Customer satisfaction, sometimes abbreviated as CSAT is a far deeper concept than it may seem on the surface. The definition is simple enough. Customer satisfaction relates to how satisfied your customers are with the goods or services you offer, the way they experienced customer service and the general efficiency of your company.
But the customer satisfaction definition leaves us with plenty of questions. What are its benefits? Do we know how to measure customer satisfaction? And, with these results in mind, do we know how to improve customer satisfaction? The answers to these questions, plus a few helpful hints, are summarised in this article.
The Importance of Customer Satisfaction
The importance of customer satisfaction can’t be overstated. It’s the basis of your company’s reputation within its market, and it will have a direct impact on how profitable your business is. Gaining new customers requires financial investment, and having used your resources to get them, you’d like to keep them.
There’s a good chance that satisfied customers will give you repeat purchases, raising the lifetime value of each customer acquired. And, if they think you’re worth supporting, they’ll mention you to friends and associates who have similar needs.
A recommendation from someone they know carries weight since it’s motivated by a spirit of helpfulness rather than the promise of profit. A person who makes a recommendation has experienced the business from a customer’s perspective – and that makes it seem more trustworthy than anything you might say about your business yourself.
Having decided to act on your satisfied customer’s advice, your new customers also experience your business and decide how satisfactory that experience was. If you earned their approval, they’ll keep you in mind and may recommend you to others in the future. Customer satisfaction can create a snowball effect in which you gain more customers and more sales revenue without doing anything other than making sure that each customer has a good experience.
How to Measure Customer Satisfaction
To measure customer satisfaction, you need to get targeted information directly from your customers. You’ve probably responded to such surveys yourself, so you’ll know that they can be sent using caller responses over the phone, SMSes, emails, chatbots, popups, postal services, or be handed out as hard copies. Nowadays, phone or online-based surveys are the most popular since they’re cost-effective, have fairly high response rates, and result in data that’s easy to process.
Here are some of the metrics that are widely used to measure customer satisfaction.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
To know whether your customers are likely to recommend your business, simply ask them! Instead of requesting a simple yes or no response, ask them to score you from one to ten. Target the position on the customer journey you want information on, get the scores, and discover what customers think of the targeted interaction. A score lower than 8 means there’s room for improvement.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT score)
A direct question asking whether your customers are satisfied with a product or service you offer provides another insight you can use to improve your business. Very satisfied customers are likely to buy again, so this can help you with your sales forecasts too.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Making your customers work hard to get the desired results makes them less inclined to repeat the experience. You may even be losing sales because customers prefer easier solutions. You can choose which areas to focus on here. For example, you could ask whether it was easy for them to find what they wanted, whether they found using the product easy to use, whether they could get help easily, and so on. Read more about customer effort score.
How to Improve Customer Satisfaction
What you focus on when working to improve customer satisfaction will depend on the activities you asked customers to evaluate and how they were rated. However, it’s possible to list a few general tips and guidelines.
Discover the Reasons for Poor Scores and Address Them
You may be able to see why clients aren’t happy with parts of their experience with you by targeting the areas they evaluated and taking a closer look, but you can also follow up with them. Less-than-happy clients may be pleased that you paid attention to their ratings, and if you can show them how you’ll use their information to improve, they might change their minds about your company.
Aim For User Friendliness
Did your customers have difficulty finding what they wanted on your website or in your store? It’s time to see whether you can make it easier. Examples could include adjusting your website’s design, making items searchable under a new series of terms, or eliminating a sign-up step. Physical stores can improve signage, ensure they’re on Google maps, or consider employing more customer service staff.
If your products themselves are responsible for making clients feel unhappy, you may need to adjust a design, offer explainer videos or walk-throughs, or address quality issues.
Work to See Your Customers’ Point of View
When you discover that customers dislike something you believed to be of a high standard, it’s easy to fall into a state of denial. Work to see their point of view. They wouldn’t tell you they were less than pleased with some aspect of your business if everything was just fine. Your perspective isn’t important to customer satisfaction – it’s your customers that call the shots here.
Ensure Best-in-Class Service
A great many customer issues can be overcome when help is at hand. Chatbots can help with simple queries, but resist being tempted to present them as human beings, and give customers an easy way to transfer their queries to a live agent.
Customers almost always see their enquiries as being “urgent” to some degree. At the very least, they’ll think that the fact they need help should be urgent to you if you care about serving them. That means manning all channels, including chat and calls, 24/7 and ensuring that customer service operatives are empowered to assist customers.
If the logistics, cost, and management challenges this implies makes 24/7 service seem like a tall order, there’s good news! You don’t have to do everything in-house if you have the right partners to help you. Choose a professional customer service company with the human resources and management software you need to provide best-in-class customer service.
Are you still not sure it can be done? You won’t know till you investigate this option in greater detail. Contact RSVP. Tell us about your customer service challenges and see what our London-based customer service company can propose.
We’re confident that you’ll find us more than equal to the task of representing you. We recognise the importance of customer satisfaction, and we deliver on our promises. Join the select group of companies that have found RSVP to be the key to greater customer satisfaction through dedicated customer service.
But there’s more. The customer satisfaction data we gather will help you to identify pain points your customers experience when doing business with you so that you can mitigate or eliminate them. Make things easy for your customers with RSVP. They’ll thank you for it!