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Customer Satisfaction Metrics to Monitor in 2021

Rithesh Raghavan | August 17, 2021 |

Advice
Customer Satisfaction Metrics to Monitor in 2021

About the author: Rithesh Raghavan is the Director at Acodez, a Digital Agency in India. Having a rich experience of 15+ years in Digital Marketing, Rithesh loves to write up his thoughts on the latest trends and developments in the world of IT and software development.

Defining customer satisfaction

The customer experience is one of the most important aspects of any successful business, and it can only get more important as competition becomes stiffer and technology more advanced. 

So, the question is:

How do you know when your customers are satisfied? 

Customer satisfaction is one of the building blocks of creating a memorable customer experience. However, building off of customer satisfaction is only possible if you know how to measure it. This is where customer satisfaction metrics come into play. 

There are numerous customer satisfaction metrics you can use to evaluate satisfaction scores based on the feedback you get from your clients. These metrics are spread throughout the customer experience to help you collect feedback. As a result, customer satisfaction metrics can also be called customer experience metrics. 

What is a customer satisfaction metric?

A customer satisfaction metric is a set of data that helps you measure and track customer experience as customers use and interact with your products and services. The objective of a customer experience metric is to ensure your customers are satisfied, help create a positive connection with your products and services, and hope that customers recommend your products and services to others.

Why should you track and measure customer satisfaction?

There are numerous reasons to track and measure customer satisfaction within your company. The first and most important reason is that happy customers translate into loyal customers. If you want to encourage repeat visits from your current customers, you must ensure that your products and services are satisfactory. 

Research shows that most unsatisfied customers tend to spread the news about negative shopping or dining experiences to others. 

Accordingly, tracking and measuring customer satisfaction helps you identify the unhappy customers and pinpoint why they’re dissatisfied. This way, you can learn where to make adjustments. Additionally, these metrics help you stay in touch with your clients regularly, which is good business practice in general.

Which customer satisfaction metrics should you monitor in 2021?

Let’s focus on the top four customer satisfaction metrics to help you evaluate and enhance the customer experience in 2021 and beyond. 

Customer satisfaction score

Customer satisfaction score

The customer satisfaction score is one of the most used customer experience metrics. This metric is designed to help you measure the level of satisfaction within your customer base. In other words, it enables you to evaluate how satisfied your clients are with your products and services.

With this tool, you can ask your customers to rate their satisfaction level based on selected questions on a predetermined scale, say from one to ten. A higher number represents the highest level of satisfaction. Accordingly, the customer satisfaction score metric can use emoticons in the place of numerical values. This is a great way to provoke emotions. 

Regardless of how hard you work to optimize your business operations, there may still be a few loopholes that make your customers unsatisfied. These are the loopholes you need to identify and correct. 

With the customer satisfaction score metric, you can set up a survey on your landing page and gather information about the efficiency, ease-of-use, and overall experience customers are having with your products and services. Results from a survey like this offer you insights into  improvements you can make to help you remain competitive. 

Additionally, the survey helps you track your previous actions on feedback to see if your improvements worked. 

Net promoter score 

Net promoter score

The net promoter score (NPS) is another metric that is commonly used to measure customer satisfaction with businesses. This metric helps you measure your customers’ willingness to recommend your business to other people. This is a broader metric in the sense that it can help you gauge how satisfied your guests are with the products and customer service you offer to the extent of recommending them to others. 

With this metric, you can ask your customers how likely they are to recommend your brand to others. Using a scale of one to ten, you can get their feedback, with one being not at all likely to recommend your business to others, and ten highly likely to do so. 

With the tallied results, you can classify your customers into detractors (1-5), passive (6-8), and promoters (9-10). 

To calculate your net promoter score, you need to subtract the percentage of detractors from promoters. The answer gives you the net promoter score. 

Your marketing department can use the net promoter score to identify customer pain points and factors that create promoters and detractors. This is an excellent way to predict trends and take the necessary actions to meet customer expectations. 

Customer effort score

Customer effort score

The customer effort score is one of the most exciting customer satisfaction metrics you can use. This metric helps you measure the effort your customers feel you have to make to serve them better and meet their expectations. It is like asking your customers, “how can we serve you better?” This metric also has  customer service applications. 

Experts would say that the best way to improve customer loyalty is to make things easy for them. For instance, research shows that negative interactions with customer service  are more likely to drive disloyalty than loyalty. 

In other words, the customer effort score is a way to measure how easy it is for customers to interact with your business. 

Customer effort score is all about expectations. However, the metric can be subjective because what people define as low or high effort may vary significantly. 

Churn 

Churn

Churn is one metric you should measure to help you predict business  highs and lows and also prevent their adverse effects on your operations. This metric enables you to evaluate the company’s condition at a given period and its ability to cope with the hardship of customers canceling their subscriptions. 

Churn is an indicator of dissatisfaction. Lucky enough, you can always reduce the churn rate. 

This metric helps you find out why customers are canceling their subscriptions or quitting your company. The data you gather through this metric can be helpful in re-strategizing to reduce the churn rate. 

For instance, if you have ever used WhatsApp and decided to delete it, you will notice that the app asks you why you want to permanently delete your account. This is a way to identify possible solutions to prevent similar situations in the future. 

However, you should note that dissatisfaction is not the only reason a customer may want to switch services. For instance, harsh economic times may force clients to cancel subscriptions they deem secondary to focus on  basic needs. 

The good news is there are many ways to measure churn. Whichever way you use, ensure that you identify your opportunities for improvement and work on them. This way, you can satisfy customers and prevent them from switching to other businesses. 

Conclusion 

When it comes to business, you only need to measure what matters. But how do you know what matters? This is one of the most challenging questions entrepreneurs face. There are many answers to this. However, the most straightforward is focusing on creating a positive customer experience. 

In today’s business environment, customer experience is the foundation of everything you need to succeed. 

You can choose from a wide variety of customer satisfaction metrics to help you improve the overall customer experience. The data you get from these tools helps you determine the kind of customer experience that appeals to your audience. 

These four customer satisfaction metrics are essential in the current business world and are very up-to-date with the advancing technology. However, you have to keep in mind that all customer satisfaction metrics do not work the same. Therefore, you need to identify the ones that are right for your business.