Businesses try hard to acquire more customers each day while they forget to maintain a good relationship with the current customer. Most businesses don’t spend money on improving customer satisfaction by saying they don’t have any budget left. Ironically, a survey revealed how getting new customers is expected to be 5 to 25 times more expensive than keeping the old customers. 

Furthermore, there is a finite number of customers your business can acquire. Especially for B2B companies, this matter becomes more crucial as there’s a limited number of businesses out there. That’s why you need to keep excellent customer satisfaction.

What is Customer Satisfaction?
 

Customer Satisfaction or CSAT is a reflection of how customer expectations meet with the customer experience of your brand. If the CSAT is great, then your brand has met the customer expectation or even exceeded them. If your product has the best quality, it can’t guarantee great customer satisfaction as there are other factors to be considered. 

Customer experience is the result of every interaction a customer has with the brand, from visiting your website or application, navigating on it until they receive your product, and how you would respond to their complaint after the purchase. Here is the simple rule. Great customer experience, resulting in Increased customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. 

Now after you know about what customer satisfaction is, here is the main question “How to determine whether the customer is satisfied or not?” Many factors influence customer satisfaction. While they may have satisfied with your product, they may be disappointed with your service. Worry not, as we will also share the right way to measure customer satisfaction in the section below. 

Why Measure Customer Satisfaction?

Many people say customer satisfaction is important. It is the heart of a business and can ensure the continuity of your business. But, what exactly are the benefits of measuring customer satisfaction? Let’s check it out!

1. Maintain a Good Brand Impression
   Do you have any experience like this? There is a customer who’s always come to your store. But at one point, he didn’t come anymore. You may become confused about how it suddenly happened when the consumer didn’t complain about anything when coming to your store. Well, Reputation Refinery revealed interesting data. “96% of unhappy customers won’t complain to you, but they will tell their 15 friends.”
   
   Bad experiences spread like a virus. One person tells another person and spreads to other people. When you don’t realize it, thousands of people think about how bad your brand is when they haven’t even used your product yet. Knowing how the state of your customer satisfaction is, you can prevent this thing from happening. 

2. Help You Find Out Consumer Repurchase Intentions
   If you give a survey with a 0-10 score, you can predict if the customer would come again to your store or not. If they choose > 7, big chance that they would come again when they need your product. If it is less than 6, then it is a red flag. You need to put them on a customer watch list and do follow up to find out why the customer satisfaction is low. With some improvement, it sure can become better. 

3. Determine Consumer Loyalty
   Here is the thing, the company spend $ 1 million on the marketing budget, but they spend nearly $ 0 on customer retention. While it is apparent how getting new prospects, nurturing them into leads, and closing the sales need a lot of effort and budgets compared to retaining the customer, many businesses are still not doing it. By measuring customer satisfaction, you can find out the loyalty of your customers and discover what things to improve. 

4. Reducing Customer Churn
   Customer churn is how many percentages of customers that stop using your product in a certain period. Many companies think that price is the main reason for customer churn when on the other hand, the Accenture Global Customer Satisfaction Report (2008) stated that the poor quality of customer service is the main cause of high customer churn. By analyzing the data from customer satisfaction, you can find a way to improve your customer experience and reduce customer churn. 

5. Increasing Customer Lifetime Value
   Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is how much revenue that you can expect from a customer in his/her lifetime. It determines the value of the customer if it is compared to how much money that you spend to acquire the customer. There is an interesting study by InfoQuest on how satisfied consumers spend more money on your product. 
   As an example, “totally satisfied customer” contributes 14 times more revenue than “somewhat dissatisfied customer” which means better overall revenue for your company. 

How to Measure Customer Satisfaction?

When it comes to customer satisfaction measurement, you need to follow these steps to make sure that you obtain unbiased results which can be used to plan for your next business strategy. 

1. Determine The Objective
   Before implementing any business strategy, you need to understand why you are doing something. Time is limited and it is unwise to do something just for the sake of doing it. That also applies when measuring customer satisfaction. After you get the data, what would you use it for? Is it to improve customer service, enhance your products or else? After defining the objective, you can plan the suitable method to measure customer satisfaction and receive the data that you really need. 

2. Target Specific Audience
   In some cases, you don’t need all customers to fill in the questionnaire. As an example, you may notice many complaints come from teen customers or most negative reviews are written by the older customers and so on. Depending on your objective, you can determine which audiences that are suitable to fill your surveys. 

3. Prepare the Questionnaire
   Depending on your budget, there are various online tools that you can use for free or paid to gather customer feedback. 

4. Put The Trigger On The Right Time
   There are various scenarios to acquire customer feedback : 

   • End of Chat Session
     This scenario is often used if you need to know how your customer service responds to the customer. When the chat ends, send a short questionnaire to get customer feedback.

   • After Successful Transaction
     If you find there is a high dropout rate on checkout, it will be best if you put the survey after a successful transaction, so customers can rate their overall sales experience. 

   • After Problem Is Resolved
     A good business will put certain buttons that can be used by customers to ask for help from customer service. You can obtain various feedback regarding response time, resolution time, reply time, etc.

   • After Product Demo or Free Trial
     After customers try your product demo, you find out that there are only several people who decide to buy your paid plan. What happens? By sending a questionnaire after the free trial period ends, you can discover the right way to improve your product demo and increase your sales. 
      
5. Analyze the Collected Data
   Data is only useless information if you can’t convert it to your next strategy. After gathering the data, discuss the result with your team to improve the related products or change the product messaging to the customers. The key is to identify the gap between your business and customers, then find the best strategy to shorten the gaps.

How to Improve Customer Satisfaction?

If by any chance you discover that most of your customers are unhappy with your brands, don’t feel discouraged as there are various ways to improve customer satisfaction. It is really easy, but most people think of it as not crucial compared to product development, marketing strategy, and so on. Well, they’re clearly missing out on big opportunities. 

1. Be a Good Listener
   It is really hard to respond to all of the customers’ complaints. And to be honest, some of them do make no sense. But, at least you should try to listen first. When there are 100 or 1000 complaints each day, many business owners become accustomed to the situation and kind of ignore the complaints. Thinking “I have a lot of customers and It won’t hurt me to lose some customers.” will break the company apart. Like what the data has stated, acquiring new customers is more expensive and there is a limit of customers for each business. If you have enough time to plan for your next marketing strategy, take only 30% of it and listen to your customers. 

2. Ask your Customers
   Who doesn’t love proactive people, right? As a business owner, you would love it when your employees take proactive steps to improve your business. That’s not different with your customers. Before they send a complaint, reach out to them first and ask how they like your product, service, etc. 

3. Avoid Overpromising
   Let’s say you sell a dietary supplement and you use this kind of slogan to sell your product. “Lost 30 kg in less than 7 days.” No matter how irrational your promise is, there will be some customers who fall for it and buy your products. Unfortunately, even if you manage to sell 100 products a day, overpromising can hurt your business so much. Tone it down with the marketing offering and only state what your brand can give the customers. 

Tools for Measuring Customer Satisfaction

But here is the main question right? Are there any tools for measuring customer satisfaction? Of course, we have the lists. Just check it out!

1. Google Forms
   The almighty Google, from Search Engine to Email Service, it also provides awesome tools that can help you gather some data for customer satisfaction measurement. Meet Google Form! Providing 100% free features from unlimited surveys, unlimited respondents to collecting data in Google Spreadsheet, choose Google Forms for minimizing unnecessary budget. 

2. Typeform
   A beautiful Google Forms alternative which offers a more creative form. In the free version, you’ve gotten the usual offer like unlimited questions and answers while the PRO version only costs $25/month with payment fields and the option to send follow up E-mail to respondents. 

3. SurveyMonkey
   As one of the most popular tools for measuring customer satisfaction, SurveyMonkey. With the free version, you can get up to 10 questions, 100 respondents with 15 question types. Paid versions start at $26/month with a more comprehensive feature. The Gold version even offers A/B testing, export data & reports, and more. 

4. ProProfs Survey Marker
   If you are searching for an advanced survey with better analytical capabilities, then just choose these tools for measuring customer satisfaction. In ProProfs, you can create surveys, NPS surveys, forms, Pop-up surveys, In-App Surveys, or even Polls. For the free plans, you can even access 100 professional survey templates. With the paid plan, you can integrate Survey Marker with most major CRM and other marketing tools. Cool, right?

5. Zoho Survey
   The next decent free survey creator is Zoho Survey. By using the free version, you’ve got an unlimited survey, 15 survey questions, and up to 150 responses. The paid version starts at $39/month and includes email notification, multilingual surveys, and custom variables.

Customer Satisfaction Measurements and Methods

You have found the tools for measuring customer satisfaction, but before using them, you need to know what customer satisfaction measurements and methods that you want to use. Choose the one that most suitable for your needs and budgets!

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
   The most universal metric for measuring customer satisfaction is CSAT. The parameter ranges from 1-5. The lowest number means highly unsatisfied while the highest number indicates highly satisfied. It is easy to use CSAT. The downside would be it is not accurate as the question is general.   

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
   To fill the gaps of CSAT, NPS is invented. It is about “How likely a customer will recommend the related product or service to their friends?” Satisfied or not is quite relative, but if people want to recommend a product or service for free, then they definitely love your product. The scale ranges from 1 to 10 where 1 means “not at all” and 10 for “extremely likely”.

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)
   In CES, it focuses on the customer service of your business. Basically, you would ask a question like “How hard it is for you to get an issue resolved when reaching for the customer service?” The scale ranges from 1 to 5 where 1 donates to “fewer hardships” and 5 means “excessive hassle”. 
    

Now, you have understood about Customer Satisfaction, right? With this guide, we hope you can gain comprehensive knowledge about customer satisfaction or even start to measure the customer satisfaction of your brand starting from now. If you need any help from us, we also offer solution for your customer satisfaction study needs. Good luck!