Measuring your customer satisfaction

In today’s article, we will talk about a very important measure for any type of business: your customer’s feeling of satisfaction with your product, service or company.

But why measure satisfaction? Can’t I just give my best, always? It is expected, of course, that every operation that serves internal or external customers is in constant effort to improve their service. But the truth is that many times, it is really difficult (or impossible) to understand if the measures adopted or the chosen path is being converted into a real benefit for those who receive the generated value.

An example: it is very common to give a lot of attention to ROI (Return on Investment), where the ability to generate financial results of operations, against the cost, is evaluated. However, it is relatively rare to talk about some kind of return on the consumer experience or impact on the satisfaction generated through the investment.

In Brazil, where about 90% of consumers consider the shopping experience as important or more important than the product or service offered (according to a survey conducted by Salesforce in 2019), positive perceptions in the customer’s mind can be a return as much or more than a cost reduction, for example.

Stay with us and better understand how to measure satisfaction and the main examples of metrics used.

Defining how to measure

The most usual way of measuring satisfaction is through opinion polls. But there are many factors to consider, including which survey to send, when to send, who and where to send to. Below, we will address some of these points.

Choosing a good trigger

There are several possibilities of “triggers”, or sending moments, for your research: time after signing or acquiring the lead, the number of actions performed (sending after x interactions), stage of the process, finalization of demands or delivery of the product/service.

In service teams, for example, the most common is for surveys to be sent automatically immediately after the end of a call. This proximity to the event is important: it allows your client to remember their experience as best as possible and evaluate as accurately as possible with regard to how they felt.

It would also make no sense to ask the opinion during the call, as it would not portray the experience as a whole. This timing is of paramount importance: think of a sales funnel, for example. Think of all the opinions that you missed out on if you measure only the satisfaction of the contacts that reached the bottom of your funnel, it will not be possible to know precisely the customers who left your brand behind!

Therefore, the first thing to do is to define exactly what you want to evaluate, which stages of your process are critical and relate to the perception of value, which stages have a high dropout rate or represent decision points which are more delicate, so it is important to know what the level of satisfaction of the contacts are in these points. Remember that too much research and questions can be annoying and decrease the response rate, so better not to abuse it.

Define who the search will be directed to

A little further on, we will see that one of the limitations of the NPS, one of the main satisfaction indicators used, is precisely the risk of not having data representative of the profile to be analyzed. Collecting satisfaction surveys indiscriminately will not be of much help, since a good part of the answers, for example, maybe from end-users, and only a minority of decision-makers. Or else it will not be possible to classify the level of satisfaction by segments (for example, company size), making more targeted action plans difficult.

When analyzing the satisfaction of your calls, for example, it is necessary to ask who the research is offered to, or who is the applicant?

Key satisfaction metrics

The following are the three most popular and used satisfaction metrics.

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)

The CSAT is a level of satisfaction specific to a moment of interaction with the company. This interaction can be opening a support ticket, completing a service, punctual communication, or purchasing a product.

Direct options (satisfied, neutral, dissatisfied) or scales (such as Likert’s, where a number is selected among gradual values) can be offered. There are two ways to calculate the indicator, considering the type of responses:

NPS (Net Promoter Score)

The NPS is a “loyalty index”, more generally, with respect to the brand or the company as a whole. It is generally not associated with a specific product or service, and the customer is asked periodically.

Although it does not point so directly to a problem in the process, it is a way of seeing longitudinal changes in the reputation of your company or team. If segmented, it is a way to track a customer’s history.

The NPS is a scale from 0 to 10, where the first six steps are considered as dissatisfied customers (or detractors), grades 7 and 8 as neutral customers, and the promoters those who answered 9 or 10. The calculation is simple, shown Next:

CES (Customer Effort Score)

CES measures the level of effort the customer has put in place to solve their problem. Reference support teams are specialists in offering a solution with minimum effort on the part of the customer, and this “facilitation” usually occurs through the use of more accessible channels and automated information systems.

The CES calculation is very similar to a weighted average, where a scale of 1 to 7 is usually offered:

Thus, we finished our quick review of important concepts when measuring your customer’s satisfaction.

If you are interested in learning more about metrics and KPIs from operations teams, be sure to read this.