Organizations take considerable efforts in meeting customer expectations and requirements and keeping them satisfied at every touchpoint. Satisfied customers are definitely the key to sustaining your business profitably and growing it year-on-year. These efforts behind customer satisfaction need to be looked at carefully. These numbers are your customer satisfaction key performance indicators (KPIs) and are essential to understand where you stand concerning your competition.
Five vital customer satisfaction (CSAT) KPIs to remember
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the loyalty of your customers. NPS asks an organization’s customers their willingness to recommend a brand’s products or services to their family, friends, and colleagues based on their experience. Based on the customers’ answers, they fall into three types:
Promoters: Customers that rated you 9 or 10. Promoters are happy with the brand and recommend it to their colleagues and loved ones.
Detractors: Customers that rated you 6 or below. Detractors are an attrition risk and will spread negative word of mouth about the brand’s products and services.
Passives: Customers that rated you either 7 or 8. They fall in between the two; they will neither promote the brand nor bad mouth it.
The NPS score of any organization typically lies within -100 to 100. A negative score is indicative of more detractors, and a good NPS score indicates more promoters than detractors. If you have more detractors, then you need to take immediate corrective measures to improve your score. If you have an equal amount of promoters and detractors, you may want to look at concentrating efforts towards moving your passives and detractors to the promoters’ bucket.
2. High raters
Respondents who rate customer experience in your surveys with ‘highly satisfied’ or ‘extremely happy’ is an excellent gauge to know you are doing well. If your customers are rating you excellently, they are happy with your customer support teams, operations, customer service teams, and your business is doing well. Satisfied customers are loyal customers, which is crucial since acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining current ones. Loyal customers are great brand advocates and a significant revenue source since they repeatedly buy from you. Knowing you have satisfied customers is not enough, knowing the reasons behind their satisfaction and delight is key. Something is definitely working, and you need to know what it is to either replicate it at other touchpoints or do more of it.
3. CSAT score
If your customer satisfaction KPI is rising with subsequent customer surveys, you are doing things the right way. No business can have 100% satisfied customers, but they can make efforts to improve the number of satisfied customers every day. How can you ensure your numbers are going up? The key is to conduct regular surveys with your customers and keeping your CSAT surveys consistent. If you change your survey questions too much and too often, it will be hard to look for trends and patterns. If you have consistent surveys, you can use results from those questionnaires to set internal goals and targets within your teams and functions. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is not dependant on one team, and all teams and functions need to partake to improve it.
4. Industry NPS benchmarks
NPS benchmarks are crucial to know where you stand concerning your competitors. No matter how good your score is, there is always room for improvement. Work on that and ensure your competition does not outperform you. If your competitors have a better score than you, study them and their methods to understand what you might be missing out on. Bridge those gaps, and measure your customer satisfaction KPIs; they will surely go up. Also, track your customer effort score (CES) with your online surveys. It gauges the ease of using products or services, usually on a scale from ‘very easy’ to ‘very difficult’. Remember to check your questionnaires’ response rate and response time; this lets you know how well your surveys are doing.
5. Brand perception
You might be advertising your products and services in a certain way, but do your customers agree? Is your brand’s messaging in line with what the customers and the industry think and need? If not, then you need to find a way to be on the same page. One way of doing that would be to conduct customer satisfaction surveys or checking your social media handles and understand how the customers perceive you and your products or services. If your communication and their perception align, you will solve customers’ needs and requirements and keep them satisfied.