Customer satisfaction, or in the broader description, delivering what the customer expects, is an integral part of the quality of the product and services the organization provides. In order to get a good feeling that the customer is getting what they want, it is critical to measure this somehow. Customer satisfaction is a great process to measure this, but there are some important points to think about.
Who Is the Customer?
When you have a product sold to a consumer, this is pretty straightforward. However, when the product or service is sold to an organization, this gets pretty complex rather quickly. Is the customer the person that buys the product? Or is it the end-user who uses the product? Or perhaps is it the engineer who needs to build it in? All these people have a different perception of the quality of the product or service you deliver. Hence, before you start measuring customer satisfaction, make sure you make a decision about which person within the company you are asking for their feedback. Another great approach is to measure customer satisfaction based on the role somebody has in an organization. This way, you can really compare results.
Methodology
There are numerous approaches to measure customer satisfaction. A few examples are mentioned below. They all have their pros and cons. Make sure you pick the one that fits your organization as well as your type of customer.
Questionnaires
A questionnaire is probably the most used technique to gather information on how satisfied customers are. This is a great way to get the information, and with most solutions, it is relatively easy to analyze the information. It is also pretty easy to distribute, and you can reach most of your customers in a very short period of time. However, the downside is that most people are fed up with questionnaires, and therefore, the response rate is usually rather low.
Phone Interviews
Calling customers and asking what they think of the service or products you provide is a great way to get in-depth feedback from customers. You can ask why they are or aren’t satisfied and use this detailed feedback to improve the organization. However, this is a very labor-intensive approach, not just for your side but also for the customers. You both need to free up the time to have this conversation.
Data-driven
Another way is to use data as an input on customer satisfaction. When you analyze customer complaints of data points such as late payments, you can deduct certain conclusions. This isn’t a watertight approach, but if there is plenty of data available, this can be a great way to measure some level of customer satisfaction. However, do make sure there is a significant amount of data before this approach is utilized. Another option is to use this data as a filter on which customer you are going to interview or send a questionnaire. This way, you’re still leveraging the data but more as a filtering mechanism.
NPS
NPS or Net Promoter Score is a very easy and straightforward way of measuring how happy a customer is, and if they are very satisfied, they will promote you to other potential customers. It is rather easy to implement; people only need to give a number between 0 and 10 and based on that, you can conclude how satisfied they are. Because of the low effort by the customer, you get lots of results and lots of people can participate. The downside is the limited context you have. Why do they score you like this? How would they score other parts of your service? These things you cannot measure. Yes, it’s an easy and fast approach, but you do lack context.
In the end, it isn’t always easy to pick the right approach. There are quite some variables at play. If you are not sure, it is always an option to combine certain approaches and see how things go. This way, you can put more effort into key customers and still get valuable feedback from all the others as well.
At Qooling, customer satisfaction is paramount. The Qooling Experts are always there to help. Convenience is not limited to the platform.
