How to Use Engagement Analytics to Measure Customer Satisfaction

The Takeaway: Engagement analytics offer far greater accuracy and are more comprehensive than surveys, revealing more valuable, actionable customer satisfaction insight.

In our recent white paper, we focus extensively on the issue of Customer Engagement Analytics Beyond the Contact Center. As you’ll see in that report, this approach can offer a wide range of major benefits. One of the most significant: Engagement analytics can serve as an upgrade – and a potential replacement – for the customer satisfaction survey. Here’s how.

Customer Satisfaction Survey Shortcomings

“35% of marketers consider customer satisfaction their top metric.”

Obviously, companies need to keep a close eye on customer satisfaction. In fact, a recent Salesforce study found that 35 percent of marketers consider customer satisfaction as their top overall metric, making this the most popular choice. Traditional revenue goals and customer acquisition followed, selected by 33 percent and 24 percent of respondents, respectively.

The real question for companies is how to best obtain this insight.

Surveys have traditionally held this role. But there are numerous reasons why surveys are less than ideal:

• They’re fixed: You can’t change the questions on a survey until it’s completed. That makes surveys inflexible and limits how quickly you can ask new questions to investigate recent customer satisfaction discoveries.
• They’re unpopular: Seventy-two percent of consumers have said surveys interfere with their experiences on a website, according to OpinionLab. The more aggressively you promote surveys, the more damage you may do to your brand.
• They’re limited: That same study found that more than half of customers will not spend more than three minutes filling out a customer satisfaction survey. That limits how much insight you can gain each time.

Put together, these shortcomings ensure that any company relying entirely on surveys to gauge customer satisfaction will likely end up with an inaccurate impression, which in turn can lead to sub-par decision-making throughout the organization.

Upgrading to Customer Engagement Analytics

By embracing and deploying customer engagement analytics, companies can overcome all of the shortcomings inherent to relying exclusively on the customer satisfaction survey. In the simplest terms, this approach to analytics has three key advantages over surveys.

• Comprehensive data: With a survey, the marketing team needs to very carefully choose which questions to ask, and inevitably there will be information your company wants to acquire but is forced to leave unaddressed. When analytics is applied to every form of customer engagement – including phone calls, emails, live chat and social posts – then there’s really no limit on the type of insight that the organization can glean.
• Unobtrusive information-gathering: Unlike surveys, analytics can effectively run in the background – there’s no need for clients to dedicate their own time or effort. This means there’s no need to weigh the tradeoff between customer satisfaction insight and diminishing the customer experience.
• Adaptability: With customer engagement analytics insight, you can shift the focus of your customer satisfaction research at any time. If a new issue crops up that requires more attention – for example, a surprising number of customers are dissatisfied with a particular product – you can further explore that development in detail, without abandoning your original information-gathering target. With traditional surveys, you’re locked into that initial focus and can’t adjust without compromising all of the research you’ve already conducted, and you’ll miss valuable opportunities by the time you develop a new survey.

To learn more about the benefits of expanding interaction analytics beyond the contact center, be sure to read our recent white paper. And let us know:

How does your company measure customer satisfaction?

EXTRACT

Engagement analytics can serve as an upgrade – and potential replacement – for the customer satisfaction survey