Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Success Metrics

Interactive messaging — real-time communication between people and businesses through voice and text messaging — has become a vital part of doing business. Keep your users engaged with customer satisfaction surveys that are simple to create and send with interactive messaging.

Having this constant channel of communications with your customers is also valuable for tracking their happiness and satisfaction. This, as it turns out, is very easy to do.

By choosing which customer satisfaction metrics to track and sending customers surveys through texts, you position yourself for sustained long-term growth. Here’s how.

Example of a survey for a large airline using VoiceSage Rich Media Messaging

Anticipate customer needs with customer satisfaction surveys

Before we get into how to track customer satisfaction metrics with interactive messages, let’s first look at which metrics to track. There are three main customer satisfaction metrics to choose from:

• Customers Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Effort Score (CES)

Each one differs slightly and offers different perspectives on customer experience. For example, if you want to know why more customers aren’t referring your business, you’d use the NPS to find out why.

Let’s take a closer look at how each of these metrics works:

Customer Satisfaction Score

The CSAT is used to rate how satisfied customers are, overall, with your service. Customers are asked a question like, “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the service you received?”

Customers rank their satisfaction using a scale from 1 to 3, 1 to 5, or 1 to 7, where each number on the scale corresponds to a level of satisfaction: 1 on the scale is equivalent to “very unsatisfied,” and 3,5, and 7 are equivalent to “very satisfied.”

[Source] CSAT is also shared using emojis to remove potential language barriers.

You can tailor this customer satisfaction metric so that it also measures satisfaction with your product, support team, and more. That way, you can identify which aspects of your business need to change or improve in order to keep customers happy.

Net Promoter Score

The NPS is used to measure customer loyalty and customers’ willingness to tell other people about your product or service. Customers are asked one question: “How likely are you to recommend these services?” and are ranked on a scale from 1 to 10.

Customers are ranked based on their responses:

• 1 to 6 = detractors. These are customers who aren’t particularly eager to share information about your product or service with others. They’re the most likely to switch brands.
• 7 to 8 = passives. These are customers who are generally satisfied and willing to recommend your product or service. But they’re also at risk of switching brands.
• 9 to 10 = promoters. These customers are happy with your product or service and actively share this with their networks.

By subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, you get your net promoter score.

[Source]

Customer Effort Score

Just like CSAT and NPS, CES asks customers one question: “Did our company make it easy for you to handle your issue?” How customers answer tells you how much effort they need to put in to get an issue resolved. For example, long wait times to speak with customer support or support not being available for live chat will hurt this score.

From a scale of 1 to 7 — where 1 is “strongly disagree” and 7 is “strongly agree” — you can determine how easy or difficult it is for customers to use your product to solve a problem.

Calculate CES by taking the difference between the percentage of people who find it easy vs. the percentage of people who find it difficult to resolve an issue:

[Source]

All of these metrics are ideal for interactive messages because they’re short (texts are limited to 160 characters) and don’t require much effort from customers. They only have to respond with a number.

Now let’s take a closer look at how to set up these surveys using interactive messaging.

Send surveys as interactive messages & rich media to boost response rates

Compared with emails, the open rate for text messages is much higher. In fact, texts have a 98% open rate and a 45% response rate. Since access to data is the best way to improve customer satisfaction, the fact that text messages have high open and response rates pretty much guarantees that you’ll get as much information as possible.

Track customer satisfaction metrics by sending surveys by text. When Express Gifts, a home-shopping service, needed to gauge customer satisfaction after each interaction, they used our platform to send surveys to their customers.

Express Gifts sent a short five-question survey to their customers to learn about customers’ experience so that the company could create a better service.

When is comes to sending surveys via text message, Martin Dove, strategy and transformation director at Express Gifts, explains that, “This data tells us how long they’ve been with us, their account utilisation, the frequency they order from us, how open they may be to an up-sell, and so on. It’s a great, and growing, resource.” All of this information is used to analyze the service and improve coaching and performance among their team.

You can do the same for any of the customer satisfaction metrics we’ve talked about. Depending on who you’re surveying, segment your customer list first. For example, since NPS focuses on the likelihood of people referring your business to others, target customers who’ve made more than one purchase. These are customers with experience using your product and are in a better position to tell you whether they’re willing to refer you.

Simply send your question and ask customers to send their response by text:

[www.insights.ecommerceexpo.co.uk]

By segmenting your audience, you’re targeting relevant customers who are most likely to respond and give honest, knowledgeable feedback.

For a more engaging, and brand-consistent method, Rich Media Messaging is an excellent channel for gather customer survey information. Rich Media Messaging was used by Shop Direct to assess the viability of a new service offering. Although this particular example wasn’t used to measure customer satisfaction, the customer survey  was set up in hours and provided all the results they needed.

“The main objective was to drive a significant level of response from our customers and Rich Media Messaging definitely engaged them to participate in the survey. We were truly impressed by the level of engagement we saw.” Helen Wakefield CRM Lead

Use customer satisfaction metrics to find new opportunities

Happy customers are loyal, and unhappy customers are more likely to spread negative feedback that hurts your business. To understand what you’re doing well and where you need to improve, track customer satisfaction metrics regularly.

Decide how frequently you’ll survey customers — for example, once a quarter — to get ongoing feedback. This gives you enough time to run each campaign, analyze the data you collect, make adjustments to your product or service, and let customers get accustomed to the change before asking for feedback again.

The benefit of this approach is how little effort it requires, plus you

• improve customer retention;
• lower churn;
• achieve higher revenue; and
• run targeted campaigns to grow your products and services.

As you get more information over time, make sure that, in addition to improving the results of the metrics you’re tracking, you’re improving how you do business. Even if the majority of customers think there’s low effort required to solve their issues, there will still be customers who say solving their issues requires more effort.

In this case, focus on who these customers are. Are they new and unfamiliar with how to use your product? If that’s the case, begin to focus your efforts on customer onboarding, making sure that new customers are aware of the features available to solve issues.

Getting customer satisfaction metrics to work for you

Customer satisfaction metrics help you stay ahead of customers so that their needs are consistently met, potential issues are avoided, and pain points are solved.

Since interactive messages have such high open and response rates, include this strategy in your digital marketing campaigns. You’ll be able to engage with customers in a channel where they spend a lot of time. At the same time, you’ll get the information you need.

Figure out which customer satisfaction metrics to use and when to use them, and then create a process that helps you get what you need to grow your company.

Contact us today or book a demo to learn more about how VoiceSage can help you improve customer satisfaction with mobile messaging solutions and surveys.