(Newswire.net — November 21, 2016) — If your customers aren’t happy then, chances are, they aren’t returning to your business – and they certainly won’t be recommending you to others. On the flip side of the coin, clients that loved dealing with you will start to show increased loyalty and perhaps even become advocates for your brand.
In either case, though, their response becomes a lot more useful to you if you can capture the data and learn from it. No surprises, then, that customer satisfaction is a vital metric for any business.
After all, it can serve as your advance warning system, letting you know of any issues before they have a chance to make a dent in sales. It can give you a glimpse into the future, demonstrating not only how your company is performing today, but what future growth might look like. It can even become a training tool for your staff, giving you the information needed to offer valuable feedback.
With all this in mind, it’s vital to understand how to go about capturing this relevant and valuable data. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that isolated encounters – a phone call from a long-term client, say – can give you a sense of how your company is performing. In reality, with so much data at your fingertips, there’s no excuse for not quantifying these experiences.
How to Measure the Data that Matters
A customer’s interaction with your brand is actually made up of a constellation of micro-experiences: how responsive you were to enquiries, the quality of the product or services next to the price point, how easy the process was from start to finish. These separate interactions all come together to make up an overall feeling of satisfaction, so you’ll want to use KPIs that delve into them as much as possible.
In their guidelines on measuring customer satisfaction, digital experience specialists NanoRep emphasize this point, writing that truly useful customer satisfaction data will focus on allowing you to “attach a score to an emotion” – an essential metric, and yet one which can seem “frustratingly out of reach”. While the process may require a little tuning up to ensure that it suits your business goals and industry, here are a few essential starting points:
The NPS, or Net Promoter Score, is an important measure of long-term customer satisfaction; by simply measuring whether or not your customers will recommend you to others, it helps to give a sense of potential for growth. It also has the benefit of converting this information into a number that will actually make sense when you run it through the spreadsheets.
A second valuable question is “how satisfied were you with the service that you received?” Again, Forbes weigh in here, finding this more valuable in the short term as it gives data which can be quickly acted upon. And, like the NPS, it can be scored in numerical terms, making it a lot easier to handle that qualitative consumer comments.
If you’re giving customers a slightly longer survey, you may also want to find out about some additional aspects of their experience: Was it how they expected it to be? Would they return to your company in the future?
As well as talking to your customers, you can get crucial facts about their experience by looking at your own data. For instance, how quickly does your customer service team deal with enquiries, and what outcomes do these interactions usually result in?
To avoid finding that you miss the final piece of the puzzle, it’s recommended that you focus on all of these KPIs. While they can each, independently, tell you something about customer satisfaction, brought together they create the full picture.
Reaping the Benefits
So what do you actually do with all these stats and figures once they’re sitting in front of you? Well, they only become useful once you start putting them into action. The first step is to circulate the information to members of the company who will benefit from it, including managers and customer service staff.
Next, you need a plan of action for improving elements of the experience that didn’t score as highly as you would have liked. Which point of the process is causing problems? You may need to make the buying journey more personal for individual consumers, improve how quickly your team responds to enquiries, or clarify information given on your website to ensure that expectations and reality line up.
However you choose to proceed, the most important thing is making sure that you have a solid foundation of data – and not just anecdotal evidence about client satisfaction – to base your work on.