How Important is Customer Satisfaction?

All your business goals, tactics, strategies, and practices ultimately revolve around a single concept: your customer satisfaction. If your business goals lie elsewhere, it can lead to a downhill road for your organization.

In this article, we will talk about:

1. What is customer satisfaction?
2. Types of customer satisfaction
3. How to achieve it?
4. The three Cs of customer satisfaction

What is customer satisfaction?

To put it simply, customer satisfaction is a quantified measurement of how happy your customers are with your services. Under this method, certain metrics are used to indicate and understand the underlying problems of your customers. It also helps to understand if your customers will buy from you again or not.

But what is the purpose of customer satisfaction?

Any organization, whether for profit or not profit, runs for its customers. And yet, sometimes measuring their satisfaction rate with the business is overlooked. 

Acquiring the customers is not the last step of a business cycle, we also have to retain our customers and prevent them from leaving. Retaining our consumers not only boosts revenue but also leads to some more important benefits like customer loyalty, better brand image and word-of-mouth marketing. 

Moreover, in this booming social media age, feedback is an important asset that has to be worked on.

Types of customer satisfaction

Normally, customer satisfaction is measured with the help of specially designed surveys. These surveys are formulated with questions that are related to a specific kind of business or organization. This helps to get the right answer for the questions that are directly related to the business.

Let us now understand some forms of customer surveys.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The NPS was invented by Mr Fred Reichheld in the year 2003. This is a fairly popular kind of survey that tests the loyalty and satisfaction of a customer. 

Interestingly, this type of survey involves a simple question:

How likely is the consumer to recommend your service or product to any one of his/her acquaintances?

NPS is calculated by asking the consumer to choose a number between 1 to 10.

The categories divided are ‘Detractors’ for 1-6, ‘Passives’ for 7-8, and finally ‘Promoters’ for 9-10.

The final step is to subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, which leads to a Net Promoter Score.

You can also ask follow-up questions in your surveys so that customers can explain themselves properly.

NPS is a great tool to analyze why customers are or might leave you and choose your competitor. 

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

This type of survey is used to get answers about a distinct product or feature. The question asks about the level of satisfaction of a consumer with a very specific component at a specific point in time.

Ideally, this method is used to understand consumer behavior at different intervals or stages of a business cycle. 

For example: How satisfied are you with the after services of our software system?

Consumers can choose between numbers 1 to 5, 1 being ‘extremely dissatisfied and 5 being ‘most satisfied’.

Finally, the CSAT score is derived by dividing the number of satisfied responses by the number of total responses.

• Visual rating survey

Visual rating is a more modern and trendy way of surveying your consumers. In this method, emojis and graphic designs are used to understand consumer sentiment. 

You can make use of thumbs up and down, stars as well as smileys to give options to your customers to express their experience with you.

It is a quick and easy way to understand customer reactions and interpret them. They are widely popular in various industries like food and cab apps.

How to achieve it?

We now know that attaining maximum customer satisfaction is a clear goal, but how exactly can we achieve it?

According to Zendesk, just one bad experience can lead to around 50% of customers opting for a competitor. This only goes on to prove that stakes are already very high when we talk about customer experience.

• Be quick on your feet

This is the age of competition, where retaining user attention is one of the most challenging tasks. As a result, it is ideal to answer and solve consumer queries as soon as possible. If the customer service is not speedy and up to the mark, it can lead to unhappy customers and a decline in your revenues.

• Listen and Act

Nowadays, a customer journey is usually longer and more complex than it was before. A consumer expects personalized and quick services. In such a situation, it is ideal to understand your consumer mindset at different points of time and gain their feedback.

Adding to that, after gaining the feedback it is important to take action as quickly as possible. If you do not listen to your consumers, all your strategies will go in vain.

• Use multichannel support

One of the most important factors of customer satisfaction is a good communication channel. This is the reason why it is important to be available at multiple channels so that customers can contact you by any means that they like. This might include social media, phone calls, message support, and emails. It is important to hear your consumers and reply as soon as possible to improve the overall efficiency of your customer support group.

• The three Cs of customer satisfaction

Mckinsey highlighted the three Cs of customer satisfaction as Customer-journey consistency, Emotional consistency, and communication consistency.

Customer journey at every touchpoint demands efficient and consistent deliverance. If the quality wobbles at any stage, the customer experience is damaged to a considerable point.

For long-term growth, forming an emotional connection with your consumers works the best. Customers are more inclined to be associated with brands that they ‘connect with’ or that they ‘believe in’. As a result, the bond of trust between a consumer and a brand has to be consistent.

Lastly, the communication journey is all about your brand message and tone. The content in your emails and messages is important and should be consistently be aligned with your brand message. It is important to understand how your customers like to talk and form conversations based on this knowledge.