Without customers, a business would not be a business. In order for your company to function properly you need customers who are loyal to your brand. We live in a super-charged world, in which your customer will let you know immediately if they are unhappy with your product or service by sharing it on social media, or writing you a bad Google review. But, what about all of your happy customers? Or, the customers who might benefit from your product, but aren’t sure how to use it? These are the customers that matter, and it is important for your business to know how to track their satisfaction and analyze it in order to make adjustments where need be. Below are three of the best ways to track customer satisfaction in order to stay on top of the competition and see your company grow.
Feedback Surveys
Perhaps one of the easiest and most effective ways to track customer satisfaction is through customer feedback surveys. You can create one of three different surveys including, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS). These three surveys are all "one-question" methods that vastly simplify the process of collecting customer insights. While you may not think that survey methodology matters much, how you ask the question does seem to measure slightly different things. For instance, a 2010 study found twenty percent of "satisfied" customers said they intended to leave the company in question, while 28% of the "dissatisfied" customers intended to stay. So "satisfied" does not always translate to "loyal."
The Customer Satisfaction Score measures how satisfied or unsatisfied customers are, on average, with your product, services or customer success programming. Usually asked on a scale of 1-3, 1-5, or 1-7, your customer satisfaction score can be calculated by adding up the sum of all scores and dividing the sum by the number of respondents. The Customer Effort Score is very similar, but instead of asking how satisfied the customer is, you ask them to gauge their experience. Lastly, the Net Promoter Score asks the question, "how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” This attempts to analyze not only customer satisfaction, but also customer loyalty.
The above examples are just three simple ways to administer a survey. These can be answered quickly, which is good for customers who do not have much time to sit down and fill out a twenty question survey. Surveys are not set-in-stone though and can be changed depending on how much information you want and what that information is. You should decide what results you’re looking for when crafting the survey and only ask questions that are actionable. In other words, you should not ask questions that you do not intend to take action on.
Social Media
Social media is taking over and it is important for businesses, especially those who are on social media, to engage with customers. Social media is a wide open world where you have the ability to create a huge impact on your customer base. It is the place where you most likely will do your heavy relationship building. Social media is also where you will learn if people are satisfied or unsatisfied with your service. In fact, the amount of customer feedback on social media is unprecedented. People finally have the ability to express their opinions vocally and openly for the world to see. It is important as a company to be on top of your social media by monitoring conversations in order to attend to comments immediately, especially if they are negative. Listed below are a few ways to help track your customer satisfaction on social media:
- Google Alerts – set these, and for free Google notifies you when your brand has been mentioned online.
- Mention – this tool also lets you know when your business gets mentioned online. It works much better for social media monitoring (this tool is not free.)
- Socialmention – this free tool analyzes your social mentions and shows your range of influence, your ratio of positive to negative mentions and much more.
Website Analytics
Some businesses neglect the many uses Google Analytics has, which is unfortunate because it provides a plethora of insight into customer satisfaction and the state of your company as a whole. By checking your analytics, you can see what part of your website gets the most traffic, when and how often. You can also get information regarding user behavior while visitors are on your website. Using analytics is a passive way to track customer satisfaction because it does not directly involve customer’s input, but it is still a good way to gauge customer traffic on your website. Through your analytics, you’ll find areas of your site that need improvement, and you can learn how to better guide website visitors through your sales funnel. Making sure the basics surrounding your company, such as your website, are intact helps to keep your customers satisfied, which in the end benefits your company.
These are a few starting points to help your business better track how happy your customers are with the service or product you provide. Customers are the core of your business and ensure your business remains successful, therefore customer service and engagement are the most fundamental things to focus on and always strive to improve.
