If a customer is satisfied, they will buy from you again and probably even recommend your company to others. If your product does not solve the customer's problem as expected, you have lost a customer and, in the worst case, you will receive bad reviews. The lack of customer satisfaction could then in turn scare off other potential new customers and lead to a loss of sales.
To avoid this, measuring customer satisfaction is an important task for every company. You can measure customer satisfaction both before you enter the market and after the product is already on the market. You should make measuring customer satisfaction a regular item on your agenda. After all, the world we live in is constantly changing and so are the needs of your customers. Your goal should be to constantly increase the so-called user experience. To do this, the voice of the customer must be heard. But how?
How to measure customer satisfaction
To be able to increase customer satisfaction, you need to know about current customer satisfaction and especially about negative feedback. So you need to get in touch with the customer and collect qualitative data. There are numerous methods for this, for example personalized and anonymous questionnaires, in-depth interviews, group interviews, the net promoter score and many more.
No matter which method you choose, you always need a tool to collect, measure and subsequently evaluate customer feedback. This process should be uncomplicated and easy to repeat at any time. At the same time, the evaluation must remain clear even with large amounts of data. This evaluation is often also called User Experience Research or UX Research.
With SeaTable, we give you the perfect tool. SeaTable helps you collect with easy-to-share web forms and evaluate and prioritize customer feedback with statistics features. We've even prepared a template to give you some initial inspiration, which you can use to complete the following three steps. Just take a look.
Step 1: Collect data on customer satisfaction
We have already learned that there are several methods to measure customer satisfaction. In the following, we would like to pick out the two most proven methods and take a closer look at them:
Survey of the NPS (Net Promoter Score)
"How likely is it that you would recommend our product to a friend?" We all know this sentence and have probably answered it a time or two. This is the Net-Promoter-Score (NPS). The purpose of this is to determine the probability that a buyer, customer or prospective customer will recommend the purchased or preferred product to a friend or acquaintance. A scale from 0 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely) is available for the answer.
Usually, you also ask why the respective value was selected. The good thing about this is that the question is not just aimed at a feeling ("What did you think of our product?"), but at a behavioral intention. For many, this question is much easier to answer. The NPS is also so popular because the answer is usually more accurate and honest than a pure feeling question. After all, by recommending a bad product to a friend, the buyer would be putting his own reputation at risk - and who wants that? In addition, the question of "why" allows you to better understand why the respective customer feedback turned out to be positive or negative.
An NPS questionnaire created with SeaTable. Just try our NPS template.
Calculation of the NPS (Net Promoter Score)
The subsequent calculation of the Net-Promoter-Scores is simple. First, you divide the responding customers into two categories: the Promoter, sometimes called fans, and the Detractors, häufig auch als Kritiker bezeichnet. Dabei sind Promoter diejenigen, die mit 10 oder 9 geantwortet haben, und die Kritiker jene, die 0 bis 6 angegeben haben. Personen mit einer 7 oder 8 werden als Passive bezeichnet.
You now take the percentage of promoters and subtract the percentage of detractors. The result is your NPS as a value between -100 and 100. A positive NPS value shows that you have more satisfied customers than dissatisfied customers. Of course, what is a good NPS score for your business depends on your industry, but typically an NPS score of 30 or better is considered very good.
Advantages and disadvantages of the Net Promoter Score
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NPS surveys are user-friendly and intuitive.
The NPS value is a clear metric.
The NPS validly targets customer satisfaction.
Good comparability of NPS values (over time or with competitors)
The NPS alone does not provide reasons for dissatisfaction.
The NPS is only robust if the sample is large enough.
Online interviews to measure customer satisfaction
Everyone is familiar with the classic online survey. This allows you deep insights into the opinion of your customers. Here, mostly closed questions are asked and the answers are given on a scale of 1 to 5, for example. You can also easily incorporate the NPS scale from 0 to 10 as a single question in an online survey. This way you could try to get additional information besides the NPS score.
For inspiration, here are some sample questions:
- Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with our company?
- How well do our products meet your needs?
- How would you rate the quality of our products?
- How would you rate the price-performance ratio of our products?
- How well have we responded to your questions or concerns about our products so far?
- How long have you been a customer of our company?
There really are no limits to your imagination here. However, be aware that with each additional question, the bounce rate of the respondents typically increases.
Advantages and disadvantages of online surveys
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Surveys are created quickly.
Surveys are only associated with low costs.
The data is quickly available to you.
The answers are mostly honest, since you participate in the survey voluntarily.
Higher dropout rates are normal (the longer the survey takes).
People can participate more than once and falsify the result.
There are cultural differences in valuation. This becomes important when you operate internationally. An investigation in the Psychological Science has shown that people from individualistic countries more often choose the extreme poles of a scale than those from collectivistic countries.
Suitable tool for customer satisfaction survey
Whichever method you choose, make sure you use a tool that lets you store and manage all your feedback. For example, SeaTable can help you collect the customer feedback you want. Simply create your desired survey using our web form. In this article, we will explain you the whole process of creating such a form and then analyzing it in more detail. If you want to get started right away, take a look there.
Creating a form is child's play in SeaTable
In addition, you should think about how you can automate the feedback collection process or make it as simple as possible from the very beginning. Only if you get a constant stream of regular new customer feedback can you tackle the next two steps and work on improving your product.
Step 2: Evaluate the collected data
After getting the feedback you want from your customers, you need to filter out the information that is relevant to you. Use categories to group the records from your questionnaire in a meaningful way. So once you have collected the feedback and clustered it appropriately, you can start gaining insights from the customer feedback.
Analyze weaknesses and potentials
Let's say you want to make improvements to your product, identify the current weak points, and find out why your customers don't recommend your product to others. For this, you can create a new view to filter, sort, and group the survey results. Look for the responses with a low NPS score and sort the feedback by relevant categories. You can create a separate view for each analysis you want, so you can access it in seconds at any time.
Display only the entries you want to see. Thanks to SeaTable's filters and views, it's child's play.
Visualize your customer satisfaction data
Besides the possibility to view the answers of the customer satisfaction survey in the table view, you can use the statistics function of SeaTable e.g. to visualize the frequency distributions. This makes it easy to quickly get an overview of the latest numbers.
Statistical analysis of the NPS survey in SeaTable
This way, SeaTable allows you to look at exactly the aspects of customer feedback you want to focus on. Do you want to focus on the feedback with low NPS scores or on a specific category? Since all the information is captured and structured in SeaTable, it's easy to look at the criticisms of your customers that you want to improve in the future. You decide which information is relevant for you and what you want to do with it in step 3.
Step 3: Increase customer satisfaction
Every customer has different points of criticism about your product or service. Nevertheless, resist the temptation to take every single point of criticism to heart and try to please everyone. That won't work and won't get you anywhere in the long run. You need to prioritize the customer feedback and work out the really important points.
If you want to prioritize, you should look at multiple dimensions. Just because a piece of feedback received the lowest NPS score doesn't necessarily mean it's the most important item with the highest priority. Divide your qualitative feedback into categories and then try looking at the following two dimensions:
- How often was a category mentioned?
- Which category has the worst NPS score?
To identify the most impactful items, you need to focus on the categories that are mentioned most often and tend to have a poor NPS score.
NPS rating in SeaTable
On this screenshot you can clearly see that the categories Feature and Price occur frequently and tend to receive poor ratings. This can be an indication that your customers would like to see better value for money. The task now is to derive appropriate actions from this customer feedback and work on this criticism. SeaTable helps you with filters, groupings and sorting to identify the central problems from the large amount of data. You can then work on solving the customer problems. The result is an enhanced user experience!
To increase customer satisfaction, you should understand your customers
Only a company that takes its customers' wishes seriously can be successful in the long term. To do this, however, it is essential that you understand what moves your customers. Use qualitative surveys and establish processes to ensure a constant flow of customer feedback. NPS and qualitative questionnaires can help you gather this information.
Make sure that you don't lose sight of the important issues because of all the information. Therefore, prioritize your information and derive courses of action from it. Take time to deal with negative feedback.
If you plan to improve your customers' user experience permanently, try SeaTable. SeaTable gives you the tools you need to increase your customers' satisfaction. Don't wait for tomorrow, establish a solid process for surveying your customer satisfaction today!
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