Customer satisfaction (CSAT) measurement tools are plentiful. Sometimes it’s hard for strategists and marketers to choose a course of action and start measuring customer satisfaction. The way you grow customer happiness and retention will be unique to your organization. Still, the elements of a satisfying experience can be measured with similar strategies, regardless of your industry and the products and services you offer.
Not sure how to get started? Don’t worry. We’ll cover how to measure customer service with survey data in five steps (that other sources gloss over).
- Focus your research
Useful research starts with a focused goal. Work with your team to come up with a guiding query. It might sound like, “How can we get current customers to upgrade to our newest product release?” or “Why does our San Diego location retain more repeat customers than our Carlsbad location?” You might ask something as simple as, “How do we get people to recommend our service to a friend?” These are all excellent, results-driven queries that you can answer by measuring customer satisfaction.
For best results, avoid building your customer surveys around the general query, “How satisfied are our current customers?” Use survey templates as a guide and ask questions to collect data that your team can act on. No matter how positive the feedback, you can always improve customer satisfaction if you have a clear, shared purpose for your survey.
- Select your CSAT metrics
When you have a focused research query, you’ll be able to select a customer satisfaction metric that best aligns with your goals. The most common metrics include a general customer satisfaction score, which is usually measured by asking customers to rate how satisfied they are with a product, service, or experience. This is the baseline metric and gives you a count of satisfied customers, but it doesn’t answer all your questions, such as why people are satisfied or what you can do to improve their satisfaction and brand loyalty.
You’ll get those answers when you identify your customer effort score (CES) and net promoter score (NPS) or take a close look at customer churn.
A customer effort score indicates how customers rate your organization based on how easy, enjoyable, and effective (i.e. how effortless) their experience has been. Customer churn, on the other hand, is the rate at which customers who have made a purchase stop coming to a brand to make future purchases. And finally, a net promoter score tells you how likely your customers are to refer their friends to your company – and how likely they are to detract from your brand by leaving negative reviews or discouraging their friends from choosing you.
- Write objective questions
When collecting customer satisfaction data with surveys, it’s critical to write objective questions. Be careful not to limit their answer options or use wording that will lead them to choose only answers that you would like to see. Survey participants will feel frustrated that the survey is “rigged” and lose trust in your organization. As a result, they may abandon the survey or decide not to engage with your brand, affecting your response rate.
Subjective survey questions will also affect the quality of your survey data. When respondents don’t have adequate, objective questions to choose from, they can’t provide answers representing their point of view. Ask questions like. “How was your experience with our customer support team?” While it would be great to receive only positive CSAT results, a survey full of subjective questions doesn’t give you realistic feedback that can drive your improvement strategy.
- Collect and carefully review the data
If you’re not sure how to measure customer satisfaction, interpreting your survey data can also be confusing. Start by reviewing the feedback with a detailed eye. Yes, you will build a follow-up strategy from additional analysis, but first, you need to be familiar with what’s in the feedback. This way, you can recognize a strong or flawed step in your plans.
Once you know what’s in the raw data, you can quantify and analyze results and draw out key takeaways with QuestionPro’s reporting tools. At this point, you have measured customer satisfaction by referring to various metrics and asking carefully crafted questions. Next, you will take the scores and results you’ve revealed to create your strategy to achieve your established goal.
When you follow these straightforward steps for measuring overall satisfaction, you will equip your organization with the feedback you need to make improvements, optimize customer experience, and grow retention and customer loyalty. Get started with QuestionPro’s customer satisfaction survey templates today.
