How To Measure Customer Satisfaction
Filed Under Blog
There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to measuring customer satisfaction, because it very much depends on the type of business that you are running and the type of customers that you have. After all, if you are operating a business where customers use you as a ‘one off’ then you will have very different customer satisfaction requirements to companies that need to have a very stable customer base.
So there are essentially 3 main issues to be considered before you decide on how you will measure customer satisfaction.
What IS customer satisfaction?
First of all it is important to understand exactly what is meant by customer satisfaction. It is obviously a feeling or state of mind, not something that is objective. Customers will use different criteria to ‘judge’ your company, so there are different yardsticks that will have to be used to measure customer satisfaction.
Satisfaction may also mean different things to different businesses, for example will your customers be satisfied with the products you supply, or with your speed of delivery, with your customer care service, with your price, or is it about an ongoing business service that you provide to them?
What kind of system to use
When thinking about what kind of customer satisfaction system to use it is important to think about how the information that you gather will be used. If you do nothing with the results then it is a pointless exercise, but if you use the results to make sure that you improve levels of customer satisfaction then it will be beneficial to your company.
You will also need to think about how the information will be used to take action so that you can not only retain your existing customers, but also attract and then retain new ones.
What measures to use
Consideration also has to be given to exactly how you will define customer satisfaction. If you merely ask people if they were satisfied with the service, then you are failing to elicit information about any weaknesses within it and so you will not improve the system.
So you need to clearly understand the expectations that your customers have and what they want from you, in order to feel satisfied.
Beginning the progress
Once you have established what is satisfaction what kind of system you should use and which measures to use, you can then start the process of measuring customer satisfaction, simply by talking to your customers, either through emails, phone calls, letters, forms etc. However, vital to this process is consistency; you need to use the same questions with all the customers that you contact.
Often the response rate can be poor, but sometimes rather than asking a whole range of questions you can ask a few when you send out an email or contact a customer. Remember that your customers are probably quite busy people and they will often not wish to participate in a really lengthy questionnaire. So weed out all the questions that are not of vital importance and keep the number of questions to a minimum.
One trick to attract responses is to offer an incentive. So when responses are received in they will be entered into a draw and the winner will receive a gift or cash reward; this tends to ensure a better response.
The final way to measure customer satisfaction is to make sure that you repeat the exercise on a regular basis, so that you can make comparisons about how you are doing and what you are getting right and any areas where you may be getting it wrong.