Want to grow your business? Who doesn’t!?
But to do it, you need to delight, retain, and increase your customer base and customer satisfaction scores. Improve customer experience, and you’ll gain loyal customers and expand your business.
Increasing customer satisfaction does several things—all of them good:
“A satisfied customer is the best source of advertisement”
― G.S. Alag
These benefits can directly impact your customer satisfaction metrics and revenue.
But increasing customer satisfaction isn’t as easy as it sounds.
If you’re looking to improve the customer journey, you’ll first need to measure existing customer satisfaction, then create a program designed to boost support to a higher level and increase customer retention rate. Do that, and your business will thrive.
Customer service metrics create a baseline record of how well you’re meeting customer expectations. Measuring satisfaction also helps you:
Furthermore, when you measure customer service success you identify where you need to make changes to customer support to boost satisfaction levels. Your customer effort score helps you build customer loyalty, improves customer interaction and retention, and increases profitability—critical steps in growing your business.
A critical step in measuring customer support (check out this free customer support worksheet for measuring success) is determining key performance indicators (KPI)s. They provide targets for your workers to shoot for and the direction for your improvement effort. The trick is finding the right KPIs. You want KPIs that fit your needs.
Below are seven KPIs you might consider using when measuring your customer satisfaction over a period of time:
These KPIs are just some of the valuable insights you’ll want to consider in your effort to measure customer support success. Additional KPIs to consider include employee turnover rate, brand attributes, complaint escalation rate, and cash flow.
Once you’ve determined your KPIs and measured customer satisfaction, you’ll want to take one more step to grow your business. You’ll want to compare your numbers to those of your competitors.
The question is: How do you stack up against your competitors’ numbers?
Unfortunately, this information is rarely public information.
What options are there?
Here are a few ideas you can use to gather competitive data:
When measuring support and level of satisfaction, you need to generate customer feedback. Effective surveys can help you do that. Of course, numerous ways exist to execute surveys—from how you design the instrument to how you analyze the data.
But you must execute your surveys correctly to get the most out of them. Below is a six-step process for doing just that:
Follow these six steps when executing customer surveys and they’ll provide the data you need to determine customer satisfaction and improve customer relationships.
Survey results may show your customers think highly of your company’s customer support and response time, which is excellent. Keep doing whatever you’re doing.
But what if the surveys show the opposite—that your customer satisfaction level is low? Poor customer service needs to be addressed immediately if your goals are business growth and improved customer engagement. A great place to start is your call center.
Your call center is the business card of your business. So, if you have unhappy customers and lower levels of customer satisfaction, your customer service agents aren’t doing their job properly and you lose customers and business. When today’s customers don’t get the service they expect, they bolt. That won’t help your business grow.
Below are five basic principles for your call center improvement efforts:
Use these five principles as the foundation for your remedial program. They’ll help you boost customer support where it’s needed.
Customer satisfaction is critical to growing your business. If customers aren’t happy with the level of service they receive or the average response time to their demands, they’ll go elsewhere. Make no mistake about that. Customer defections, however, can shrink your profitability.
To remedy that, you’ll need to improve customer support success. Measuring satisfaction is the first step in doing that. It will pinpoint where customer support is lacking and where to make changes. Improving customer service not only boosts profitability but also sets the stage for you to grow your business.
Post Update: The article was updated on February 28th, 2023, originally published on February 5th, 2019. It has been completely revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.