Voice of Customer – Customer satisfaction

Everything you need to know about customer satisfaction and customer satisfaction survey

Customer satisfaction, what does that mean, how do you measure it and how do you improve it? Below you will find all information about what customer satisfaction means, how you measure it and why customer satisfaction surveys are important.

• What is customer satisfaction? A definition
• How do you measure customer satisfaction?
• Improve the customer experience
• Benefits of Customer Satisfaction Survey
• Customer satisfaction survey software
• Essential features of customer satisfaction survey software

What is customer satisfaction? A definition

Customer satisfaction indicates the extent to which products, services and services meet customer expectations. So to what extent a company or organization is able to meet or even exceed customer needs.

How do you measure customer satisfaction with customer satisfaction survey

There are various methods for measuring customer satisfaction and conducting customer satisfaction research. One of the most commonly used KPIs to measure customer satisfaction is the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). CSAT can be compared to a score with which you measure the satisfaction of your customers with the purchased products and/or services. On a scale of 1 to 10, the customer is asked to rate your product or service. By expressing customer satisfaction in a report number, the CSAT is recognizable and easy to display in average scores.

The CSAT thus offers the opportunity to gain insight into how an organization performs on certain (specific) aspects. The CSAT is usually used when asking for a recommendation is not a logical question or when asking for a recommendation is not appropriate, for example with questions about healthcare institutions or questions about the government.

Incidentally, a satisfied customer does not say anything about how loyal he or she is to your brand or organization. The difference between satisfied and loyal customers is that satisfaction focuses on the past and meeting expectations. Loyalty focuses on the future and on the extent to which a customer remains loyal to an organization and recommends to others.

The importance of customer satisfaction survey

Measuring customer satisfaction gives you insight into the extent to which you meet customer expectations. This is very important to know for organizations that want to work in a customer-oriented way. Focusing on customer orientation and meeting customer needs, in turn, results in more satisfied customers who often come back and make repeat purchases and thus become loyal customers. Or even ambassadors/promoters of your brand or organization. Enthusiastic customers also ensure enthusiastic employees. This results in lower absenteeism due to illness, retention of talent and an increase in productivity and a positive atmosphere in the organization. And loyal customers and promoters spend more and are willing to pay more. So more turnover! The goal of customer satisfaction research is to give you the tools to improve the customer focus of your organization and to generate satisfied customers.

From increasing customer satisfaction to improving the experience

To stand head and shoulders above your competition, it’s important that you don’t just listen to your customers and respond to their changing needs. The enthusiasm and well-being of your employees also plays a major role in this. Happy employees means happy (returning) customers. To achieve this, it is important that the basis of your company is in place. By only responding to customer satisfaction, you will no longer be able to stand out as a brand and organization. ‘Experience Management’, on the other hand, looks at customer orientation and what this yields from 3 pillars as a holistic whole:

• Listen to your customers and continuously implement targeted improvements at all organizational levels (Voice of Customer)
• Motivate and enthuse employees, they enable customer satisfaction and customer loyalty (Voice of Employee)
• Get the basics right and improve your business operations by targeting hard KPIs (Voice of Business)

Benefits of Customer Satisfaction Survey

Measuring is knowing! Many companies or organizations often make decisions based on gut feeling, processes that do not run well internally or only anticipate customer complaints. And satisfied customers are overlooked. By properly setting up your customer satisfaction survey and analyzing the results, you know exactly to what extent you as an organization meet customer needs and which buttons you need to push to improve customer satisfaction. By ensuring that your methodology is aimed at highlighting priorities, you know exactly what the points for improvement are per department, location or employee and you can make well-founded strategic and operational decisions.

Customer satisfaction survey software

If you really want to make a difference and set yourself apart, it is not only important that you know to what extent your customers are satisfied. What matters is what you do with that information and how you improve customer satisfaction with it. You collect continuous and automated customer feedback via smart customer satisfaction research software. Then you gain insight into customer satisfaction on a structural basis and you can immediately respond to it. And not annually afterwards, customers and employees often no longer know how the interaction has been and complaints can no longer be resolved. That way you are always behind the times.

If you link the insights to your internal (customer) data from ERP, CRM and support systems, you also know exactly at which organizational level improvements are needed. You can also personalize the questionnaire by automatically linking data that you already know about your customers from your internal customer systems. Address the customer by name and surname or mention the name of the employee who helped the customer.

With sophisticated customer satisfaction research software you can give the organization structural tools at all levels to increase customer satisfaction and give your customers the feeling that they are being listened to seriously without sending lengthy questionnaires.

Essential features of customer satisfaction survey software

• Ask as few questions as possible
  Make your automated questionnaire short and sweet, but make sure you can find out why your customers give a certain score.
• Categorize open answers
  Let your customers categorize the answer and find out exactly why they gave that answer and what exactly it means.
• Smart data collection across all channels
  Customers and employees are on many channels and platforms. Use the medium that suits them and make giving feedback as easy as possible.
• Let customers’ stories take center stage
  A story says so much more than just a number. Understand what moves your customers by supporting the scores with real stories and emotions.
• Share insights into your organization
  Activate the organization by giving everyone access to the insights that are relevant to him or her at any time.
• Make data as beautiful and visual as possible
  Avoid boring tables and graphs. Make data and results visually attractive, so that they become manageable and come alive in the organization.
• Ensure a good data connection
  By bringing data from different sources and systems together in one system, you avoid manual, time-consuming and error-prone processes.
• Make organizational data suitable for analysis and reporting.
  Different systems in the organization store data for the same customer in different ways, which makes analysis and reporting difficult and requires a lot of manual work. Prevent this by working with one system for all analyzes and reports.