As a business owner, one of your main goals should be keeping your customers happy and satisfied with your products and services. A negative review can drive them away, and they might even share it with other potential and existing customers. 

Customer satisfaction is an important business metric that determines how happy a customer is with your brand as it doesn’t just come from excellent products, promotional offers, or low prices. Nowadays, it’s also measured through customer experience or how an overall transaction goes from the customer’s point of view.

The more customers have great experiences with a business, the greater the chance of retention. If you prioritise your customers better than your competition, then the payback will be greater. Customer satisfaction can be measured in different ways, depending on how your business handles it. Here are 10 ways to measure customer satisfaction:

1. Customer satisfaction survey

One of the most common ways to collect data on customer happiness is through a satisfaction survey. It should include questions on how satisfied they are with the physical and digital structure, order processing, payment and delivery, and other aspects of the business. Satisfaction surveys can take on these forms:

• In-app surveys: Customer surveys are found on your website while the customer is engaging with it. In-app surveys measure metrics such as your Net Promoter Score and Customer Effort Score.

  
  

• Live chat surveys: Live chat surveys take place through a live chat pop-up before or after a transaction. It only contains a couple of questions regarding the experience of the customer in their overall transaction.

  
  

• Email surveys: Emails are the best way to reach out for customer feedback. A link to a survey form goes to the customer’s email address after a transaction, usually after an email confirming the delivery of their products.

  
  

2. Feedback form

Feedback forms also help to gather data on customer happiness. The difference between satisfaction surveys and feedback forms is that the latter delves deeper into the feelings and reactions of the customer. 

The most common feedback forms require a customer’s insights on how they felt a transaction went, what they want to say about their experience, and how you can improve your services.

3. Cold calling

Aside from lead generation, your outsourced call centres can also do cold calling to gather customer satisfaction data. Cold calling involves direct communication with customers by speaking to them on the phone to ask for reviews or feedback. This can be a great way to increase human interaction with your customers.

You can directly hear feedback and comments from your customers without limitations in character count or range of answers. Cold calls are also recorded to ensure quality and the precision of each answer.

4. CSAT score

Your CSAT scores come from your customer surveys and they show how many customers are satisfied with your business over your total number of customers. Business process outsourcing (BPO) companies use this to decide the quality of service they provide in every call. You should always aim to get the highest satisfaction score possible from your existing customers to gain trust and develop a good reputation with new ones.

For you to achieve a high satisfaction score, respondents must rate your services from 1 to 5. You should then calculate your score using the Top 2 Box method where you will select those who gave 4 or 5 ratings over the total number of respondents. The two highest values in ratings are the most accurate factors in predicting retention.

5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Along with your CSAT score and Customer Effort Score, your NPS is a crucial metric of customer satisfaction. This tells you how likely your customers are to recommend your business or products to their friends and family. 

Here, respondents give ratings on a scale from 1 to 10 and from this, you can classify your customers in three different categories:

• Promoters: These customers give a rating of 9 or 10, which shows that they’re highly satisfied with your products and services.

  
  

• Passives: These customers give you a rating of 7 or 8, which shows that they might be satisfied with your services but not enough to recommend you to others. You can improve these ratings by listening to your customer’s comments and suggestions while keeping up with their demands.

  
  

• Detractors: These customers give you the lowest ratings possible and this might discourage others from using your services. You can avoid this by improving your offerings regularly and learning from your mistakes.

  
  

6. Customer effort score

Customer satisfaction is a two-way effort. You provide the best service to your customers as much as they learn and adjust to the experience you give. This is reflected in the Customer Effort Score (CES), which determines how much effort your customers give to reach out to your business. Customer effort correlates with customer loyalty and the higher level of effort a customer gives, the less likely they are to remain loyal to your business. This is why improving customer experience is so important.

7. Social mentions

With social media customers are likely to connect with businesses through platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. As a business, you can also leverage this to measure this satisfaction.

Each mention from a customer counts as a social mention and this is common when you have an online presence through your company website, your social media page, or a review site. Social mentions help you determine the sentiment of comments, reactions, and recommendations around your business.

Many social media tools can track these mentions, such as public posts, comments, and generated hashtags. Social media can make or break your reputation as a business so you must track all your brand’s mentions and reviews.

8. Review sites

Review sites are a reliable form of customer feedback because they act as third-party determiners of how happy your customers are with your service. Potential customers turn to reliable sites to check reviews from your customers and learn what they should expect from your service.

9.  Churn rate

Your churn rate is the rate of customers and employees leaving your business in a certain period. Happy employees make happy customers so you must learn how to take care of them and how to retain them. An increase in churn rate means something is wrong with your management or the service you provide.

10. Things gone wrong

There’s always a reason behind every bad review from a customer, and you can determine what it is with the Things Gone Wrong method. This method determines the rate of complaints for every given number of reviews. You can also use a different set of metrics to determine this. 

For example, if you get at least one complaint for every single item you offer, then it’s time to optimise your products and services. Continuous improvement of your services is the key to improving customer satisfaction. Remember that the customer is king, so you need to keep them happy with your business.