5 Ways to Successfully Measure Customer Satisfaction

2018-04-27

There’s a buzzword on the web right now. Ever hear the term, ‘Customer Centric’? According to industrial psychologists and researchers, customer centricity is the most successful business strategy for growing your customer base and increasing profits.
Being customer centric means developing every company decision with the customer in mind. Executives are encouraged to constantly ask, “What would the client want here?”

Part of being customer centric is obtaining feedback from your customers. This is not a once off task. It’s an ongoing culture that consistently listens to customers every step of the way.
Today’s smart business owner is asking, “How can I measure whether my customers are satisfied?”
Here are 5 of the most effective ways to measure customer satisfaction and steer your business accordingly.

Develop a Survey Campaign
An excellent approach to measuring customer satisfaction is to implement annual survey campaigns within your company. These campaigns should not be two-week stints. A good customer satisfaction survey will last at least six months.
Within the survey you will endeavour to establish:

• Whether customers would recommend your company to others
• How customers rate their experience (not your service) when dealing with your company
• What suggestions customers have on improving your company processes

How you develop a survey campaign is through meticulously monitoring all the channels available to you. These may include mobile app surveys, email surveys, social media surveys and post-purchase surveys. Let’s look at each of these briefly:

Mobile App Surveys
If your company has any apps, add a rating popup that prompts your user to rate their experience with your app and/or your company.

Email Surveys
Chances are you have your customers’ email addresses. Use these to conduct personal surveys to existing customers, who can probably give you the most accurate customer satisfaction rating.

Social Media Surveys
Facebook allows you to post a poll. These can be used as customer satisfaction surveys. Yes, they will be public; but this gives you a chance to see what all your customers already think of dealing with your business.

Post-Purchase Surveys
It’s highly beneficial to religiously prompt customers about their customer experience after they ‘ve made a purchase with you. Doing so will give you an idea of your entire sales process and what clients go through when they order from you.

Measure Your Customer Satisfaction Metrics
There are 6 types of metrics used for measuring customer satisfaction. When you collect data, you need to know how to organize it into an interpretable form of feedback. You also need to know how to form your questions when collecting this data.
This article discusses the 6 metrics by which you can measure customer satisfaction. In short, they are:

• Customer Surveys
• Customer Satisfaction Score
• Net Promoter Score
• Customer Effort Score
• Social Media Monitoring
• Things Gone Wrong

These metrics will give you some direction on what you should be looking for when you measure customer satisfaction at your company.

Hold a Focus Group
Focus groups give you a great deal of first hand feedback from customers who have already dealt with your company or experienced your products. They can tell you exactly how and where they see room for improvement.
Focus group companies find viable candidates that fir your demographic. They will then pose questions to these individuals and ask them specific questions on their satisfaction levels with certain products.
Questions in a focus group can include:

• How do you feel when you see this product?
• What memories do you have associated with this product?
• How have you experienced dealing with our company?
• What aspects about our company do you dislike and would like to see changed?
• Do you regard any of our competitors a more viable option than us and why?

Customers will essentially be talking directly to you about how they perceive you. With enough focus group sessions, you can accurately gauge where your company needs improvement.

Measure Online Customer Activity
Social media has become a powerful tool for monitoring customer satisfaction. The reason so many companies don’t use it? Because it’s PUBLIC.
But don’t let that one factor scare you away from a potentially amazing platform. Customers would much rather deal with a company that responds to complaints than one who hides them.

Facebook
There’s a company who’s name I won’t mention. This company’s Facebook page is rife with complaints, dissatisfaction, angry comments and frustrated rants. If this company was doing what they were supposed to, they would use this data as a sign that things need to change—drastically!
Your company should be on Facebook, and you should be watching your customer activity closely. Those who follow your page will respond to your posts. Look at what they like, what they say and how they respond to different posts, images, blogs and videos.
Record this data and use it to develop stats on your customer culture and how to appeal to them. You will also gauge their customer satisfaction from this kind of data, because it relates to a generalized perception of your company.

Blog Comments
You should also have a blog. If you do, what are your customers commenting? Again, this relates to a culture your customers have around your business. You need only read a blog comment section or look at a company Facebook page to know what’s really going on between customers and companies.
Make sure your blog commenting is positive. If it isn’t, it’s better to know what your clients are thinking than to allow things to deteriorate further. Form your blogs around issues that concern customer satisfaction and you’ll get loads of feedback to help you measure customer satisfaction.

Implement Intuitive IVR
IVR has come a long way. Today’s IVR is capable of recording every customer action or process. It not only deals with your customer queries, but also collects data on dissatisfaction, reasons for cancellation, upselling, and more.
Implement these and others into your business and grow in your customer centricity. It has proven to pay off significantly for other companies who have done so.