3 Tips for Measuring and Achieving Customer Satisfaction

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Nobody likes to feel unheard. Especially customers.

Measuring customer satisfaction is a top priority for any business – and for good reason! A happy customer is more likely to spend more, come back for more, and get other people to buy from your brand.

On the other hand, unhappy customers pose a significant risk to businesses: at best, they’ll reluctantly go through with the purchase. At worst, they’ll never buy from your brand again and drag the company down on public online reviews.

So how can you make sure your company is using the right methods to improve customer satisfaction at scale? In addition to the many customer service metrics

You can’t buy that kind of customer loyalty, but you can watch metrics to make sure and you can definitely measure and make better business decisions from it.

What is customer satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction is the measurement of how happy your customers are with their experience.

How do you measure customer satisfaction?

Tip 1: Use multiple customer service metrics

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a tried-and-true way to measure customer happiness, but it doesn’t always tell the full story. Today’s customer, the “NOW Customer,” expects rapid-fire, on-demand experiences that are on-par with the best experiences they’ve ever had. How can companies make sure they’re meeting the NOW Customer’s expectations? Can all that be captured in one single metric? Not necessarily.

According to Simplr’s 2021 study, The State of Ecommerce Live Chat, brands with great customer satisfaction scores have a high correlation to effort, repurchase rate, and lifetime value. Those companies are watching measurements and using tools that are relevant to consumers in the era of NOW CX. These include:

• Customer Effort Score. Making sure that your website is easy to navigate is a crucial component of customer satisfaction.
• First Resolution Time. Speed is very important when it comes to the NOW Customer. How quickly you’re answering customer service emails, text messages, chats, and phone calls can greatly affect overall satisfaction. This is an important one to measure.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS measures the likelihood of a customer recommending your service or product to a friend. Since word-of-mouth can make or break a brand (hello, Yelp reviews!), this is a very important one to track.
• Repurchase rate. Are your customers coming back to your store over and over again? Tracking a customer’s repurchasing behavior is a great way to gauge their satisfaction and their lifetime value.

There are many ways to measure customer satisfaction and combine insights and data. Companies that equally prioritize all the different variables have a clearer, more holistic vision of how their CX is performing.

Tip 2: Engage your “silent customers”

For every customer that fills out an NPS rating, 10 do not. Since not everyone is going to participate in post-purchase surveys or ratings, the best way to measure their satisfaction is to proactively engage with them. Here are three ways you can increase customer satisfaction among customers who are otherwise “quiet”:

1. Build out a robust live chat strategy (and staff it with humans!). Studies show that engaging with customers during the pre-purchase stage makes them feel more confident and more excited about their purchases. While they may not take the time to fill out an NPS rating, a business can tell a lot about how they interact with a human agent on their website. The results of live chat interactions show where improvements can be made in customer satisfaction.
2. Track conversations across multiple channels. Website visitors can be quiet, and they can also be all over the place. Companies like Gladly make it easy to track support conversations across multiple channels (such as chat, email, and phone) to make sure that no customer falls through the cracks and becomes unaccounted for.
3. Reach out to customers outside the buying journey. Traditional customer satisfaction metrics and tools were built to catch a customer in a very specific moment: directly after a purchase. For many, this isn’t ideal timing. One way to avoid this is to reach out at another time, via email. While this may require some coordination with your marketing department, it’s always a good idea to check in.

When measuring customer satisfaction, it’s important to remember that traditional  measurements don’t always take into account the “silent customers.” Luckily, there are ways to proactively engage and track website browsers to ensure that they’re having a great, personalized experience.

Tip 3: Get the whole company on board with customer satisfaction

Gone are the days where customer support is considered a cost center. Most high-performing brands understand that great customer experiences lead to more lifetime value, customer retention, and revenue for the business. Insights should be readily available to your whole organization, including sales, marketing, finance, and the C-suite. Here are some ways to make this happen:

• Make sure that customer experience goals are aligned with the overall business goals.
• Ecommerce and CX should go hand-in-hand at this point. Both departments should be making investments in things like website experience, knowledge bases, software, personalization efforts, and making sure that every consumer question is answered.
• Marketing invests a lot of resources in getting your target market onto your website. It makes sense for both departments to be invested in the success of the end user experience.

As perceptions change about customer experience, it’s more important than ever for everyone in the organization to be invested in great support.

What it takes to measure and achieve customer satisfaction

In the era of NOW CX, customers have high expectations. Companies, therefore, are expected to go above and beyond every time to meet them. Luckily, brands can sustain customer satisfaction by measuring a combination of data sets, processing insights, engaging with “silent customers,” and getting their whole company on board with delivering the best experiences possible.

Interested in Simplr’s 24/7 human-first, machine-enabled CX staffing solution? Discover how innovative brands like Allbirds partner with Simplr to turn one-time customers into repeat customers and repeat customers into superfans (and how you can too).

Author Bio: 

Julia Luce is the senior content manager at Simplr, home of NOW CX. Julia helps brands navigate today’s customer experience landscape through trends reports, mystery shops, and interviews with leaders in eCommerce. Prior to joining Simplr, Julia worked as a freelance writer for professional and lifestyle outlets. She lives in Nashville, TN.