Many factors help determine customer satisfaction, including the perceived value and quality of products and services, the responsiveness of employees, and the speed and convenience of everything from navigating a website to making purchases and accessing customer support.
What is customer satisfaction?
While companies describe customer satisfaction in many ways, it can be loosely defined as a measure of how well a business, product, service, or experience satisfies customer expectations.
Why is customer satisfaction important?
High levels of customer satisfaction offer many benefits for businesses. Strong customer satisfaction increases customer loyalty, boosts customer retention, and improves customer lifetime value, ultimately driving greater revenue. High customer satisfaction also reduces customer churn, improves word-of-mouth, and reduces the potential for damaging, negative comments on social media and online reviews. In a highly competitive digital marketplace where customers have great power, satisfaction has become a critical point of competitive differentiation.
How do companies improve customer satisfaction?
To improve customer satisfaction, companies must first seek to understand what customers want and expect from every touchpoint throughout the customer lifecycle, and then measure how satisfied customers are with each interaction. Businesses can use these metrics to improve satisfaction at every point in the customer’s journey.
What actions help improve customer satisfaction?
After determining where they are failing to meet customer expectations, businesses can focus on several critical priorities to improve customer satisfaction.
- Speed and convenience. Customers are most often satisfied when they can get what they want quickly and easily. Businesses can achieve this by making processes as fast and frictionless as possible, whether it’s finding the right product, navigating a website, making a purchase, resolving an issue, or communicating with customer service.
- Personalized interactions. Customers want to feel understood and valued by the companies they do business with. Personalizing marketing messages and offers can increase satisfaction during the sales process. Ensuring that agents have all previous customer conversations at their fingertips can impress customers who are contacting customer or technical support.
- Friendly, knowledgeable, responsive, and empathetic employees. Customers appreciate a human touch when interacting with the representatives of a business.
How is customer satisfaction measured?
Most businesses measure satisfaction with surveys that customers can complete during or just after their experience buying a product, contracting a service, or interacting with the business in other ways. Businesses may survey customers via email, SMS text, or directly on a webpage.
What are customer satisfaction metrics?
Standard customer satisfaction metrics include the customer satisfaction score (CSAT), which measures overall satisfaction on a continuum. A net promoter score (NPS) measures how likely a customer is to recommend a company to others or to advocate for a brand. A customer effort score (CES) measures how hard it is for customers to use a product or service, get technical support, or complete other tasks. Metrics related to customer churn, retention, and sentiment analysis can also provide insight into where customers are satisfied or dissatisfied with a business.
What are the drawbacks of customer satisfaction surveys?
While surveys offer some value, they are limited by scope and bias. Because response rates can be quite low, surveys may only represent a small fraction of customers. Results are often skewed by the fact that highly satisfied or dissatisfied customers are more likely to respond. Surveys questions are typically quite broad and don’t enable a nuanced understanding. And surveys are unreliable when it comes to understanding and predicting future behavior.
What is conversation intelligence software?
Conversation intelligence software offers a far better approach to measuring customer satisfaction than traditional surveys. Conversation intelligence technology captures and analyzes customer conversations on every channel – phone, email, social, web, chat, SMS text, and more. Using AI-powered processes, conversation intelligence software transforms the unstructured information in these interactions into structured data that can be aggregated, searched, and analyzed to reveal deep insight into customer expectations and satisfaction.
How does CallMiner determine customer satisfaction?
CallMiner Eureka is the most comprehensive platform for analyzing omnichannel customer interactions at scale. By capturing, transcribing, and analyzing 100% of customer conversations, CallMiner reveals meaningful insight and nuanced intelligence that help businesses make better decisions. With CallMiner, businesses can analyze the unsolicited feedback in customer conversations to interpret nuance, uncover patterns, and identify traits that reveal a deeper understanding of what customers want, need, and expect.
