As your ecommerce business and customer base begin to grow and diversify, you may find it harder to give your customers a personalized experience, which can lead to a decrease in satisfaction.
Measuring customer satisfaction is the key to giving customers the experience they truly want at every point of online engagement. This article will provide you with helpful tips for how to measure and improve customer satisfaction, so you can strengthen customer loyalty and generate more revenue.
What are customer satisfaction and customer experience?
While many businesses use “customer satisfaction” and “customer experience” interchangeably, they are quite different. Customer satisfaction refers to how happy a customer is with your business, product, or their overall experience. Customer experience (CX), on the other hand, focuses on the impression your customers get while interacting with your brand during the purchase process and the ease of getting what they need.
Can you measure customer satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction doesn’t rely on quantitative metrics like conversion rates, retention rates, or customer lifetime value (CLV), which focus only on specific areas of customer behavior based on purchases. Since customer satisfaction is subjective and driven by perceptions and emotions, your business needs to think outside the box to figure out the best way to quantify your customers’ happiness.
Metrics for customer satisfaction
Here are three common metrics to help measure customer satisfaction.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures satisfaction by quantifying the relationship between the customer and your brand. By prompting customers to complete an online survey asking how they would rate your app, product, or service on a scale of 0–10, you can get an idea of what works and what doesn’t.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures customer satisfaction with a product, service, or interaction. A survey pops up during a certain navigation point, usually during the checkout process. You can ask customers questions such as “How would you rate your experience?” or “How satisfied were you with your transaction?” CSAT is measured and scored as a percentage ranging from 0% to 100%.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score (CES) evaluates how easy it is for customers to accomplish their goals or resolve an issue with online surveys and feedback forms. Customers are asked to rate the level of effort for activities, such as making a purchase or resolving an issue. The ratings are on a scale from 1 through 7.
Ways to gather data
There are different ways to gather customer satisfaction data. While many businesses lean on CLV metrics because they correlate customer spending with satisfaction, the most valuable data comes directly from the customers and in their own words with these two methods.
Direct feedback
Direct feedback is solicited directly from customers, asking them about specific or overall shopping experiences. This feedback is gathered through emails, surveys, social media, in-app, or by phone call.
Indirect feedback
Indirect feedback is more complex because companies have to collect customer feedback left voluntarily across different marketing channels like social media comments, online reviews, or while the customer is communicating with your support team.
How to use customer satisfaction metrics
Happy customers are more likely to leave a positive review, purchase from you again, and advocate for your brand to their friends and family. To truly understand what makes your customers happy, you need to gather and make sense of customer satisfaction data with the following three steps:
- Identify problems with customer experience – Although unhappy customers are more likely to leave negative feedback, encouraging reviews can help you discover and resolve problems efficiently.
- See where customer experience is improving – Positive feedback highlights what you’re doing well, so you can use this knowledge to improve other parts of the customer experience.
- Focus your marketing, product, and customer support teams – With your findings, guide your teams to make improvements and allocate resources where they’re needed most.
Use these tips to increase employee satisfaction
When it comes to customer satisfaction, the focus shouldn’t only be on your clients but also your employees. Happy teams care more about their jobs and provide exceptional service. Invest in your marketing, product, and support departments with training and empower them to discuss and implement new strategies.
Tips for improving your online customer satisfaction
Here are some tips to help improve your customer satisfaction online:
Understand who your customers are and what they expect from you.
By gathering and analyzing your customer data from existing customers, you can understand who your target market is and what they want. It can also help identify new opportunities to exceed their expectations.
Make your website easy to use.
Your website should be intuitive and easy to navigate on a desktop, tablet, mobile browser, or app with fast load times and attractive design. Remove as much friction as possible from the browsing and checkout process, and get rid of any unnecessary steps. Some ideas could include incorporating autoscroll and friendly search functions, or waiting until checkout to encourage users to create an account.
Present high-quality content, but not too much.
Focus on quality versus quantity. Keep your text, images, videos, and overall web design to a minimum because too much stimulating content can overwhelm and distract shoppers from making a purchase.
Personalize your customer experience.
Give your customers a personalized digital experience so they feel like you’re speaking to their needs and pain points. This can help you get the most out of cross-selling and upselling strategies, targeted communications, and exclusive deals.
Consider the price of your products.
Set your product prices strategically. A low price can diminish your brand value—and remember, customers are willing to pay premium prices if they think the product is worth it. Offering occasional deals also doesn’t hurt.
Make it easy to contact you, in many different ways.
It should be easy to find your contact information and get in touch via live chat, phone, email, text, and/or social media channels attended by real people (not bots). This also helps your team collect additional direct and indirect feedback without badgering customers.
Respond to customer feedback.
Always respond to customer feedback, whether it’s good or bad. This shows that you are listening and paying attention to your customers and gives you another opportunity to gather useful insights.
Act on customer feedback.
Customers feel appreciated when you solve their problems or take responsibility for your mistakes. Negative feedback is also extremely valuable because unhappy customers tend to abandon the website without sharing their reasons. If you can figure out the reason for, say, a high bounce rate, you can take steps to improve the metric.
Provide proactive support.
Be proactive about upcoming disruptions. Tell your customers if your website is going to be down or if a popular item’s stock is limited. Hiccups happen, but being transparent about them makes your customers more forgiving and can build trust in your business.
Encourage customer self-service.
Give your customers self-service options or a robust FAQs page to help resolve issues on their own. Not only will they feel more empowered, but this also helps reduce your support team’s workload—plus, it gives customers a place to go when they have questions outside of your support team’s working hours.
Customer satisfaction is extremely important for business growth. As more companies shift to an ecommerce-first mindset, businesses need to work harder than ever to give customers an online experience that feels personalized and human. With a clearly defined strategy backed by customer data, your business can elevate the customer experience and boost loyalty, brand awareness, and overall satisfaction.
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