How Happy Are Your Customers?

A Customer Satisfaction Lesson From My Hairdresser

 

Eva’s Story

What if every customer who walks in to your business knows everyone of your employees by their names?

They know your birthday or even your kids birthdays – and you know theirs? … kinda like a family affair?

… and your products or services have transformed their lives so much that they feel indebted to you?

Back in  2018 before I moved from Kasarani, Nairobi, I formed such a great relationship with my hair dresser.

Inevitably, I had to move to a different side of the city but my relationship with her was very personalized. Eva, my hairdresser has a way of keeping her customer relationships personal and customized.

Even after moving, I drive to her salon many kilometers away just because of our relationship.

Why am I telling you this story?

When customers are unsatisfied, they will leave.

In fact, there is one Zendesk report that revealed that eight percent of customers will migrate to another company after one bad service experience.

A majority of brands believe that great customer service has a profound effect on reducing customer churn, and ultimately the profitability of a business.

One of the core components of a company that considers itself to be customer-centric, is measuring customer satisfaction. For your company to be customer-centric, it means that all your plans and designs have the goal of fulfilling your customers’ needs and expectations.

Customer satisfaction is a measurement used to determine how happy your customers are with your business offering.

Measuring customer satisfaction gives you valuable information into the performance of your business. With the insights received, you can improve on areas that have issues and enhance on thriving areas.

With the availability of digital analytics, as a business owner or manager, you are able to find out if your customers are researching a goal, how they are interacting with a product feature, or even their relative struggle completing a given task. But it’s not possible to gauge their emotional response to a product or service.

However, measuring customer satisfaction gives you a glimpse of your customer’s emotional response. In the quest to improve customer experience, it is important to look at data in the right context while mixing it up with behavioral and attitudinal data.

Ways You Can Monitor and Measure Customer Satisfaction

 

1. Define Your Business Goal

Understanding your “Why” before undertaking any major business initiative is key in ensuring that you do not waste resources for something you are not so keen about.

Collecting data takes time, effort and there is a cost attached to it. So if no action will be taken after the data is collected, then there is no need to even start the process.

Understanding customer expectations is an essential element that determines customer success. Getting to learn the factors that affect customer satisfaction will help you as a business owner to provide products or services that meet the needs of your customers and consequently, help your business grow.

The objective should have a purpose such as:

• Improve a product or service
• Enhance the quality of customer service
• Introduce a complementary product
• Operationalize proactive support such as a knowledge base

 

2. Outline a Comprehensive Plan

Having identified the goals, the next step is establishing an actionable plan on how to achieve them. There is then a need to establish your target audience based on particular characteristics such as demographics, needs or behavior and the overall experience.

It is also important to identify when to send a survey. Doing it at the right time is important so that you can obtain the right response from your customers. Also to be considered is the frequency in which the surveys will be sent.

To evaluate customer satisfaction, you can acquire feedback at different points of the customer’s journey such as:

• After a support issue is resolved –  Once the support request raised by the customer is resolved, you can obtain feedback.
• Right after a demo – After a successful product demo, you can prompt a survey question to know the product feedback.
• After a successful sale – After a successful transaction checkout, you can prompt a survey to rate the customer’s sales experience.
• At the end of every chat session – When the chat ends, you can inquire from your customer about their overall chat experience.

 

3. Prepare the Survey Questionnaire

People are too often too busy to complete a survey so it is important to ensure that you ask direct or specific questions. The questions should be tailored to the type of product or service you offer. Asking the right questions is key to getting honest and useful information.

For honest feedback, it is recommended to ask open ended questions that allow customers to express themselves using their own words.

There are two types of feedback questions;

I) Quantitative questions – This offers feedback in a more broader or detailed way. Normally, the responses to these questions are original and unique.

For instance;

– How was your overall experience on our website?
– How can we improve your experience?

II) Qualitative questions – The feedback to these types of questions generally have multiple choice or ratings format.

For instance:

• • How likely will you be able to recommend our services to your friends?

Then have a scale of between 0 – 10, with 0 being not at all likely to recommend and as you move towards 10, extremely likely to recommend.

As a business owner, you can prepare questions to gain actionable insights to gauge customer satisfaction scores based on the qualitative or quantitative feedback requirements.

 

4. Choose the Right Communication Channel

It is important to identify the channels that your target customers are receptive to for giving feedback. You can then select the channels you know they find easy communicating with you on.

Surveys can then be sent through these channels to measure customer satisfaction.

Below are a few channels that can be adopted

• Email Surveys – These are perfect for your standard product and service-related surveys.
• Website Surveys – These are primarily used to understand the customer’s experience with the website.
• Chat Surveys – These are important measuring the performance of the support agent. Customers can be asked to rate the chat experience at the end of the conversation and the information received can be used to provide better product training or improve the interpersonal skills of the agents.
• In-app Surveys – These help to understand how good the support is inside your app. As a business, you can improve user experience by leveraging the survey data to understand users.

Choose And Monitor Customer Satisfaction Indicators

Once you have the questions ready, the next step you should take is determining the type of metrics to be used to measure customer satisfaction.

 

5. Customer Satisfaction Surveys

I) Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Surveys

The goal of CSAT is to find out how satisfied customers are with the products, services, business, or customer service team. Customers are questioned on their level of happiness or satisfaction regarding one or more aspects of a business.

For instance, “How satisfied are you with our product/ service?” Which has a score that typically includes;

– Very unsatisfied (0%)

– Unsatisfied (20%)

– Neutral (60%)

– Satisfied (80%)

– Very satisfied (100%)

 

II) Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys

This survey is used to determine whether customers are:

• Promoters – those likely to recommend.
• Passives – They are satisfied but not likely to recommend your brand and can easily be converted by competitors.
• Detractors – They are unsatisfied and have the potential to damage the company’s brand image and growth through bad word-of-mouth.

To measure this, a survey would ask customers a question like “How likely are you to recommend a product/ service/ brand to your friend or colleague?” This is then accompanied by a scale between 0-to-10 with:

• 9-10 being promoters
• 7-8 being passives
• 0-6 being detractors

 

III) Customer Effort Score (CES)

This measures how much work or effort that a customer has to apply in order to purchase products or services from a company. If the process is long, the customer is likely to move to your competitor if their process is much simpler.

Some customers may be willing to go through the complex process which is a good indicator of brand loyalty. CES seeks to collect data around specific features on a company’s website, resolution times, and support requests.

The questions could include:

• The company made my purchase easy.
• The service representatives handled my issue in a timely manner.
• How easy was it to get the help you wanted?

The CES rating scale typically consists of:

• Strongly disagree
• Disagree
• Somewhat disagree
• Neutral
• Somewhat agree
• Agree
• Strongly agree

6. Analyze and Evaluate Data Collected

Once data is collected, it shouldn’t just sit there dormant and unused. There is now the need for the data to be analyzed and in order to generate valuable insights. With the insights received, the information can be used to create a better product or to improve customer satisfaction ratings.

The information gathered will form the base of the company’s future planning. Once you have the customers’ feedback, as a business owner or manager, you should;

• Discuss internally, the customer feedback received in order to improve the quality of products or services.
• Involve all the team members of various departments to give a broader view of customer expectations.
• Establish the gaps between the business and customers. Then plan new business strategies to mitigate the gaps and gain more customers.

7. Manage Your Social Media

According to The Next Scoop research, “90% of businesses are predicted to leverage the power of social media for better customer service.” Social media has become one of the most influential channels that customers and businesses alike use to share ideas, opinions, and experiences.

Tracking these social media channels helps in analyzing the conversations in regards to the brand and in turn use these insights for better business decisions.

When customers mention your brand, as a business owner, you are able to understand where these conversations are happening and the perceptions of the customers towards your brand.

You can consider integrating social media monitoring tools for calculating user satisfaction within your social channels. The tools effectively monitor user satisfaction and behavior.

Implement the Feedback & Iterate the Process

Once you have received feedback from the customers it is important to make the necessary changes in order to improve customer satisfaction.

The idea of going through the process of collecting data is to understand and improve the areas of the business that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty. Customers feel appreciated and are happy when they know that they are valued and their voice is heard.

 

5 Tips for Measuring Customer Satisfaction

 Only ask relevant questions: Keep your questions open-ended to know what the customer thinks about your product or service.

• Make the feedback process simple: A simple process does not bother the customer and saves time. Avoid repetitive or general fields like name, email etc.
• Keep the conversation short and focused: Ask minimum questions to get accurate answers. Keeping your surveys short encourages more customers to complete them.
• Show your appreciation: Be kind and appreciate your customers for their feedback and time. You can incentivize them with discounts, coupons or good offers.
• Do it regularly: To ensure success in this process, consistency is an important factor. Consistently sending out customer feedback, ensures that you have more information about the problems with your product or service.

Remember that,

Many brands that are thriving in this modern and global economy, recognize that measuring customer satisfaction is of great importance because it helps in identifying how well the products and services of a company meet the customers’ expectations.