Customer satisfaction rates can be a difficult metric to acquire. While a simple ‘were you satisfied with your experience with company X, Y or Z’ at the end of a form or questionnaire can give you a rough idea of whether people are happy with your company and what they provide, some companies – those most concerned with customer satisfaction, which is definitely a good ideal to have in this modern era of business where the customer is always right – are not ‘satisfied’ with this simplistic level of depth. However, if you want to move further into the rabbit hole of customer satisfaction, how can you make sure that you don’t get lost focusing on the wrong details, or that you ask all the right questions?
These three key metrics will allow you to dive into customer satisfaction rates and understand what makes your customers tick, and exactly how happy they are with your company.
Customer Loyalty
“In most businesses, the dream customer is one who returns again and again, providing your business with reliable repeat business.” Donna Taylor, a marketing writer at Paper Fellows states. “But measuring customer loyalty is more than that – it’s how your customers feel about coming back to you; about being that repeat business. If you offer a great product, but your company has terrible customer service and your shipping times are unbelievably slow, your customers may come back to you for your products – but they won’t be happy about it.”
In short, loyal customers are not always happy customers, so the customer loyalty metric would involve asking a customer not only if they would use a company again, but if they would want to/would feel good about using the company again, which is often much more in-depth and complex than a simple ‘yes or no’ answer, and the feedback from questions related to customer loyalty can be detailed and give your team a lot to think about and work on.
Customer Success
Ask yourself one simple question: are you helping your customers along their paths to success, or abandoning them once you close a sale? If you’re doing the former, then this would be a positive form of customer success, since your business is keeping the customer and their future in mind. An example could be a company selling musical instruments – if they sell the instrument without any further information being exchanged to the customer, then the company clearly isn’t bothered about whether the customer goes on to play the instrument well or not. However, if leaflets with information on local music lessons and online resources for learning are given, and the salesperson informs the customer, with their musical knowledge, of any tips and tricks to start playing well throughout the sale, then this would be demonstrating a brilliant customer success policy. If customers feel looked after and like the company actually care about them after the sale has been made, they will be satisfied, and often come back to the company due to the building up of a relationship between customer and company, creating even more business and profit.
Customer Service
If customers are treated well by your business and feel like they have had all their problems listened to and sorted out in a timely and efficient manner, then of course they’re going to end up more satisfied at the end of the day. It’s simple when you stop to think about it. And customer service doesn’t just have to mean your responses to problems which your customers face and call you about – dedicating time and effort towards creating public pages filled with helpful information can demonstrate brilliant customer service, and having an easy-to-navigate website with quickly found support pages can contribute as well.
Overall, customer service, whatever it means to your business, can make customers feel wanted and appreciated, since you’re fine-tuning your company to suit their needs. Customer service leads to customer satisfaction – the two practically go hand-in-hand. If a customer feels frustrated, first of all at having a problem with your product or service and then secondly by a slow reaction from your business or a disorganized and bare-bones approach to help page, then they’re certainly not being satisfied with your company at all.
