We tend to measure customer satisfaction after the customer experience has already happened. But that isn’t when the opinion about the experience is really created. Customer experiences are actually created long before your customer ever reaches your doorstep. They often start with impressions and perceptions created when your potential customer interacts with friends and colleagues who may tell them about your company, or they search online and find articles and reviews about your business. This is the moment when expectations are created based on what messages are currently active about your business and the customer experience. While you can’t control others — you can control customer satisfaction scores, design and manage customer experience.
4 Proven ways to control customer satisfaction scores
1. Profile Your Customer. I know I say this all the time, but if you want to control customer experience and improve customer satisfaction scores, the first thing you must do is be clear on what kind of customer you’d like to attract and then create a customer experience targeted toward them. Here’s an example. If you have a hair salon business and you decide to target people who are on a busy schedule. You might design an experience that guarantees that your customer will start their appointment on time and end their appointment on time — every time. If you were targeting people who wanted to go to a salon for a spa experience and who looked at that experience as entertainment, rather than a task — those people would feel rushed, hurried and unappreciated. So first decide on WHO your customer is and what’s important and then start designing a customer experience around that.
2. Map out your experience process. The best experiences are really staged, orchestrated and managed. Customers appreciate the thought put into it and are willing to pay a higher price and give great reviews to the companies that deliver. To design a great process, you’ll need to map customer experience out exactly what it looks like TODAY. This way you can manage and measure the effectiveness of the changes you’re making. At each stage of the process, outline exactly what your desired action or outcome is and then work backwards to make sure that it’s achieved. For example, if your customer is a busy person who wants to receive service within 5 minutes of walking in, you may decide to have them schedule an appointment in advance so that their slot is guaranteed.
3. Create opportunities for feedback. Don’t wait to ask for feedback! QuestionPro Mobile application has some terrific features that can push surveys out to your customers based on when they enter your store. Or, you can post QR codes at different stations around your location and give customers the opportunity to give you a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” at that specific station. It not only increases customer engagement, it allows you to control that experience in real time and improve customer satisfaction scores immediately before a bad impression is created.
4. Change it up for the better. If you’re receiving input and feedback, make those changes and publicize them. If a customer made a request for something that turned into an improvement to your system – let everyone know. If it’s appropriate for your business, acknowledge them there or why not send them a letter or note about the change you made with a special free gift to come back and experience their idea in action.
While you can download customer satisfaction survey templates and send out an online survey, with today’s interactive technology you can get feedback even sooner so that you can control customer satisfaction scores and the quality of that experience. This will not only improve your customer satisfaction ratings but will improve profitability, loyalty, and customer engagement.
Key metrics for consumer satisfaction measurement
Measuring customer satisfaction (CSAT) or consumer satisfaction is necessary to determine the success of brands. Measuring consumer satisfaction is a crucial success standard, and brands continually make efforts to boost customer satisfaction at each touchpoint of the consumer journey. There are seven key metrics to measure CSAT:
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
2. Customer Effort Score (CES)
3. Customer service satisfaction (CSS)
4. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
5. Customer reviews
6. Customer Churn Rate (CCR)
7. Customer Health Score (CHS)
We look at these metrics in great detail in the above blog.
How to take control of customer satisfaction variables
1. Push Metrics
Your survey metrics give you valuable insights into understanding customer satisfaction (CSAT). Being aware of what’s working and what’s not lets management devise result-oriented CSAT strategies. The amount of metrics accessible can be overwhelming to manually check, especially if you need to log in to an account every time you wish to look at the dashboard. This results in a reluctance to look at these dashboards by segment managers. With Push Metrics, QuestionPro CX management software’s new feature, you can schedule periodic dashboard reports and save time and effort. Head on over for detailed information on Push Metrics.
2. CX Disposition Metrics
When developing a CX program, it is imperative to track your brand’s efforts in reaching out and engaging your customers at various customer touchpoints. You can gather this feedback is via customer email surveys. Keeping track of emails sent regularly will help collect valuable information at all engagement points and monitor changes to consumer behaviors along the journey. Email disposition metrics, QuestionPro CX management tool’s new feature, gives you the status of every email survey conducted for feedback. It displays pertinent data such as open rate, click rate, etc.
3. Enhanced CX closed-loop
A single negative post on social media or negative word of mouth from dissatisfied customers can hut your organization. It will impact your brand reputation management and business revenue adversely. These are very time-sensitive matters and need to handled very delicately and in a timely fashion. With QuestionPro CX’s enhanced closed-loop, you can close the feedback loop by way of a ticketing system. You can add a new ticket for every detractor and assign it to the relevant representative for resolving the issue. This helps in containing the churn rate and the chance to convert your NPS detractors into promoters.
