A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a quick and easy way to measure how satisfied your customers are with your brand, products, or services. It’s one of the most common customer experience metrics, alongside customer effort and net promoter scores.
Companies use CSAT to determine how well their products and services match customer expectations at critical touchpoints in a buyer’s journey. It also provides teams with actionable insights to help improve critical areas of their business, like customer service and product quality.
1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is an essential metric for any company that wants to boost its customer experience. It’s easy to compute, provides valuable insights, and can help you spot unhappy customers at risk of churning.
To calculate your CSAT score, you need to ask your customers a few questions about their experiences with your product or service. These could include how easy it was to find an answer to a question or how satisfied they were with the performance and quality of their experience.
Once you have a range of customer satisfaction scores, you can use this information to identify where you need to improve your products and services. As a result, you can make changes to improve your customers’ experiences and increase their loyalty.
Another critical advantage of measuring customer satisfaction is that you can pinpoint specific touchpoints in the customer journey. It lets you quickly identify issues and make changes before they worsen.
For example, you can send a CSAT survey after each support interaction and measure how happy your users are with the level of service they receive. You can also track your scores at various times of the year and identify spikes or lags in satisfaction levels that may be related to business initiatives.
As a rule of thumb, it’s essential to send customer surveys consistently and regularly. Using a survey tool that lets you schedule the distribution and track the results over time is beneficial to have the highest CSAT score possible.
2. Customer Effort Score (CES)
The Customer Effort Score (CES) is a survey-based customer satisfaction metric that measures the ease of interaction with your business and how much effort customers need to put into resolving their issues. The CES survey can be used at several points throughout the customer journey, including after a product purchase or in the onboarding process for new customers.
The CES is one of the most effective customer feedback survey questions that can be used to gather real-time data on how your business is performing at each point in the customer journey. It can also be used to identify areas where customers are experiencing a high level of friction, such as when they have trouble initiating a customer service ticket.
CES surveys can be easily gathered and are relatively short, making them easy for customers to complete. In addition, they can be created using a range of responses, such as a happy face, a neutral face, or an unhappy face.
However, a high CES does not necessarily mean that your customers are satisfied with the service they received from your brand. Instead, they likely had to exert a lot of effort to resolve their issue, which may be contributing to their dissatisfaction with your brand.
To improve a low CES, your customer service team needs to resolve any issues causing the customers to extend a high level of effort and ensure that their interactions with your business are always effortless and quick. In addition, it will increase their likelihood of recommending your products and services to other people, which will help boost your sales and overall revenue.
3. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is a customer satisfaction score that measures how likely customers are to recommend your product to their friends and family. It is based on a 0-10 scale calculated by surveying your customers.
Companies can use NPS to measure their success in growing their business. Generally, it is used as an internal measurement of progress and is often compared to industry benchmarking data.
However, it’s also important to remember that NPS is not an exact science. Several factors influence it, including product quality, service, and the buying experience.
If your NPS is lower than you would like, it’s essential to find out what factors are causing the issue. By understanding the root causes, you can address them and improve your NPS score.
In addition, it’s vital to identify critical drivers and track them over time. Analyzing these pieces of information together will provide insights into which factors affect your NPS score for your specific business and touchpoint.
A common strategy to boost your NPS is to focus on improving 3-5 areas at once. Then, once these are implemented, you can regularly evaluate your NPS results to see if the improvements were practical.
4. Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
The Customer Retention Rate (CRR) is a metric that measures the percentage of customers that remain loyal to your business over a given period. It’s a vital business metric that can help you identify issues and make proactive changes before they become problematic trends.
While a CRR of 100% is ideal, it could be more realistic for many businesses to achieve. Even industry-leading companies have retention rates that fall within the range of 80% and lower.
However, you can still achieve an improved CRR by focusing on a few metrics that will give you a clearer picture of the overall health of your customer base. For example, a high retention rate can indicate that you are excellently generating loyalty among your customers. It also shows that you are prioritizing your growth around the needs of your existing base.
Final Words
Calculating your CRR is a simple process that involves subtracting new customers from the number of retained customers at the end of a period and dividing it by the number of retained customers at the beginning of the same period. Then, you’ll choose a time frame to help you understand the trends and effects of product updates on your CRR.
Once you’ve established your CRR benchmark, you can compare it to your competitors. It will allow you to see how your business stacks up to others in your market and sales model and your overall customer acquisition costs.
