Measuring customer satisfaction is a key barometer of the health of your business. Measuring customer satisfaction is a key piece to your continued business success. If your customers aren’t happy, it is unlikely that they will give you any repeat business. Even worse, unsatisfied customers can further damage your business by posting negative reviews. How do you prevent that from happening? By understanding how to measure customer satisfaction and looking for ways to improve customer satisfaction.
There are a number of different methods for capturing, reporting on and measuring customer satisfaction. However, deciding on which one will work best for your business can be confusing at times. Let’s highlight the pros and cons of measuring customer satisfaction and share tips for how to use that feedback to make your customer experience better.
Measure Customer Satisfaction with Focus Groups
Focus groups are an excellent method for collecting in-depth feedback from actual customers or potential customers and measuring customer satisfaction. Having the ability to dig deeper can help you identify new markets or opportunities for growth that you didn’t know existed. On the flip side, you run the risk of groupthink, which could skew the data if the moderator doesn’t nip it in the bud early in the session.
The biggest downside of focus groups is the time and resources they take to pull off. Before deciding whether or not you want to conduct focus groups, you need to decide if the benefits that could be achieved outweigh the associated costs. Many companies have had great success.
Customer Interviews
If you’re looking to avoid groupthink, you might consider interviewing your customers one-on-one. While this method isn’t as scalable as others on this list, it can be a way to get into the nitty-gritty about how real customers use your product and service. Interviews are also much less structured than focus groups so you can feel free to go in any direction the conversation takes you.
Interviewing customers will help you identify what motivates them to make a purchase, what leads to a satisfying experience, and what a business could do to upset them. This article by Dustin Walker on the Daily Egg has some good tips for how and why you should interview your customers.
Net Promoter Survey
A Net Promoter Survey (NPS) will help you get to the point quickly by asking the customer to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely they would be to recommend your business. This will help you segment your customers into detractors, passives, and promoters. Armed with this knowledge you can follow up with your detractors to find out what you can do to improve their experience.
Another benefit of a Net Promoter Survey is that it’s easy to administer on an annual or semi-annual basis. This enables you to track customer satisfaction over time and determine if your business is trending in the right direction or if you need to course correct.
Sentiment Analysis for Measuring Customer Satisfaction
Sentiment analysis is technology that allows you to monitor conversations that are happening about your brand online. This will help you gain a better understanding of public perception about your business. Monitoring trends in sentiment on social media will help you react quickly when that sentiment begins to change.
The technology isn’t perfected yet. It might take time for a program to learn the nuances of your business or your brand. This is especially true when analyzing a statement without the proper context. For example, when a word can have two meanings or is being used as slang.
Collecting and Managing Online Reviews
Online reviews are the final method of measuring customer satisfaction covered in this post. Online reviews offer you an in-depth look at how your customers feel about you in real-time. This is especially true if you are using an online review management platform that consolidates all of your reviews.
Online reviews will provide you with actionable insights. These insights will help you improve not only customer satisfaction but also your business operations. Online reviews will also help increase your business’ visibility online, improve consumer confidence, and influence purchase decisions
Listen and Respond….Quickly
Whichever method you choose for measuring customer satisfaction, it’s important that customers know you are listening. However, you should do more than listen. You should take the information used from your research to improve the overall customer experience. Doing so will lead to a more satisfied customer base over time.
Measuring Customer Satisfaction with RAY
Request a demo to see how RAY’s cloud-based solution can help you use text messages to invite all of your customers to review your business. RAY’s efficient, mobile process can help your business build a strong online presence on the sites that matter most. This will, in turn, improve local SEO and ultimately boost revenues.
Improve the online reputation of your business with RAY
Do you want people to speak well of your brand online? With an adequate strategy you can improve the user experience and with it, the online presence of your business.
The best: you don’t have to spend all your time on homework. You only need the right tool.
