Successful businesses know that customer satisfaction holds the utmost importance in increasing their sales. Smart entrepreneurs value their customers and take action to avoid disappointing them. They understand that CSAT should be the primary focus of a business organization because customers are the ones who drive a business. Measuring customer satisfaction can help an organization determine which strategies are effective and which ones need fine-tuning.
In this post, you will learn about the importance of customer satisfaction, ways of measuring customer satisfaction, and ways to provide excellent customer satisfaction. But before we start listing the benefits of customer satisfaction, let’s define what CSAT really is.
What is Customer Satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction, a term often abbreviated as CSAT, measures how happy or satisfied customers on average are with an organization’s products, services, or overall experience. The concept comprises a typical customer’s expectations, perceived value, and quality of the company’s offerings. Businesses that put in effort in measuring customer satisfaction can get valuable insights into how customers feel about their brand and how they plan to interact with the brand in the future.
A customer, by definition, is anyone who buys products or services from a company. For example, if we talk about a car dealership business, the customers would be individual buyers. On the other hand, a hospital’s customers would be all the patients who come to the hospital for consultancy, checkups, treatment, or other medical procedures.
Many businesses in the community are both providers and customers. A hospital, for example, provides medical services and offers healthcare to patients. The same hospital could also be a customer to insurance companies by buying insurance from them. In return, the hospital might be releasing data about the patients to those insurance companies.
Ways of Measuring Customer Satisfaction
The most common method of measuring customer satisfaction is collecting and analyzing customer satisfaction scores. This score is computed by conducting CSAT surveys using a Likert scale. In these questionnaires, customers are requested to communicate their expectations and perceptions about a business, its products, or its services.
The questions are categorized into demographics, product usage, satisfaction scale, and others. There are also open-ended questions with open text fields for customers to fill in long-form responses. Some surveys include longevity questions at the end to ask customers whether they are interested in being contacted again for such surveys or not in the future. The satisfaction scale typically has pointers from 1 to 10. Once the company gets all the responses, they calculate the average to compute the CSAT score.
Although this CSAT score is a comprehensive method for collecting customer feedback, other effective methods can be established to get additional data. These methods include the following.
1. Net Promoter Score
This score measures brand loyalty by calculating the likelihood that an existing customer will recommend your brand to others. These kinds of referrals and recommendations are important for the growth of a business.
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2. Customer Effort Score
This score indicates the effort that the business customers had to put in to get their issues resolved. The lower the customer effort score is, the more efficient that company’s customer service is. Companies with low customer effort scores thus have higher levels of customer satisfaction.
3. Social Media Monitoring
Monitoring the social media pages and followership tells a lot about the business’s customer satisfaction. Customers often make frank comments and give honest feedback on social media, revealing their actual level of satisfaction with the brand. Therefore, Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, and Twitter profiles can help you evaluate how your customers feel about your products and services. You can also view how your customers share information about your company with their friends and family.
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4. Measuring Complaints
One of the ways of measuring customer satisfaction is calculating the number of complaints you receive for your products or services through various channels, such as in your survey responses, on your social media profiles, or even on your brand website. If you can lower this score, it means you successfully enhance customer satisfaction.
Benefits of Customer Satisfaction
Great customer satisfaction has tons of benefits for an organization. It is strongly linked with customer retention. If a company can retain its existing customers and get them to make repeat purchases, its marketing costs become relatively lower, and sales get higher.
High levels of customer satisfaction are among the most critical indicators of a company’s good performance at a specific time. They also indicate how well the company is likely to perform in the future.
Here are some specific benefits of customer satisfaction that your company can enjoy if you maintain a high CSAT.
1. Identify Your Unsatisfied Customers
Identifying the most dissatisfied with your products or services can help focus your efforts on the right people. When you address your unhappy customers directly, you have a better chance of changing their perception and experience of engaging with your brand. If you don't even know who is writing negative reviews or sharing negative experiences about your brand, you won’t resolve the situation. Word-of-mouth warnings to peers and friends by these unsatisfied customers can adversely impact your company’s image. If you want to make customer satisfaction your first priority, you need to first identify who your unsatisfied customers are.
2. Identify Your Happy Customers
Just like identifying your unsatisfied customers helps resolve issues with them and enhance customer satisfaction, knowing who your happiest customers are is also beneficial for your business. Measuring customer satisfaction enables you to identify who gives you the highest CSAT score so that you can pay attention to this category the most. Personalizing your marketing messages to target this group can positively impact growing your sales.
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3. Power Your Internal Processes
Data on customer satisfaction gives you precious insights about who consumes your services and products. This data can be advantageous if you know how to use it correctly. It enables you to adjust your marketing strategies, sales tactics, and other internal processes.
4. Attract New Leads
You will receive positive reviews and testimonials from your customers when you have good customer satisfaction. These will attract more leads and customers to your business. Customer reviews are among the most powerful and persuasive means of attracting more people to your products and services. They are even more powerful than a marketing campaign, as people tend to trust their peers more than an advert from a business.
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5. CSAT Sells
Excellent customer satisfaction can be seen as a strong selling point. Sales teams can highlight their high CSAT scores to develop a compelling sales pitch. Salespeople can also analyze reviews from happy customers to observe which parts of your product or service need to be mentioned as unique advantages over other substitutes available for customers.
6. CSAT Guides Product Updates
Your CSAT score can guide you regarding the kind of product updates required and the kind of changes likely to be the most profitable. Even negative reviews are also beneficial for product development. This is particularly relevant for businesses that sell software or apps and need to fix any bugs found immediately.
Ensuring High Levels of Customer Satisfaction
There are several ways to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction for your business. Most of the efforts to make your customers happy these days can be taken over the internet. You need to make sure that you have a professionally built website for your brand.
If you do not have a website to market your business yet, you can create one in just a couple of hours by registering for a free account on Strikingly and using one of our ready-to-use templates as your web design.
On your website, allow customers to write product reviews and give feedback about your services. Provide excellent online customer service by adding a contact form to your website. The best way to allow your customers to get in touch with you online is to build a live chat feature on your site. All Strikingly users using our Pro plan can add a live chat feature to their site to let their customers speak to them and ask them anything any time they like.
In this fast-paced world, it is critical to let your customers get in touch with you before, during, and after they make a purchase from your business. Failing to do so would negatively impact your customer satisfaction and gradually cause a drop in your sales.
Our focus on Strikingly is also on keeping our users satisfied with our tools, features, and service at all times. Therefore, we encourage our users to participate in our online community called the Idea Forum and share their experiences of building and maintaining a website on Strikingly.
