Customer Satisfaction
Survey

What are Customer Satisfaction Surveys?

o A customer satisfaction survey, or customer feedback survey is both the name of a specific type of survey and the general term for any survey that seeks to understand customers’ expectations and sentiments related to your products and services.

o By knowing those expectations and acting on them, you can dramatically increase your customer’s loyalty to your brand.

o Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a commonly used instrument that helps the employer/company measure the customers’ level of satisfaction with regards to the product/service offered.

o The consumer survey questions are designed to draw out piercing responses that can be analyzed, organized, and acted upon for higher-quality service and solutions.

Reasons to conduct a customer satisfaction survey

1. To know the degree of satisfaction of a client.

2. Understand your existing customers by market research.

3. Identify potential new customers

4. Develop new, effective strategies by understanding your market

Based on your market research results, you can make more informed decisions regarding the pricing, distribution channels, marketing mediums, or to identify opportunities to introduce a new product or service. These results will also help you to make more informed decisions about your existing operations and activities.

5. Identify new business opportunities by identifying gaps in the offer

Conducting market research may help you discover new markets that are under-serviced or demand service.

You may also identify changing market trends due to demographic or societal changes that will bring new opportunities for your business.

Expectations and Customer Satisfaction

Expectation is the belief that a product or service will produce certain outcomes given certain anticipated levels of performance based on previous affective and behavioural experiences.

Expectations are often related to satisfaction and can be measured as follows:

1. Importance: Value of the product/service fulfilling the expectation. A satisfaction survey offers powerful insights so that your product team can focus on fulfilling (and possibly exceeding) your customers’ expectations.

2. Overall Affect-Satisfaction Expectations: Like/dislike of the product/service.

3. Fulfilment of Expectation: The expected level of performance versus the desired expectations. This is “predictive fulfilment” and is a respondent-specific index of the performance level necessary to satisfy.

4. Expected Value from Use: Satisfaction is regularly dictated by the recurrence of utilization. In the event that a product/service isn’t utilized as often as expect, the outcome may not be as satisfying as envisioned.

Measuring Expectations

In building a customer satisfaction survey, it is also helpful to consider reasons why pre-purchase expectations or post-purchase satisfaction may not be fulfilled or even measurable.

1. Expectations may not reflect unanticipated service attributes.
2. Expectations may have been quite vague, creating wide latitudes of acceptability in performance and expected satisfaction.
3. Expectation and product performance evaluations may be sensory and not cognitive, as in taste, style or image.
4. The product use may attract so little attention it produces no conscious affect or cognition (evaluation) and results in meaningless satisfaction or dissatisfaction measures.
5. There may have been unanticipated benefits or consequences of purchasing or using the product (such as a use or feature not anticipated with purchase).
6. The original expectations may have been unrealistically high or low.
7. The product purchaser, influencer, and user may have been different individuals, each having different expectations.

From Theory to Practice: Start Measuring Satisfaction

o You can’t build a loyal customer following if you don’t know what your customers think or feel about your products/services.
o We live in a highly competitive, digital world. Most of the best companies in the world are heavily focused on creating the best customer experiences they possibly can, focusing not only on meeting customer’s expectations but exceeding them.
o The single greatest predictor of satisfaction is the perceived quality of your products/services. This is measured by the customer’s perception of the brand’s overall quality, perceived reliability, and the extent your customer’s need are fulfilled.
o Other satisfaction factors include your customer’s brand loyalty, the satisfaction of a specific product attribute, and the customer’s likelihood to repurchase.

Types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Survey

A CSAT is the eponymous customer satisfaction survey that directly asks customers about their satisfaction level with your service or solutions.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. NPS is an indicator that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others. It is used as a proxy for gauging the customer’s overall satisfaction with a company’s product or service and the customer’s loyalty to the brand.

3. Post-Purchase Survey/ Initial Quality Surveys

A post-purchase survey is meant to gauge the experience customers had during their initial stage of use/transactions. These surveys can determine 3 things: Quality of products, Quality of customer service, Post purchase gratification.

4. Usability/ User Experience Surveys

Usability surveys, or user experience (UX) surveys, are used to understand how easy or difficult it is to navigate your product, app, service, website, or any other customer-facing solution.

How to Turn Customer Satisfaction Survey Results Into Action?

Measuring Customer Satisfaction is important but what you do with the data is essential..

o Close the loop– Respond quickly after receiving negative feedback from your customers. This is a chance to keep your customer loyal.

o Analyze for trends– Understand what metrics you’re looking to improve and see if there are patterns on these specific items.

o Company-wide effort- Every department must be on board to keep the customer satisfied. If customers complain about a product feature, the product department must be willing to receive the data and fix. If customers complain about the service, customer service representatives need to understand how to fix the issues better.

What does customer engagement look like?

Customer engagement is both general and selective. Customers might engage with your business at different levels. For some, it happens at the product level. For others, it’s at the level of the brand.

1. It’s online and offline

o It will also vary online and offline, depending on the kind of offering a business provides. In a traditional model, where sales are discrete events and products and services are used away from the point of sale, engagement may not happen at all. In a situation where products and services may be supplied and consumed online, engagement with the brand happens as a matter of course.

2. It’s sometimes integrated with product use

o It may in some cases be indivisible from the product or service itself. In these cases, the question is not whether or not the customer engages but how meaningful those engaged moments are.

Here are a few examples of what engagement might look like in practice.

o Making a complaint

A dissatisfied customer reaches out to give feedback or ask for a problem to be remedied. Whether they complain in a public forum, or approach you via email. Notably, if a customer cares enough to complain, the stakes are high and there’s a valuable opportunity to close the experience gap and win their loyalty by exceeding expectations.

o Responding to marketing with a comment on Facebook

A customer seeing an ad for a product they’ve recently bought may add a comment. The word-of-mouth moment that reflects positively or negatively on both the customer and the brand – a form of social proof.

o Reviewing on a third-party site

A customer waits for hours on hold to a utilities company, and while the minutes pass, leaves a one-star review. In this scenario, the customer is a detractor of the brand, but unlike the social media, they are not sharing their opinion with friends and family in their sphere of influence, but doing it relatively anonymously.

o Participation in loyalty programs

A customer signs up for a loyalty card or app which they use to collect points on future purchases. They enjoy collecting points and achieving rewards, which becomes a secondary motivation in itself. They will choose your brand above others because they can collect points with you but not others.

o Contributing ideas, suggestions and requests on a brand’s social spaces

A loyal customer comments on your Instagram post asking if and when you’ll be restocking a product they love.

o Using online support and customer service

A subscriber to a SaaS platform wants to know how to use the tool to solve a specific problem. Unable to find the answers in the product’s knowledge base, customer contacts customer service via live chat to ask for advice and is referred to a product specialist who answers the question. This is an example of someone engaging deeply with a service they’ve paid for, and having a better experience as a result.