How to Measure Customer Satisfaction Across Communication Channels

When it comes to customer experience, there’s a huge disconnect between how companies perceive what they are providing and what customers feel they are getting.

As much as 93% of companies surveyed believe they provide excellent customer service. Another 6% report average customer support. Ask customers, however, and you get an entirely different result. Less than 45% of customers rated their experience as satisfactory. Somewhere in the middle is the hard cold truth: you’re not doing as well as you think when it comes to customer satisfaction.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction

To improve customer satisfaction, you have to have an honest assessment of your current situation. This starts with asking your customers at various stages of their interactions and listening to what they are telling you.

There are three commonly used techniques for measuring customer satisfaction:

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT is a straightforward way of measuring customer satisfaction. It measures how customers feel about a business, purchase, service, or interaction. It can be as simple as a survey that asks customers how satisfied they were with the experience by rating it on a scale from 1-5 or 1-10.

It’s a simple way to quickly gauge how customers feel. It can be used to determine where interactions led to positive or negative results and pinpoint when it happened.

Companies track CSAT over time to assess current performance and growth against established baselines.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Scores go beyond satisfaction and probe for advocacy. For example, an NPS survey might ask how likely you are to recommend this company/product/service to a friend. This provides a measure of customer satisfaction as well as assessing customer loyalty.

NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of people giving you bad scores – ‘detractors’ – from the percentage of positive scores – ‘promoters’ (or use our free NPS calculator).

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score focuses on a very specific assessment. You’re trying to determine how easy it was for customers to do business with you or complete an interaction. Obviously, the easier the process, the happier the customer.

We’ve all had that frustrating experience where you can’t navigate a company’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menu to get to the right person or be unable to find the information you want on a company’s website. A CES survey may ask whether your inquiry was handled as well as how easy it was to navigate the process

Problem > Solution > Testing

CSAT, NPS. And CES can all be used to assess satisfaction levels. When problems are found, they can be targeted for focused attention. Solutions can then be measured to see if they positively impact future results. These surveys can all be used in marketing to serve different offerings to customers based on their scores.

Improving The Omnichannel Customer Experience

Customers today interact with companies across a variety of tools and channels. From calls to emails, live chat to social media, website interactions to texts, it’s crucial to provide a consistently high customer experience across every channel.

When it comes to contact centres, you are providing a very personal interaction. Employ strategies such as advanced call routing, skills-based routing, and percentage-based routing to get callers quickly to the right agent. Provide agents across all channels with a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and ticket tracking solution to avoid making customers repeat themselves. Monitor, measure, and track performance against Key Performance indicators (KPIs).

Set performance standards for monitoring and replying to email, chat, and texts. Monitor social media channels and company/product hashtags. Set up automatic flagging for customer reviews on your website or review sites. React quickly and positively.

Online, create self-serve materials for customers to quickly and easily find answers to common questions. Chatbots can play a critical role in finding answers and sending customers to the right places faster. This can reduce overall call volume without reducing customer satisfaction. It can also help customer support agents by reducing the number of routine inquiries they need to handle.

Assessing Customer Experience In Each Channel

You can assess CSAT, NPS, and CES with just three questions:

4. How would you rate the quality of service you received today?
5. How likely are you to recommend our business to a friend?
6. How easy was it to solve your problem/get your question answered today?

At each touchpoint across every channel, it is an opportunity to measure performance. Versions of these questions can be adapted to phone surveys, automated responses to texts, emails, or chats. You can design a short questionnaire or landing page for social inquiries.

In short, you can follow up on every customer interaction with these three simple questions that provide powerful insight into your business and operations.

Matt Shealy is the President of ChamberofCommerce.com. Chamber specializes in helping small businesses grow their business on the web while facilitating the connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide.