customer Feedback Cycle

The strategic system for collecting and implementing customer feedback is called the “ACAF Cycle”.

Its name is the acronym of:

  • A as Ask , or Asking customers for feedback
  • C as Categorize , i.e. Categorize the feedback
  • A come Act , or Act based on feedback
  • F as Follow-up , i.e. Following up on customer requests by informing them that we are really listening to them

 

ciclo di feedback A.C.A.F

 

 

Each step of this process requires correct tools to be carried out with ease and rigor.

 

 

 

ASK: Ask for feedback from customers

The process for measuring customer satisfaction begins with the satisfaction questionnaire, i.e. with the request for feedback from our customers, and then asking a precise and direct question about satisfaction.

But what questions should we ask? It depends on our goals.

  • Do we need to understand general trends in customer satisfaction over time?
  • Should we identify customer service issues that frustrate customers?
  • Do we need to discover the problems of the product in order to improve it?

Appropriate analysis procedures correspond to each objective, which we see in detail in this article.

 

 

1. Questions to understand general trends in customer satisfaction

To identify general customer satisfaction trends, we need to set up a satisfaction questionnaire that helps us first establish a baseline on how happy (or unhappy) our customers are today. So we can ask the same question at set intervals to understand how customer satisfaction changes over time. This will help us identify trends and solve new customer problems.

The most popular ways to measure general trends related to customer satisfaction are data:

  1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
  3. Social media monitoring

 

a) NPS or Net Promoter Score

The NPS, which stands for Net Promoter Score, is a synthetic index that is growing in popularity to measure the likelihood that a person will recommend a particular product or service. The satisfaction questionnaire consists of asking a single question with an answer on a scale of 1 to 10.

 

esempio domanda NPS

Example of an NPS survey made with Kiosk Emoticon .

 

Customers who choose an answer between 1 and 6 are called detractors, those who answer 7 and 8 are neutral, those who answer 9 and 10 are called promoters.
The NPS index is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors (customers who would not recommend you) from the percentage of promoters (customers who would recommend you).

It is commonly used as a tool for measuring customer loyalty. In fact, customers who fall into the “promoter” category tend to have a 3x to 8x higher lifetime value (LTV) than the “detractor” category.

The NPS index is therefore used as a reliable measure to predict revenue trends. According to data from Bain and Company, companies with the highest NPS in their industry tend to outperform their competitors by at least 2x.

Here are the pros and cons of using an NPS questionnaire:

 

PROAGAINST
  • The question is not about an emotion (i.e. how satisfied you are) but an intention (i.e. how likely you are to recommend) and therefore is easier to answer.
  • The question is easily understood by most of the respondents.
  • The NPS survey generates high response rates as it only requires one response.
  • The NPS survey is highly correlated with customer growth and retention.
  • The NPS survey can be time-consuming to calculate without a customer feedback tool. To solve this point, you can use the Kiosk Emoticon NPS module.
  • There is a different cultural perception linked to values (eg an “8” in America has a different meaning from an “8” in Italy).
  • The vote is linked to the last point of contact a customer has had with our company and how they feel on a given day.

 

 

Many companies, especially in the United States, use NPS as their main metric not only to measure customer satisfaction over time but to predict the future performance of the company. In fact, the evidence shows that companies with an NPS greater than 50% will have a growth in turnover.

Eg. Amazon’s NPS is 62; Airbnb’s of 74, Apple’s 72, and Tesla’s NPS is an astounding 96.

 

 

b) CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Analysis

The CSAT satisfaction questionnaire is also based on asking a question focused on determining the level of customer satisfaction. It is a type of questionnaire that has a low impact on the customer in terms of time required to provide information and has a very high value for the company.
The central question concerns the degree of satisfaction with our company and therefore the CSAT score expresses how satisfied a customer is with the specific interaction with the company.
The question looks like this:

 

 

esempio domanda CSAT

Example of CSAT Survey made with Kiosk Emoticon.

 

CSAT questions are often asked at the end of live chats or knowledge base articles to learn how helpful the solution has been for the customer.

Here are the pros and cons for using a questionnaire based on the CSAT index:

 

PROAGAINST
  • Short and intuitive. It’s a simple question with clear answers.
  • The rating scale is adaptable.
  • We can vary the answers depending on what works best for our audience (e.g. emoji, text, stars, or numerical rating scales).
  • The survey generates high response rates since it is just a question.
  • There is cultural bias (a wider range is not always better, due to cultural differences in how people rate their satisfaction).
  • Sometimes it is difficult to understand what we can improve as a company.
  • Difficult to overlap this data with “more objective metrics” such as usage data and CRM data so that teams can understand how different cohorts of users / customers respond differently.
  • Our client may have a deviated point of view from the last point of contact a client had with our company and how he feels that day.

 

 

c) Social media monitoring

In addition to collecting NPS and CSAT surveys, you can hear what customers are really thinking about you using tools like Google Alerts or Mention that help identify social mentions and brand forums on websites like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Yelp, TripAdvisor and other third-party review sites.

While there isn’t a specific survey question that the customer answers, it is these means that allow you to get a general feel for what customers are saying about your company over time.

Here are the pros and cons of social media monitoring:

 

PROAGAINST
  • No burden for the customer to complete a survey as the “mention” is in their natural environment.
  • Get a true measure of what customers think of you as this method is completely organic.
  • Difficult to measure and quantify, making it nearly impossible to track performance over time.
  • Difficult to tie social media comments to a large-scale CRM system.

 

Find out how Kiosk Emoticon can help you create questions to understand general trends in customer satisfaction over time by administering NPS and CSAT surveys

 

 

2. Questions to identify customer service issues that are most frustrating to customers

These are useful questions to evaluate the performance of the support service.

The customer is asked to answer questions such as: How is the customer service team doing? Are you satisfied with the service you have received? Are we offering fast and high quality service?

The most useful questionnaires to identify the satisfaction of the service provided are:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
  • Customer Engagement Score (CES)

Let’s analyze them in more detail.

 

a) Net Promoter Score (NPS)

As already highlighted, the satisfaction questionnaire based on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the likelihood that a person will recommend your product or service.

An example of an NPS question is:

sondaggio NPS

Example of an NPS survey made with Kiosk Emoticon.

 

 

Here are the main pros and cons:

 

PROAGAINST
  • Easily understood by most respondents and most of an organization.
  • It typically generates high response rates as it is just a simple question.
  • Limited in the broad spectrum of emotions one might feel after a service interaction.
  • Lack of clarity about what they are asking or how it relates to their problem.
  • A rating scale must be universally understood: stars, inches, and numerical rating scales present challenges in analyzing customer feedback.

 

b) Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

As already shown, the questionnaire based on the CSAT index measures how satisfied a customer is after interacting with the company.
An example CSAT question:

 

example of how to measure customer satisfaction

Example of CSAT Survey made with Kiosk Emoticon.

 

 

PROAGAINST
  • Short and intuitive. It’s a simple question with clear answers.
  • The rating scale is adaptable. We may vary the answers depending on what works best for our audience (e.g. emoji, text, stars, or numerical rating scales).
  • High response rates since it’s just a question.

 

 

  • Cultural bias (a wider range is not always better, due to cultural differences in how people rate their satisfaction).
  • Difficult to understand how good / bad a score is due to wide ranging benchmark data.
  • Lack of actionable feedback in terms of understanding what we can improve as a company.
  • Difficult to overlap this data with “more objective metrics” such as usage data and CRM data so that teams can understand how different cohorts of users / customers respond differently.
  • Vote disturbed by the last point of contact a customer had with our company and how they feel on any given day.

 

c) Customer Effort Score (CES)

The CES survey allows you to obtain a quantitative index of the commitment required from customers to interact with the company. These interactions can be related to the effort required to use a product, to access a service or to the ease with which the customer was able to solve a problem. The importance of the CES survey is therefore related to the ability to keep the fundamental promises of the company, how to solve a problem quickly.

The reference question for this survey is:

 

Sondaggio CES, Customer Effort Score

Example of CSES survey made with Kiosk Emoticon.

 

The CES index therefore represents the measure of the difficulty for a user to reach a resolution of the problem. Unlike the NPS application, which emphasizes acquiring “promoters” to recommend the business to others, CES focuses on creating an “effortless experience” for customers.

Using the CES index is emphasized in a Harvard Business Review article that having a low-effort experience is one of the best ways to increase customer loyalty. According to the HBR study, 94% of customers who report low effort said they would repurchase, while 88% said they would increase spending.

Finally, according to CEB, 96% of customers with high CES scores showed reduced loyalty in the future, while this was the case for only 9% of those who reported low CES scores.

 

PROAGAINST
  • Strong predictive ability
  • One question to answer.

 

  • It does not provide information regarding the customer’s overall relationship with your business. It is much more difficult to identify areas for improvement than all the other options available.
  • Lack of segmentation by customer type.

 

Find out how Kiosk Emoticon can help you create questions to identify the most frustrating customer service issues by administering NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys.

 

The surveys described are feasible through digital methods that have as their strong point the ability to collect responses quickly and easily create a point of contact between customers and the company.

 

 

Step Two: Categorize – Categorize the feedback

The collected data must therefore be organized. We can generally divide feedback into 3 main categories:

  • Product feedback
  • Customer service feedback
  • Marketing and sales feedback

If the data collection was successful, only a specialized program is able to process the information and organize it in a short time in order to create easily intelligible reports. Otherwise you will need to compile and manipulate data in spreadsheets and run pivot tables which and VLookup which take a long time to analyze trends.

 

Step Three: ACT – Acting on Feedback

The results should then be shared with

  • Product team
  • Customer support team
  • Marketing and sales team

Experts recommend sharing the results in order to act on the advice received.

 

Step Four: Follow – up with customers

According to research by an independent group in the UK, 43% of customers do not leave feedback because they don’t think the company really cares what customers think. The data highlights that 81% of customers would be willing to leave feedback if they knew they would get a quick response.

It therefore becomes a vital element to make our customers feel appreciated for their feedback, both positive and negative. Only in this way will they collaborate with us by providing us with other feedbacks and therefore other elements for improvement.

 

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CES CSAT Kiosk Emoticon NPS Satisfaction questionnaire

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