Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a metric that asks customers to rate their experience with your product or service. Companies typically deploy CSAT surveys after a product purchase, on your website, or during customer support interactions.
NPS and CES survey methodologies segment customers into promoters, passives, and detractors, which helps you take action on your results.
1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is an easy-to-use metric that can be measured across any touchpoint in the customer journey. It is typically captured by a short survey question that asks how satisfied the customer is with a product or service. CSAT surveys can be sent through website pop-ups, email, feedback forms, SMS, and more.
Generally, customers are asked to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1-5. CSAT scores can then be calculated by dividing the number of positive responses by the total number of reactions and multiplying by 100 to get the percentage score.
While CSAT is an excellent metric, it can only be limited in its insights with contextual data. For example, if a high percentage of respondents indicate dissatisfaction with a product or experience, brands must understand why this was the case. This is often achieved by supplementing a CSAT question with open-ended, qualitative questions that allow customers to explain their ratings in their own words.
A CSAT score is helpful, but it can also be combined with other key metrics like first contact resolution and customer effort score to get a more holistic view of team performance. It is also helpful to track the CSAT score over time so teams can see if there are trends in how satisfied customers are with their experiences and whether improvements they’re making are having an impact.
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is an essential customer experience (CX) metric that measures how likely customers are to recommend your brand to others. The underlying theory behind NPS is that customers who are promoters will drive loyalty and growth for your business.
To calculate your NPS, you ask respondents to rate their overall satisfaction with your brand on a scale of 1 to 10. Then, you subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. This gives you a straightforward metric that is easy to understand and compare across your industry.
While NPS is a great metric to track, it’s important to remember that the score itself doesn’t tell you everything you need to know. You also need to look at the open qualitative responses from your surveys. These provide valuable insights into what your customers think, which will help you identify areas of improvement and win back at-risk customers.
For example, if your support agents take longer than average to respond to customer issues, this can hurt your NPS. In this case, you should invest in better training for your team or implement changes to your products and services to fix the problem. Tracking and analyzing NPS and the corresponding customer feedback can improve your customer experience, leading to increased loyalty and referrals.
3. Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that measures the amount of effort a customer has to put into an interaction with your company. This score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of negative responses from the percentage of positive responses. Like NPS, CES is not a perfect metric and should be used with other metrics to get a complete picture of your customer experience.
CES surveys are typically sent immediately after a customer action or touchpoint, like after they purchase or contact your support team. These surveys can be straightforward, asking customers to rate how easy or difficult they found an interaction using a scale of 1-5 or 1-7. Other options include:
- A simple thumbs-up/down binary.
- An agree/disagree scale.
- An emoticon anger-to-happiness scale.
The survey can also ask for open-ended comments, allowing the customer to vent and explain what made an interaction difficult. This feedback can be invaluable and is often the most valuable part of a CES survey.
Once you have the CES data, could you share it with your organization? This should include the CX and product teams as well as leadership. This will help everyone understand the issues and how they can be resolved. Additionally, it will allow you to see changes’ effects on your CES over time, making it an excellent metric for tracking success.
4. Customer Loyalty Score (CLI)
Customer loyalty metrics help you understand the drivers behind your retention and loyalty efforts. These metrics include repeat purchase rate, cross-sell and upsell ratio, customer lifetime value (CLV), and more. These metrics are a great way to benchmark your customer retention rates and show you how much future revenue you can expect from loyal customers.
Customer Loyalty Index (CLI) is another critical metric to measure customer loyalty. It measures the likelihood that a current customer would recommend your brand or product to their friends and family. It also determines whether a customer would buy additional products from your company or try other services you provide. To obtain a more accurate and robust picture of your CLI, you should survey your customers over time to track their response patterns.
NPS is the most widely used metric for measuring customer loyalty. The survey asks customers how likely they are to recommend a business and its products or services to their friends and family. However, it can be challenging to translate NPS into meaningful insights. To improve the accuracy of your NPS results, you should ask respondents for a reason for their rating. Additionally, you should segment your respondent base by demographics and industry to compare their NPS score with their peers.
