Ways to Gauge Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is going to dictate the future of your business.

13:26 30 June 2021

If your customers are satisfied, they’ll keep coming back for more (and spread the word to their friends about your business). If unsatisfied, they may become detractors, discouraging people from trying your products or services.

 

You can’t just assume that your customers are satisfied because you think you’re doing a good job. Your customers may have a totally different opinion. The only way to tell for sure is to directly measure customer satisfaction, consistently, and take action to improve when necessary.

 

But how can you do this?

 

Quantifying Customer Satisfaction

 

First, you need some kind of method to quantify customer satisfaction. We tend to think of satisfaction as a subjective, qualitative variable; a person feels a vague degree of satisfaction under some conditions. But if you’re going to make your customer satisfaction strategy both directed and actionable, you need to turn it into something more objective and quantitative.

 

The most common way to do that is with the help of a cumulative customer satisfaction (CSAT) score, which you can generate by issuing quantitative surveys to your customers on a regular basis.

 

The only catch here is that most customers don’t have the time, patience, or motivation to go through a long survey or answer dozens of questions about your brand. That’s why modern best practices encourage brands to gather customer satisfaction information in small chunks.

 

For example, you can issue a survey with just a few pages:

 

• A simple, quantitative satisfaction question. “How satisfied are you with [product/service]?” Give customers the chance to answer on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being “very dissatisfied,” 3 being “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied,” and 5 being “very satisfied.” It’s simple and straightforward, but if your sample size is sufficiently large, this is all you need to get a great snapshot of customer satisfaction with your business.
  
  
• Room for an extended, qualitative satisfaction response. As a follow-up, you can ask your respondents to provide a few sentences describing why they chose the satisfaction rating they did. For example, did they choose a 2 because their shipping was delayed or because they weren’t happy with the customer service they received when they called and complained about it?
  
  
• A personalized thank you. Customers feel better and are much more likely to respond to surveys in the future if they get a personalized thank you message at the end of their experience.

 

Of course, you can add more questions to your survey, asking about customer satisfaction as it pertains to certain areas (like product quality, customer service quality, etc.), or inviting customers to provide more feedback in other areas. But the longer and more time-intensive your survey is, the lower your response rate is likely to be.

 

Interviewing Customers

 

Depending on your business, you may also have the opportunity to interview your customers one-on-one. For example, if you’re in a B2B environment and your account managers work closely with contacts representing major clients, having periodic phone calls to discuss satisfaction can be a good use of time. It may be harder to quantify satisfaction with an open interview than with a straightforward, quantitative survey, but you’ll get a much better sense for the people you’re working with and how they feel.

 

What to Do If Customers Aren’t Satisfied

 

If you discover that your customers are chronically unsatisfied, or that your satisfaction rates aren’t changing despite improvements in the business, there are a few important steps you’ll need to take:

• Identify the root causes. There are many potential reasons why your customers are dissatisfied. It could be your prices, your delivery/fulfillment, your customer service, or something else entirely. If you’re going to make improvements, you need to figure out what the root causes are first.
  
  
• Ask for more specific feedback. Talk to a selection of customers who rate themselves as dissatisfied and try to get more information. What could change to make them satisfied?
  
  
• Make investments and improvements. Be prepared to make investments and improvements in your business. For example, can you hire better customer service agents to provide more robust service? Can you research and develop new products to better serve your audience?
  
  
• Experiment, measure, and repeat. Improving customer satisfaction isn’t like flipping a light switch; it requires an ongoing series of careful experiments and gradual refinements. You’ll need to tinker with several variables and measure customer satisfaction to see if it changes in response. If you don’t see significant improvements, you’ll need to keep experimenting.

 

Customer satisfaction represents your business’s destiny. If you can measure it accurately and improve satisfaction over time, you’ll be in a prime position to generate more revenue, boost customer loyalty, and remain operational for many years to come. Don’t underestimate its power.