Customer Satisfaction: Metrics That Matter + How to Improve Them

If you could sit down with each of your customers, what would you ask them? Personally, I'd ask you coming to the barbecue later? I'm making corn dogs. Your customers are better positioned than anyone to give you properly powerful insights. Insights that are crucial for any business that wants to grow revenue and build stronger relationships. So in this video, I'm going to talk about the type of customer surveys, what they are, how to use them, and when to use them. And I'll use a fictional business to bring it to life for you. And of course, I'll share some tips about how you can improve your scores as well. To get a more realistic sense of how customers feel about your business, we need to ask some questions. And while it would be great to have one on one chats with every single customer, it's just not practical. You're a busy person. You got stuff to do, right? Enter the humble. Survey surveys and questionnaires have a simple goal. To ask customers to score their satisfaction with your product, brand, feature, feature, or service. They're sent out via email and can also be integrated into web forms in app or product rating systems, automated phone surveys, or live agent capture. Now, there's no set rules on how survey questions should be worded. They need to be clear and direct and crucially, have a space to gather additional context. So let's dive into the metrics you want to gather to get the best possible idea of how your customers feel about you. Right now. Get ready for some acronyms. And I got to warn you, a lot of acronyms coming up. All right, let's put on our imagination hats and imagine that you're part of a clothes retailer that specializes in pajamas with physical store outlets and an E commerce service. We're going to call that business Jamal's Jammies. And I know what you're thinking. I'm not wearing them right now. Unfortunately, the first metric you want to dig into is customer satisfaction or csat. So the clues in the name Customer satisfaction measures, on average, how satisfied or unsatisfied customers are with your product, services, or customer success programs. The score is ranked on a scale. The scale can be as small as 1 to 3, going up to 1 to 5, 1 to 7, or 1 to 10. While there's no universal agreement on which scale is best, if your business is more complex and has more touch points, it makes sense to use a larger scale. You can calculate your CSAT score by adding up all scores and dividing the total by the number of respondents. For example, you can see these 42 responses across a range of 1 to 10 have led to a CSAT score of 5.7. CSAT is one of the most popular ways of capturing customer sentiment because of its simplicity. It's a really useful way of knowing what ballpark your customer attitudes are falling in. Whether they love you or loathe you, CSAT is a good temperature check Some of the ways you can improve customer satisfaction 1. Give service agents the authority to turn problems around themselves. There's nothing more frustrating than staff who can't actually help you without consulting the higher ups. Give your customer facing staff in store assistants and online agents the tools and authority to solve customers problems on the spot. 2. Be careful about when you request feedback. If you've just had a customer complain about being sent the wrong size pajama bottoms, you really don't want to be sending them a feedback form 10 minutes after they've just got in touch. Hopefully they want to send them back to you so that you can wear them yourself. That said, if you've resolved the problem, managed expectations, and created a net positive outcome, sending a request for feedback can lead to better results. Use your best judgment to decide whether it's an appropriate time to hit send. 3. Keep customer effort low to keep satisfaction scores high, which leads us nicely to the next survey you should be sending. Customer effort score or CES measures how easy your customers find using your product or service. High effort user experiences create frustration that leads to churn, AKA lost customers, which is not good, while giving customers a seamless low effort experience seriously increases satisfaction. In fact, making an experience low effort is one of the best ways to reduce frustration and increase loyalty handily. Like csat, you capture this through customer surveys and figure out your score with the same equation. Total of all customer effort scores divided by total number of survey respondents. The difference here is that instead of numbers, you'll use graded terms. For example very difficult to very simple. In the case of Jamal's Janney's, you might ask questions around the purchasing experience. How easy was it for you to find the items you wanted? How did you find the checkout process? Was it easy to arrange a refund? All of these questions will help you build an understanding of the obstacles you need to remove for a more fluid customer experience. Now a few tips to improve your customer effort score. 1. Make interactions easily accessible at every touch point. Whenever customers are on their journey, make sure help is nearby. For Jamal's jammies, that means an attentive in store assistant online. For ecommerce customers, it means a chatbot or live chat option is always available. Don't leave your customers guessing when they can't figure something out. Be on hand to help. And if customers keep getting stuck in the same place, it means you need to look at that part of the customer journey. 2. Reduce your average response time. One of the benefits of having support readily available is it reduces time customers spend waiting to move forward. You've been kept on hold for a whole afternoon. Probably didn't enjoy that. I didn't either. Having the necessary resources available to handle customer queries quickly will do wonders for your CES score. 3. Close Negative Feedback loops. Listen to what customers are saying are the disruptors to good experiences and fix them. Market research is a useful tool, but it's nothing compared to direct customer feedback, especially negative feedback. Close those negative feedback loops and watch your customer E's scores skyrocket and handily. All this will overlap with your efforts to improve your csat. Next up is Net Promoter Score or nps. Ever had a friend say out of nowhere you gotta try this? That's what gets Net Promoter scores flying super high. NPS asks a simple question. How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague? Recommendations are rarely made lightly due to the social risk attached to a bad one. Remember that time where you were like, hey, want to watch Spy Kids 3 with me? And your friend was like, why are all of the people thumbs? And then they never talk to you after that? Yeah. Now imagine that scenario where they had to pay for the movie too. It's not going to fly. That's why NPS is a strong indicator of upsell and cross sell opportunities. The way you calculate NPS is a little different to the first two metrics we've talked about. You reach your NPS score by first segmenting your responses into three categories detractors, Passives, and promoters. Take passives out of the equation. We want people who feel strongly about your brand. You get your score by taking the percentage of promoters those who gave a high score those who minus the percentage of detractors low scores. For example, if 10% of respondents are detractors, 30% are passives and 60% are promoters, your NPS score would be 60 -10, which is 50 for Jamal's jammies. Some of the questions we could ask are Considering your recent purchase, how likely are you to recommend Jamal's Shammy's to a friend or colleague? How likely are you to recommend Jamal Shammy's to a friend or colleague based on your interaction with our in Store customer care team? Now how can you improve your net promoter score? 1. Do a root cause analysis. You might notice patterns when you compare feedback from promoters and attractors. Say you find your online checkout process has loads of strong scores while you're in store. Point of purchase has more than its fair share of detractors. When this happens, take a look for the root causes and find out what's causing the lower scores. 2. Engage with your detractors. This is a similar tactic to closing the negative loop. Talk directly to your biggest critics. Remember, if someone has taken the time to leave a lousy review, it means they cared enough to take the time to leave it in the first place. That means on some level they care. You owe it to them and yourself to find out what's causing your customers the most pain. 3. And finally, make NPS part of your culture. Make it clear to all who need to know your mission is to win as many promoters as as you possibly can. Be bold and passionate about nps. Share how it's tracked, how it can factor into individuals. Annual reviews incentivize your teams based on NPS ratings and feedback. And finally, we need to combine these scores to get a big and clear picture of the relationship between your brand and your customers. Enter the Customer Health Score. This metric is the cornerstone of a successful customer service strategy. Now I know I've been super prescriptive about how to use these surveys and metrics. Customer health is different. In fact, I'm not really going to prescribe anything at all. That's because the exact criteria will be unique to your business. It should draw on the results from the metrics we've already discussed. But the goal is simple to measure the overall health of your relationships with your customers. Ease, satisfaction and likelihood to recommend. Combine every relevant stream of input into a single score and set clear parameters around your Customer Health score. If your score drops too low, it should trigger a response to investigate any underlying issues. Now, if you follow the tips above and lean into your customer's feedback, you could really do incredible things for your business. And that's because your customers will always be your most valuable source of information. They hold anecdotal insights that all the data in the world can never fully replace. They'll flag things to congratulate yourself on and continue. And most importantly, they'll service the things that you need to face up and fix or stop altogether. The more data you can capture, the better you can figure out and how your brand is perceived by the folks that matter the most. And it's not just marketers who win. Capturing these results helps sales sell faster, customer service serves more empathetically and it ends up performing better. You win, which means your customers win. It's a nice little win fest. Win Win. If you're looking to capture how customers feel about your brand, try our free Customer Service Metrics Calculator. You'll find the link in the description below. This is really one of the most powerful tools I've ever laid my peepers on. And be sure to stay subscribed so you never miss any of our marketing mojo. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get into my Jamal's jammies, all right, and take a nice little load off for the rest of the rest of the evening. We've been working hard capturing all this data about our customers. I need a nap. Until then, I'll see you later. I can't find this client info.

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