Meeting customer expectations is what every business does. What if you start exceeding customer satisfaction? 

CSAT is one of the most simple ways of measuring customer satisfaction level. It has numerous advantages. We’ll uncover all the aspects of customer satisfaction along with the benefits of CSAT.

Let’s move on!

Importance of Customer Experience (CX)

The provision of excellent customer experiences is the driving force for business growth and higher revenues. You just can’t anticipate a successful business running without having happy customers. You need to take good care of customer needs and wants in order to attract them and retain them so that they keep doing business with you. 

A Walker study found that by the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

Investing in CX is the best thing to do if you truly want to differentiate from your competitors. But CX is not only about differentiating; It’s about creating those wow moments that build loyalty in your customers. Loyal customers tend to spend more and also act as brand advocates for you. Through positive online reviews and word-of-mouth, they bring in referrals who are more than happy to trust you as their peers do. 

The main goal of providing exceptional CX is to achieve higher customer satisfaction levels. Because the more you satisfy a customer, the more they trust you and associate their loyalty towards you.

Why Measure Customer Satisfaction?

Measurement leads to better management. Simple!

This one liner explains why managers ask for weekly and monthly reports on important matters. Making informed decisions yields better, yet focused results. It also helps in allocating resources wisely and saves companies tons of money that would otherwise be wasted on fluke decisions.

Customer satisfaction, repeat purchasing, and revenues are highly related to one another. Tracking changes in customer satisfaction greatly helps you in forecasting consumer behavior and revenue returns. It helps you identify your raving fans who are better prospects for upselling pitches. 

The best part of measuring customer satisfaction is that it gives you an idea of customers who are least satisfied with your company. 

An unhappy customer tells between 9-15 people about their experience.

Mckinsey

Just imagine how much damage one unsatisfied customer can do to you! 

Identifying such customers at the right time is necessary for making things right for them so that your brand image doesn’t get tarnished. The first step in that case is to make up for their bad experience and promise that the same wouldn’t be happening again. The second step is to make sure other customers don’t have to face the same in their customer journey. 

By measuring customer satisfaction you can put new strategies in place to improve overall CX and achieve higher customer satisfaction.

Here’s everything you need to know about Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and the ways you can leverage it for your growing company. 

What is Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)?

CSAT is the measure of customer satisfaction. On a numeric scale (mostly 1-7 or 1-5) it indicates what percentage of your customers are happy doing business with you. 

It’s a one-question survey that asks customers to rate their experience. The score is recorded and a follow-up question may be sent to get deeper insights about the customer’s particular experience. 

CSAT, along with other customer satisfaction metrics like NPS and CES, can help you improve your overall CX and boost up profits! 

When to survey for CSAT?

Customer satisfaction surveys should ideally be sent to customers right after they have an experience with your products or services. The idea is to record the score while the experience is still fresh so that the results are accurate and valid. 

Here are four different channels where you can collect the responses:

Where to Measure CSAT?

All major customer touchpoints are the best places to start measuring customer satisfaction. These points are the main areas of customer-company interaction that make the most profound impact during the customer journey. It’s highly recommended that you measure customer satisfaction across these key areas of customer contact. 

Not sure what customer touchpoints are? No worries, read here. 

How to Measure the Final CSAT?

After surveying the customers, categorise the responses as happy customers and sad customers.

For example, if on a scale of 1-5, the higher scores denote high satisfaction levels, then the customers who score you 4 & 5 are your happy customers.

The final CSAT score is calculated as follows:

5 Benefits of CSAT

There are numerous benefits of CSAT. Running a successful business is all about satisfying customers. After all, they are the ones who keep your business in running!

Here are the top 5 benefits of CSAT:

Opens up communication

Companies who regularly communicate with customers always have a leg up from their competitors. Conducting satisfaction surveys is a good way of keeping customers engaged with your brand. It makes them believe that you really care about their say.

Measuring customer satisfaction gives you an idea of consumer preference about specific interactions. For example, if your CSAT surveys indicate that customers are more satisfied watching an online demo instead of pictures, then you should focus on providing excellent online demos.

Smart investment

Learning customer preferences mean you know exactly what to provide and where to spend. This makes making informed decisions to the next level where your business investments really prove fruitful.

Vague decisions never really work and the hit-and-trial method only costs you more than it returns back. Hence, measuring customer satisfaction across each touch point enables you to make make smart investments in the business cycle.

Better retention

The best benefit of CSAT is that it helps companies retain customers. Measuring CSAT means you know what key areas to focus on to make a difference. Once you start exceeding customer satisfaction and provide them with the wow moments they deserve, they’ll be your customers forever.

Improved brand image

Retained customers continue doing business with you. They can be turned into promoters who will happily refer you to others. Positive word-of-mouth greatly enhances brand image and is more effective in attracting new clients.

People like to be associated with brands with good image. One bad review can seriously damage brand reputation which can prove very costly. Thus, keeping the customer satisfaction level in check can save you from humiliation in the market.

More profits

This one’s a no brainer. After all this discussion about customer retention and improved brand image, it’s pretty clear that CSAT improves your market condition and customers will come flying to you. Better retention means saving all those extra pennies that you spend on acquiring new customers.

Retained customers have a higher lifetime value and they tend to spend more.

5 Super Tips for Improving Customer Satisfaction

Tip # 1. Be Omnipresent

Being omnipresent means to be available everywhere and every time. Customers are highly satisfied when they don’t have to make that extra effort trying to interact on channels they’re not comfortable using.

Having a multichannel approach with smart integrations across each channel is a good way of keeping customers satisfied.

Tip # 2. Motivate your employees

Having motivated employees is very important so that they can deliver their best. Front-line employees must be empowered enough so that they can handle an unsatisfied customer well and turn their bad experience into a good one.

Disengaged employees do not perform wholeheartedly and it shows to the customers. Thus, it’s crucial that companies don’t only focus on enhancing customer satisfaction, but also focus on employee satisfaction and morale because both the parameters are closely related to each other.

p.s here are four remarkable ways to reduce employee disengagement

Tip # 3. Utilise customer survey insights

Customer feedback is the best tool to make informed decisions for improving customer satisfaction. Apart from customer satisfaction metrics, the conventional surveys are the best to know what customers really want.

Utilising the survey results to make appropriate decisions can enhance customer satisfaction in multiple folds.

Tip # 4. Personalise user experience

Personalised user experiences yield high satisfaction. Minor personalisations like addressing a customer with their name can really make a difference in the entire customer journey.

Once you start personalising the customer experience, the odds are, customers will start associating their loyalty towards you. That’s because you keep their preferences in mind and

The GroHawk team is constantly working to make personalisation simple for your company. With GroHawk’s feedback integrations, personalisation becomes easy because you get access to customers’ thoughts in real-time. You get to track customer behaviour which greatly helps you deliver individualized services automatically.

Tip # 5. Act on customer feedback

Acting on customer feedback is the best way of satisfying customers. Imagine that you own a restaurant and one of your customers say that the pizza lacks toppings. You immediately apologise and provide them with a better version of a pizza with rich toppings.

Now that you’ve listened to customer feedback and acted on it immediately, you can be sure that the customer returned satisfied. That’s a very basic example of how to make up for bad experiences by acting on feedback.

CSAT surveys also serve the same purpose of letting you know where your customers think you lag so that you can improve their experience and win their hearts.

Conclusion

CSAT is a powerful customer satisfaction metric to calculate as it gives a simple, numeric representation of customer satisfaction level. Measuring the metric helps you make enlightened decisions to improve the specific touchpoints which add up to an amazing customer experience.