• What is the most impactful factor to run a business successfully?
• What is that which may put a downfall even to a successfully running business?

Some of you may say finances or say strong management or an affecting market strategy.

All these factors have their importance but the most important factor which makes you run a business successfully is Customer satisfaction.

A satisfied customer is what every business looks for. One happy customer brings two more customers with them.

Even today, no matter how effective advertising you do for your product, a new customer will always consider the recommendations of an existing customer.

So, when feedback from our customers is so important that makes us change or improve our future market strategies, then isn’t it important to know our customer’s needs?

 Why is it important to know Customer Satisfaction levels?

Studying customer satisfaction helps a business to analyze its market value.

This helps businesses identify customer loyalty, unhappy customers, reduce churn, and increase revenue. It is also important to understand the market demand and attract new customers.

• It helps to understand customer’s brand loyalty.
• Reduces negative word of mouth.
• Increases the customer lifetime value
• Retaining an existing customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one.

Now let’s look at the various ways to understand our customers and their satisfaction levels.

In this article, we are going to have an understanding of the most used system of measuring customer satisfaction.

Customer Satisfaction Score

CSAT or the Customer Satisfaction Score is one of the most used and unavoidable tools to understand your customer’s satisfaction level.

Its customer satisfaction survey targets customers with the basic variations of questions like “How would you rate your experience with our sales/services/products?”

CSAT has the following parameters to understand satisfaction level which is very precise and helpful especially to know about the possible future changes in your business.

The scale typically ranges from:  very unsatisfactory / unsatisfactory / neutral / satisfactory / very satisfactory.

Though CSAT is precise and to the point still it doesn’t provide you the exact mindset of your customer and you cannot measure their loyalty to the brand.

A dissatisfied or satisfied customer may ignore the question because of not having a proper scale as per them.

Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score or NPS provides very easy and straightforward questions to the customer. The question somehow looks like this:

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend?”

They provide a scale measuring from 1 to 10 on the meter, where customer can simply put their feedback with one click.

This also fills the gap between the customer’s measuring score provided by CSAT.

The only drawback of NPS is slightly dissatisfied or unsatisfied customers are more likely to take this feedback, which again doesn’t bring the right level of customer loyalty.

NPS is popular because of its simplicity and accuracy. Its score is one-dimensional and without any incentives to recommend the brand.

Calculate your NPS by subtracting the percentage of detractors from that of promoters. The higher your score, the better.

 

Customer Effort Score

Unlike CSAT and NPS which sometimes provides superficial or unreal customer satisfaction score, CES provides deep learning of customer’s loyalty with ease.

Most likely questions that CES asks their customers are closed-ended but they provide options to the customers to give their feedback with few open-ended questions as well.

In CES the questions are most likely as: “How easy it was for you to interact with our services/products?”

The scale usually goes from 1(very easy) to 5 (monster headache). In this case the lower the score the higher the customer loyalty.

Like the other metrics, CES alone is not enough to measure customer loyalty on its own.

img src – zonkafeedback.com

Direct Feedback

The best and simple way to understand your customers and providing them the required support to retain their brand loyalty.

Direct feedback may differ from the demographics, emotions, and other parameters of customers.

Organizing a survey on different parameters is one of the major sources of measuring customer loyalty.

This can be done by taking the following direct feedback types surveys :

• In-app customer survey

Rating an app while using it is one of the most popular and easy surveys that take place while a customer is using your services or apps.

• Post Service Customer Survey

This survey usually takes place right after the services are provided to the customer. This can be done by sending e-mails, messages, over a call, or in a personal meeting.

• Volunteered Customer Survey

Have you seen a box of suggestions inside malls, restaurants, etc.?

These comment boxes or suggestion boxes are often kept there to seek customer’s feedback about the services.

Though these kinds of surveys are not that successful, with a small incentive or providing prompt services to the customer’s providing feedbacks is always an encouraging way to achieve more responses.

 

Indirect Customer Feedback Survey

We have seen the direct ways to reach out to our customers from time to time, and there are few indirect ways as well to understand your customer’s loyalty.

And for this practice use of Analytics and different channels like social media helps us to know customer loyalty.

• Analytics

Learning analytics is a good practice to know your customers. To know their interest you may refer to the data provided like the number of times they visited your site, bounce rate, time spent by them on the site, number of shares, etc.

• Using Social Media

Customers are everywhere, you have been using emails, phone calls, etc. One thing which is always handy to your customer is their mobile.

We should not forget this medium and should make maximum use of it. Social media helps you to collect data much faster and easier way.

With the help of different promotion activities, you provide customers an easy medium to contact you, in return, you can provide spontaneous support which helps them to refer you.

Increasing followers, recommendations let to learn the customer loyalty of your brand.

Up- Shot

No matter you have a large-scale business or a small one, to keep running a business successfully it is important to keep a track of customer satisfaction levels.

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