Customer satisfaction measures how much your customers like your products or services. And in some cases, it can make or break your business. Highly satisfied customers are more likely to remain loyal and spend more in the future.
On the other hand, dissatisfied customers are more likely to switch to a rival brand. According to the Global State of CX 2023, 65% of all respondents said customers were more willing to switch brands if unsatisfied.
So, how do you ensure you maintain high customer satisfaction scores?
In this guide, we’ll define customer satisfaction, explain why it’s important, and describe how to measure it. Then, we’ll look at some improvement strategies and show you how to boost customer satisfaction with monday sales CRM.
What is customer satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction measures how well a company’s products, services, and overall customer experience meet or surpass customer expectations. You can measure this using quantitative and qualitative data from customer surveys, like the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Customer satisfaction can be affected by many factors, such as:
- product/service availability
- perceived product/service quality
- perceived product/service value
- overall purchasing process
- after-sales service and onboarding
- response and resolution times when resolving issues
- timeliness and manner of communications
Marketing teams use the survey data to evaluate customer experience, loyalty, and purchase intentions since high customer satisfaction can lead to increased customer retention, positive word-of-mouth referrals, and stable business growth.
Why is customer satisfaction important?
Customer satisfaction is crucial for business success, as it impacts customer retention, loyalty, and brand reputation while providing valuable insights for continuous improvement.
Here at monday.com, customer satisfaction is one of our core values:
“Our customers’ satisfaction and success is at the heart of everything we do. We are passionately committed to helping customers with our best-in-class support, and we believe that when our customers win, we win.”
It’s equally important to identify happy and disgruntled customers. While delighted customers show where you excel, remain loyal, and spread positive feedback, unhappy customers may be able to highlight pain points and provide valid insights on how to improve your product, service, and overall customer experience.
5 benefits of high customer satisfaction
Achieving a high customer satisfaction score is more than just a vanity metric. It provides specific, tangible advantages, such as:
- Greater customer loyalty: Satisfied customers are more likely to return and become loyal, repeat customers (or keep their subscriptions), leading to increased customer lifetime value (CLV) and ultimately boosting your bottom line.
- Positive word-of-mouth: Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your product or service to others, increasing brand awareness and new customer acquisition.
- Increased customer retention and reduced churn: High satisfaction leads to greater customer retention, reduced churn or attrition, and a stronger brand reputation. According to Bain & Co, “a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit.”
- Increased sales revenue: Satisfied customers are more likely to spend more and make repeat purchases, leading to higher sales revenue.
- Competitive advantage: High customer satisfaction can differentiate a business from its competitors and contribute to its long-term success.
How to measure customer satisfaction
You can measure customer satisfaction in several ways, including:
- Online surveys: Conducting online surveys to gather customer feedback.
- Email surveys: Using email surveys to assess customer satisfaction.
- Social media: Monitoring and analyzing customer sentiment on social media platforms.
- Live chats: Gathering real-time feedback through live chat interactions.
- Short Message Service (SMS): Sending satisfaction surveys via text messages.
- Churn rate: Analyzing customer churn rate as an indicator of satisfaction.
- Web intercepts: Using website intercept surveys to gather feedback from visitors.
These methods provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction, allowing you to identify areas for improvement and measure the effectiveness of your customer experience strategies.
Popular customer satisfaction tools and metrics
When measuring customer satisfaction, several tools and metrics are available depending on what aspect you want to measure.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT surveys assess customers’ satisfaction regarding a specific interaction, transaction, or experience. They typically contain a question like “How satisfied were you with the service?” or “How satisfied were you with the experience?” and a corresponding survey scale, which can be numerical — such as 1-3, 1-5, or 1-10 — or written with answers ranging from “very unsatisfied” to “very satisfied.”
You calculate your CSAT score as the percentage of positive survey scores. The definition of a positive score depends on the scale being used. For example, if you were scoring on a scale of 1-5 — with 1 being bad and 5 being great — any scores of 4 or above would be included as positive responses. The formula is:
CSAT (%) = (No. positive responses / Total no. responses) * 100
For example, if you had 400 positive responses out of 500 total responses, your CSAT score would be (400 / 500) * 100 = 80%.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS surveys measure the likelihood of customers recommending a company’s products or services. Typically, they contain two questions:
- How likely are you to recommend our brand/product/service to a friend or colleague?
- What’s the most important reason for your score?
Using the 0-10 scale, the NPS determines whether customers are detractors (0-6), passives (7-8), or promoters (9-10):
You calculate your NPS by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, so the formula is:
NPS = % Promoters – % Detractors
For example, if 60% were promoters and 20% were detractors, your NPS would be (60% – 20%) = 40.
Remember, NPS differs because it’s not a percentage. Typically, any score above zero is good, anything above 50 is excellent, and anything over 70 is considered world-class.
According to Gainsight’s Customer Success Index, 80% of companies use NPS as a key customer satisfaction measurement.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES surveys evaluate the ease of customers’ experience with a company. For example, signing up for a trial, making a purchase, or solving a customer support issue.
The idea is that the easier it is to complete a task, the better the experience. One of the best ways to reduce frustration and disloyalty is to make an experience easy.
You can ask customers how they agree with a statement, rate their level of effort, or answer a question. Gartner — who developed CES — recommends using the Likert Scale from 1-7, representing “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” with the statement.
Like CSAT, you calculate CES by the percentage of positive survey scores (those who give a 5 or above), so the formula is:
CES (%) = (No. positive responses / Total no. responses) * 100
For example, if you had 300 positive responses out of 500 total responses, your CES score would be (300 / 500) * 100 = 60%.
Gartner found that CES is 40% more effective than CSAT at predicting customer loyalty.
Customer Churn Rate (CCR)
CCR measures the percentage of customers who stop using a company’s products or services over a a specific period. The CCR formula is:
CCR = (Number of Customers Lost / Total Number of Customers) * 100
For example, if you had 500 customers at the start of the month and 25 of them left, then CCR = (25 / 500) * 100 = 5%. In other words, 5% of your customers left during the period.
6 ways to improve customer satisfaction
Sending out surveys and measuring responses is one thing, but how do you go about improving customer satisfaction? Here are six strategies you can try.
- Understand customer expectations: Gain insights into customer expectations and ensure that products and services meet or exceed these expectations.
- Gather and act on feedback: Collect customer feedback through surveys, social media, and other channels, and take action based on the received feedback to address areas of improvement.
- Empower support/service teams: Provide support teams with the necessary resources and training to effectively assist customers, ensuring they are well-equipped to address customer needs.
- Communicate across departments: Use a centralized hub, like monday sales CRM, so multiple teams can collaborate and communicate on customer needs and keep track of interactions.
- Personalize the customer experience: Tailor products and services to meet individual customer needs, providing a more personalized and relevant experience.
- Monitor customer satisfaction metrics: Track customer satisfaction metrics such as NPS, CSAT, and CES to identify trends and areas for continuous improvement.
By implementing these strategies, you can enhance customer satisfaction and business performance.
How to boost customer satisfaction with monday sales CRM
It’s essential to have a robust Work OS and CRM to manage relationships and achieve high satisfaction scores throughout the customer lifecycle — and monday sales CRM has the advantage of being both.
By adopting monday sales CRM, KC Petroleum were able to meet their goals of sharing information more easily, better understanding their sales performance, and drawing business-critical insights. They gained:
- One centralized sales hub to replace multiple spreadsheets
- 25+ admin hrs saved thanks to digital processes
- Seamless collaboration, anytime and anywhere
- 18x more ROI
Here’s how you can boost customer satisfaction with monday sales CRM.
Centralize data
With monday sales CRM, you can centralize and sync all your customer data in real-time, which is perfect for maintaining healthy customer relationships across departments. It helps sales reps boost customer engagement, enables marketers to monitor customer satisfaction scores and trends, and assists support staff in generating timely and personalized messages.
Send customer satisfaction surveys
SurveyMonkey allows you to create surveys, polls, or quizzes to gather customer satisfaction feedback. Using the integration with monday.com, you can send surveys and automatically create or update items in the CRM with customer responses. From there, you can analyze the results and make data-driven decisions to improve customer satisfaction.
Collaborate across teams
With a single centralized hub, everyone can see what other teams are doing and collaborate more effectively, increasing productivity and ensuring you engage customers as one. All customer interactions, such as emails, calls, and meetings, are tracked in one cohesive timeline. Better still, with the mobile app, field reps can access and update customer information on the go.
Save time with automations
You can save valuable time and keep customers updated by automating repetitive tasks, like automatically assigning leads to sales reps, getting notified when a customer opens an email survey, setting reminders for follow-up activities, and sending follow-ups based on elapsed time.
Improve your customer satisfaction with monday.com
You need to measure customer satisfaction to provide the best possible experience throughout the customer lifecycle from pre- to post-sales. Highly satisfied customers are more likely to remain loyal and recommend your product or service to others, thus giving your brand a competitive edge.
The best way to improve customer satisfaction and exceed their expectations is with a CRM. Using a centralized hub, like monday sales CRM, you can manage contact communication, send customer satisfaction surveys, and analyze customer data within customizable dashboards.
Try monday sales CRM to see how easy it is for teams to collaborate and manage customers in one central workspace.
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