What is customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is a measurable metric that provides key insights about whether your product meets or exceeds customer expectations. By increasing customer satisfaction, businesses can help foster brand loyalty and trust.
The drivers for customer satisfaction may vary across different industries. This is as a company’s offering will likely have to tap into employee desires and needs specific to the kind of product they’re selling.
Why is measuring customer satisfaction useful for businesses?
Analysing customer satisfaction can help generate a positive reputation for businesses. By understanding your customer wants and needs, companies can tailor products designed to meet their requirements. It may also be useful to look into some contemporary challenges to customer satisfaction such as consumer trust, high cost-of-living and moderating brand image.
Learning how to measure customer satisfaction helps businesses make better judgements when trying to meet their needs and expectations. Meeting some current challenges to customer satisfaction like consumer trust, transparency and a high cost-of-living makes your business more competitive. Finally, employer branding can also have a great impact on customer experience.
Measuring customer satisfaction with qualitative vs quantitative data
Before we look at the different types of customer satisfaction surveys, it might be useful to look at the different types of data they collect first. Customer satisfaction feedback can be considered either quantitative or qualitative data. In this next section, we’ll look at the different uses of each.
Qualitative data
Qualitative data helps businesses find out the reasons, motivations, thoughts, desires and feelings behind certain decisions and behaviours. This can encompass branding, values, services and products. However, as this data is anecdotal, it can include unconscious bias. Therefore, businesses may do well to moderate discussions around their branding carefully. Some examples of qualitative data include:
- Gender
- Religion
- Hair colour
- Marital status
- Method of approach
- Strategy used.
To gain insights into qualitative data, a researcher usually separates qualitative responses from a dataset into different categories. These categories are divided by how similar the sentiment is.
Quantitative data
Quantitative data is represented by a numerical figure. Data from this type of survey can be quantified into factual statements and statistical results.
Quantitative customer feedback is typically provided in the form of a rating or a score. Usually, quantitative research involves a larger sample size, which leads to reduced bias and more impartiality. However, unlike qualitative data, businesses cannot get deeper insights into what their customers think and what makes them tick. Examples of quantitative data include:
- Age
- Weight
- Currency
- Conversion rates
- Sales data
- Number of transactions.
Types of customer satisfaction surveys
Customer satisfaction surveys allow businesses to find out what customers feel about their products. Different customer satisfaction surveys allow businesses to collect different kinds of actionable feedback. There are four main types of customer surveys:
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) surveys;
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys;
- Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys;
- Product-Market Fit surveys.
Formatting customer satisfaction surveys
Customer satisfaction surveys often use Likert scales. Likert scales are a type of ordinal scale which can be used to find out the degree to which someone agrees with a statement provided. They are sometimes used combination with multiple choice questions, open-ended questions and feedback boxes.
When using a Likert scale for customer satisfaction surveys, consider creating instructions, so customers know what the number designates, i.e. least or most satisfied. Likert scales typically range from one to five or one to seven. One is usually the lowest score a customer to give and the largest number on the scale is the highest a customer can give.
Consider adding open-ended questions to this survey type in order to gather written feedback from customers. You could also ask customers to expand on why they provided the score they did for each question. This type of feedback is qualitative, which means businesses can gather more information about a customer’s thoughts, feelings, decisions and reasons when it comes to customer satisfaction. At the end of the survey, you could also provide a section for customer reviews.
Customer satisfaction similarities and differences
These surveys have some similarities and differences. They all collect customer satisfaction, but they do so using different scoring systems and focus on different aspects of customer satisfaction. One of the benefits of using different types of customer satisfaction survey in tandem is that you can conduct a more granular investigation of what aspects of a product, service and customer journey they are most satisfied with.
Net Promoter Score survey look at whether a customer would discuss your product positively with their friends and family. The customer satisfaction score survey looks at how satisfied customers are from a scale of one to five. Customer effort score surveys explore how much effort customers have to put in to interact with a business. Finally, Product-Market fit surveys help businesses to uncover whether there is a demand for their product on the market.
In this next section, therefore, we take a look at the different kinds of customer satisfaction surveys and how they work.
Customer Satisfaction Score surveys
This type of survey simply collects customer satisfaction feedback. Typically using a Likert scale from one (very unsatisfied) to five (very satisfied), customers rate their satisfaction for each item on the survey. This makes customer satisfaction score surveys helpful for:
- Finding out how loyal customers are;
- Confirming you are making the right business decisions;
- Retaining current customers and attracting new ones.
Some examples of customer satisfaction survey questions include:
- How satisfied are you with our product?
- How satisfied were you with the service you received today?
- How satisfied were you with our website service?
Net Promoter Score surveys
This type of survey is usually based around a single question: ‘how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend?’ or variations on it. Promoters are customers that score highly (between 9 to 10), while detractors are customers who score between 0-6. Detractors are more likely to negatively influence others’ views of a product, while promoters are more likely to speak enthusiastically about it.
To gather more in-depth insights on NPS survey responses, businesses can provide open-ended questions and boxes to write their feedback. Learning what keeps customers coming back, what differentiates them from other similar brands and why they would recommend a product to a friend can help businesses become more competitive.
Customer Effort Score surveys
Customer Effort Score surveys help businesses find out how smooth a customer journey was, how complicated a new product is to learn, or whether their questions were resolved with ease. They can therefore use this feedback to find out how they can improve on ease of use. Customer Effort Score surveys involve asking questions like:
- How easy was it to use our website today?
- Do you feel satisfied with how customer support helped you with your question?
- Do you find our product easy to use?
As with Customer Satisfaction Score surveys, Customer Effort Score surveys also typically use a Likert scale, either from one to five, or one to seven.
Product-Market Fit surveys
When companies create products, they are usually responding to gaps in the market. However, not all products stay relevant to customers over a long period of time. Companies in a fast-changing industry may require Agile product management to keep their product features relevant to customers.
Businesses can also use Product-Market Fit surveys to find out if a new product is relevant to their customer’s needs and desires. To create a Product-Market Fit survey, consider using the following example questions:
- How disappointed would you be if you couldn’t use our product?
- How likely are you to use another product if ours wasn’t available?
- How much does our product meet your needs?
- How much would you like our product to stay as it is?
As with other types of customer satisfaction survey, companies can use a Likert scale to rate, e.g. how or more likely they are to use another product, how disappointed they might be if the product wasn’t available on the market and so forth. Again, they can also add a feedback box to find out what other products customers might be interested in using instead, as well as any needs they feel a product isn’t meeting.
How businesses can gather feedback using surveys
Businesses can share surveys with their customers through channels such as email, social media (including advertisements on social media), or in person. By choosing a wide range of channels to share surveys, companies may reach different customer bases. This can help them find out how a wider range of customer demographics are feeling about their products.
What to do with the results
Once you’ve collected the customer feedback data, businesses will need to organise and store it. Some steps to organising the data include:
- Identify and collect data from all channels customer feedback is being collected from.
- Create a centralised database for all customer satisfaction feedback. This could be a spreadsheet or a customer relationship management system (CRM).
- Create a standardised format for storing all feedback, such as data collected, nature of the feedback, feedback source.
- Create a workflow for the ongoing collection and processing of customer feedback. This could involve assigning relevant roles to data literate staff (such as a data manager) or automating processes using AI-powered HR tools.
- Categorise and tag feedback to make it easier to organise. This could involve tagging with keywords or attributes that make them more searchable.
- Analysing the results, looking for sentiment trends and patterns over time.
- Present the results visually using charts or graphs.
Customising customer satisfaction surveys
Businesses can also customise customer satisfaction surveys so they align more closely with their branding. Ways they can do so include:
- Featuring their company logo;
- Making sure survey colours, text and formatting are in line with company house style;
- Keeping the survey accessible and to-the-point;
- Using incentives that customers would be interested, such as vouchers or cash prizes.
Finding out how a customer feels or thinks about a product or service can help businesses identify what is working and why. It can also help them uncover what they could be doing better, or whether their customer base is likely to respond positively to a new product. Different customer satisfaction surveys provide slightly different results and can be used successfully alongside each other to provide the most in-depth results.
