No matter what type of business you’re in, there’s no doubt that measuring your customers’ satisfaction is a key to improving and keeping those customers. But it can be hard to know where to start with data collection and analysis, so many companies don’t start trying until it has become overtly evident there is a customer satisfaction issue. Many of our customers have been in this boat, and we’ve been able to get them back on track by helping them measure customer satisfaction through two methods: Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
We love guiding our customers through understanding, implementing, and using these tools – but we also practice what we preach. At Conectys, we use both CSAT and NPS internally in order to make sure we’re hitting the right notes with customers and earning our customers’ loyalty.
Here’s why we believe both of these tools are important, and how we can help you get them up and running in a snap so you can start moving in lockstep with your customers.
CSAT
The Customer Satisfaction Score is a pretty straightforward methodology of finding out the details of what your customers like and dislike about the experience. You create a questionnaire that includes a handful of questions that are specific to your customer experience, products, or services. Customers can respond based on a numerical survey scale. From these responses, you can get some very definitive insight into where your customer journey is thriving and where it’s lacking.
NPS
The Net Promoter Score methodology is much less in-depth but can yield you a greater quantity of responses. This is because it’s a one-question survey – and many people are willing to answer a single question over multiple ones. The question simply asks how likely the respondent is to recommend the brand to a friend or colleague, and they can answer on a scale of 0-10.
NPS is a great way to benchmark your company’s success with customers because you can easily look back over time and see if your number has gotten higher, lower, or stayed the same. You won’t get the same wealth of information as you do with the CSAT, but when you couple both of these tools together, you can get some pretty keen insights into how happy your customers really are and what you can do to make improvements.
Putting them into Practice
If you want to use one (or both) of these tools, we recommend starting with the NPS survey first. It’s faster to create and will give you an internal benchmark that’s easy to measure against. Then you can dive into the CSAT once you have more of a concrete idea about some specific areas you want to gather feedback about.
If you’d like some help getting started with these measurements of customer satisfaction, we’d love to get you up and running. At Conectys, we’ve used CSAT and NPS repeatedly and systematically for years and have seen incredible results from doing so. We can help you lay the right foundation, start collecting your data, analyze the results and actually do something about them.
Doing Something with the Data
When you first view the results of an NPS survey, you might be shocked one way or another. Maybe you’re pleasantly surprised by the number of promoters (those who answered with a nine or 10) you had, or maybe you’re horrified by the overwhelming number of detractors (those who answered between zero and six). If it’s the latter, don’t panic. Your business isn’t going to sink because you now have data in front of you, but it could if you didn’t have this data in time. Now you just have to do something about it.
You might also be surprised by what you find with the CSAT. Maybe one of the questions on your survey questionnaire is about a new product you’re offering that you thought would be a smash hit with your current customers, and you find out that it’s widely being viewed as underwhelming. That might be disappointing (especially if you head the product department), but it doesn’t mean all is lost. Oftentimes, the data simply tells you where to zero in your focus so you can dig deeper. If you pinpoint areas of weakness, you can follow up with more questions and gather more context before making any adjustments to the course you’re on.
Once you start regularly collecting and analyzing the results of these two tools, you’ll start to know what to look for and whether follow-up is needed before you take action. The goal is to get firsthand customer feedback so you can drive a better customer experience and ultimately keep customers longer. We’ve been able to do this at Conectys, and have consistently improved scores year-over-year. For example in the Travel and Hospitality industry year-to-date, one of our client’s NPS scores is 23 points higher than the average for their competitors. In the Automotive Retail Service Industry, it is 54 points higher and in telecommunications and Internet Service Providers, our client’s NPS score is 22 points higher on average than their competitors.
As long as you’re constantly collecting the data, and constantly improving, you’re all but sure to elevate your customer experience piece by piece. The impact on revenue, customer loyalty, and your company’s overall success might take a while to become obvious, but it will undoubtedly be positively impacted. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you get started measuring customer satisfaction, please contact us.
