If there’s one thing that has been steadily declining in brands across industries, it has to be customer satisfaction.
Modern-day customers, thanks to the internet, are quickly coming to terms with what they can expect from their favorite brands. And if their expectations are unmet, they will not think twice before switching to a brand offering better experiences.
How are you planning to boost customer satisfaction at your company?
We recommend a data-driven strategy that tracks the major customer satisfaction metrics! Which customer satisfaction surveys and metrics to track, you ask?
Well, we have a list of the top 15 customer satisfaction metrics that you can refer to when drafting a customer experience strategy.
Let’s dive right into the content to discuss them all!
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What is Customer Satisfaction Metric?
Customer satisfaction metrics are a window into how satisfied customers are with your brand, product, or service.
Since every company wants to satisfy its customers, it needs to track metrics specific to customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction metrics help companies quantify the results of the efforts they put into boosting customer service.
Customer satisfaction metrics track crucial customer data points that reveal how delighted customers are with your business.
Some examples of the most important customer satisfaction metrics are the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
Let’s dive deeper to learn more about customer satisfaction metrics.
Why should you track customer satisfaction metrics?
Indeed, customer satisfaction metrics provide insights into the level of satisfaction among your customers. But, do you need them? What do customer satisfaction metrics bring to the table?
Let’s find out —
1. Foster a better communication and feedback system
You cannot just start tracking customer satisfaction metrics and believe it will bring any results. It all starts with the right mindset and intent to introduce better communication and feedback systems to the organization.
And customer satisfaction metrics only help turn the intent into a data-driven endeavor.
2. Prepare and predict business growth
Customer satisfaction metrics like Net Promoter Score and Customer Effort Score provide insights and patterns of customer satisfaction.
These patterns can be mapped and used for predictive business growth, i.e., companies can adopt the metrics to measure the likelihood of repetitive and new purchases.
3. Achieve insight into customer sentiments and decisions
You don’t want to lose customers, do you? The best way to keep your customers is to identify the ones about to leave and the ones that will stay.
Customer satisfaction metrics like Customer Health Score provide adequate insights about at-risk customers.
Moreover, you can use these metrics to determine the reasons behind customer sentiments and decisions.
4. Quantify your CX strategies
You can adopt any CX strategy for your company. But how will you figure out its effectiveness?
We highly recommend using customer satisfaction metrics to measure the impact of your new CX strategies and the changes to bring to them over time.
The idea is to quantify the efforts and decision-making.
What are the most important customer satisfaction metrics?
Now that you are well-acquainted with the concept and need for customer satisfaction metrics, we are all clear to move ahead and discuss some of the most important customer satisfaction metrics.
Let’s get started on how to measure customer satisfaction —
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
One of the most popular customer satisfaction metrics that is used by almost all the companies is Net Promoter Score.
When using NPS, the focus is on determining how likely customers are to promote or recommend a product, service, or brand to their friends and family. The NPS survey categorizes customers into three segments — promoters, passives, and detractors.
Customers will be rating your brand on a scale of 1 to 10. Net Promoter Score provides both quantitative and qualitative data about customer experience.
2. Customer Effort Score (CES)
Every company wants its customers to be able to use their products with minimum effort.
In other words, they want to ensure their products and services provide high user-friendliness. This is where customer effort score surveys come in handy.
A CES survey is simply a one-question survey that inquires about a recent action a customer performed.
The information collected can be used to identify potential roadblocks in the customer journey and boost customer retention.
You should use CES surveys as a proactive approach to finding out why a customer might leave.
3. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
You might ask why not just stick to the customer satisfaction score. After all, all we are trying to track is customer satisfaction.
Well, customer satisfaction score (CSAT) provides an insight into customer sentiment.
Just like NPS, customer satisfaction surveys help determine how satisfied customers are with you. However, the difference is that CSAT surveys focus on a specific product or service, and not on the entire brand.
You can ask multiple questions to the customers and address different aspects of the product.
4. Customer Health Score
Indeed, the different customer satisfaction metrics dive into different aspects of the customer journey and provide information related to them.
However, you will want to have an overall summary of how satisfied customers are with your business.
A customer health score is a metric that involves data from CES, CSAT, and other surveys and produces an overall picture of what customers feel about a company.
With a customer health score, you will find it easier to make efforts toward increasing customer retention and reducing customer churn.
5. Customer Service Satisfaction
Don’t just focus on selling. Indeed, customer satisfaction does depend on how impressive your first impression is with customers.
But, you want customers to keep purchasing from your business. Therefore, you will have to impress customers with your post-sales service.
To track the effectiveness of your post-sales service, you should track customer service satisfaction, a critical customer satisfaction metric.
Make sure you track customer service satisfaction by sending appropriate surveys to customers right after key interactions.
6. Customer Reviews
Customers love reading reviews other customers leave on public portals. You should also be willing to track these reviews and use them to define your customer experience strategy.
The feedback left on portals is generally subjective and can be linked to your overall customer satisfaction strategy.
A high customer review rating can even lead to more business opportunities because almost 88 percent of customers are influenced by customer reviews.
Moreover, you’d want to reply to the customer feedback on the review portals as these help increase the ingenuity of the reviews.
We recently a post on how you can respond to negative reviews on your public business listings. We believe that it is important to treat negative reviews appropriately and turn them into a potential business opportunity.
Make sure you go through the guide to learn the dos and don’ts of responding to negative and positive feedback left by your customers.
7. Customer Churn Rate (CRR)
You don’t want to have a high customer churn rate. This is because it shows how ineffective your products, services, and interactions are.
Customer churn refers to customers who leave a brand or quit doing business with a company.
To track this, you will have to measure the customer churn rate, which is essentially the percentage of customers that have left your brand.
One thing you should note is that CRR can differ from one industry to another. Regardless, you should try to determine the factors that are leading to high customer churn at your company.
Most importantly, you should try to keep this number as low as possible.
8. Customer Abandonment Rate
This is serious. Customers who terminate an interaction without completing their journey can increase the customer abandonment rate, which is not a good sign for your company.
The abandonment rate is essentially the percentage of customers that leave their journey without completing an action or request.
However, the abandonment rate can be different for different companies.
A company having a call center will track the abandonment rate by relating it to the queue abandonment rate.
An eCommerce company might track the rate of cart abandonment to track its customer abandonment rate.
9. First Response Time
To ensure a smooth movement of customers throughout the buyer journey, you’ll have to make sure you are there to help them whenever they need you.
In other words, it is your responsibility to respond to or acknowledge customers’ concerns.
First response time is essentially the amount of time you take to respond to customers’ concerns. The more time you take, the lower the customer satisfaction.
This is one reason why we recommend companies adopt AI-driven chatbots that can respond to customer queries, especially when you are not there to acknowledge.
10. First Contact Resolution
First contact resolution is a customer satisfaction metric that speaks volumes about how effective your customer support team is. This is because it shows how often your support team can close tickets on its first attempt.
Indeed, customers are seeking quick acknowledgment and resolution to their issues. But, research shows that most customers are happy with a reply within 24 hours of ticket raising.
So, you do have time to acknowledge the issue and find a satisfactory resolution. A low number of first-contact resolutions might lead to lower customer satisfaction.
11. Ticket Resolution Time/Rate
Resolution is important. But what’s more important is the amount of time customers took to get a resolution.
In other words, the time the customer support team took to find a resolution is critical to customer satisfaction.
Ticket Resolution Time is the customer satisfaction metric that tracks the average time a company takes to resolve customer service complaints.
At the same time, you’d want to track the ticket resolution rate, i.e., the percentage of tickets you were able to successfully resolve.
12. Customer Retention Rate
As a business owner, your focus should be on getting new customers and coming up with strategies to boost customer retention and customer loyalty.
This is because the cost of retention is significantly lower than acquisition.
We highly recommend measuring customer retention rates to gauge the level of satisfaction among your customer base.
Customer retention rate measures the percentage of customers you’ve retained over a given period. The idea is that the higher your customer retention rate, the more satisfied your customer base.
13. Customer Lifetime Value
We mentioned how important it is to track and improve customer retention rates. This is because you want more and more customers to stick with your brand for years to come.
However, you should also measure the financial value these retained customers are bringing to your company.
To find customer lifetime value, you should multiply the average annual revenue per customer by the average time a customer stays with your company.
CLV is a customer satisfaction metric that shows how effectively customer support teams contribute to a company’s bottom line.
14. Customer Acquisition Cost
What does it cost your company to bring in a new customer? You want to track this number because it can impact your company’s overall profitability.
Customer acquisition cost or CAC you will know the costs of acquiring new customers.
You can calculate it by dividing the total money spent on sales, marketing, and promotion by the total number of new customers converted during a given period.
In this, we consider marketing, promotions, and advertising as an investment for bringing customers.
15. Average Handling Time
Do you want to know how effective the customer support team is in handling a complaint?
You should track average handling time. This customer satisfaction metric will help you track how much active time it takes to resolve a complaint.
In other words, average handling time measures the total labor hours it takes in a week to resolve a said number of complaints.
You want to ensure that more complaints are being resolved in a given number of labor hours.
How to boost customer satisfaction metrics?
Indeed, the customer satisfaction metrics mentioned above are enough to produce an all-around picture of how happy and satisfied customers are with your brand.
But, how do you plan to boost these metrics and ensure better results? Here are some key tips you can follow —
1. Focus on improving customer service interaction
Every interaction customers have with your company is important. Make sure there is no disconnect within the customer journey, especially when the customers need you the most.
To achieve this, you should prioritize first contact resolution and first response time.
The idea behind this is to ensure that customers know you are there for them and are willing to resolve the issues without a lot of back-and-forth.
2. Implement a customer feedback solution
Are you maintaining a spreadsheet to counter the tickets raised by customers? Stop because this will lead to exhaustion.
Instead, use a customer feedback solution that automatically tracks the tickets — from creation to resolution.
Moreover, you can make use of free analytics tools and survey templates. However, make sure the solution you choose is powerful enough to function during business expansion.
3. AI is at your service, use it well!
Why not? Almost every company is using Artificial Intelligence-driven tools to boost customer experience.
AI-fueled chatbots can help you provide improved customer experience as these chatbots are programmed to collect large data sets, identify patterns and languages, and even use the data to answer the easy questions your customers might ask.
AI will help you improve first response time as AI chatbots can assist customers 24/7.
4. Put CX at the center of business strategies
Once you make the mindset shift to put CX at the center of every business strategy, you truly make a giant stride to improve customer satisfaction.
To do this, you will have to ensure marketing, sales, and service team alignment to figure out areas in the buyer journey where customers experience the most friction.
Put the data collected via customer feedback solution to use and figure out where you are going wrong.
5. Don’t ignore the future
Stop thinking short term.
Develop a long-term approach to boosting customer satisfaction metrics as your company will certainly look to expand or grow, which will lead to more customer experience-related issues.
Therefore, we highly recommend you plan to scale your CX and customer support teams to avoid bottlenecks in the future.
Final thoughts!
You have got to hustle when interacting with customers, especially if your focus is on improving customer satisfaction.
More importantly, you have got to complement the hustle with a data-driven customer satisfaction strategy. This ensures a quantitative approach to customer experience improvement across all your business operations.
With the customer satisfaction metrics mentioned in this guide, you can rest assured that you will have all the necessary insights into customers’ experience with your brand.
So what are you waiting for? Select the customer satisfaction metrics that suit your business model and start tracking them.
Stay tuned for more information posts in the future!