What is customer satisfaction

Quality Glossary Definition: Customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction information, including surveys and ratings, can help a company determine how to best improve or changes its products and services. This applies to industrial firms, retail and wholesale businesses, government bodies, service companies, nonprofit organizations, and every subgroup within an organization. Model of Customer Satisfaction. Customers include anyone the organization supplies with products or services.

The table below illustrates some supplier-customer relationships. Note: that many organizations are both customers and suppliers. What Does it take to satisfy the Customer? This keeps a steady and, hopefully, increasing revenue stream coming in without you having to constantly work on it. Big results. Small investment. Ready to take the first step? What is Customer Satisfaction?

What is customer satisfaction? How can you measure customer satisfaction? Why is customer satisfaction so important? Maximise customer lifetime value Many businesses underestimate the cost of acquiring a new customer.

Positive brand exposure Word of mouth is important to any business. Increase revenue All businesses want to increase their revenue and grow their business, but they might not always have the resources to invest in actively growing it. Don't forget your customer journey guide! Download now. With attention at a premium, companies have to stop focusing on self-centered rationales to fill out surveys and instead give customers internal incentives.

All customer questions should be readily answerable, either manually, within your interface, or with documentation. How many times have you experienced that and tried, to no avail, to find a live chat or some way to get an answer? First, and no matter what, conduct user experience UX research. Second, look into smarter content and documentation. This data will be your building ground for a solid help documentation plan. Where are users struggling and with what? Finally, look into smarter customer support options.

In addition to displaying your contact information prominently, live chat is increasingly a necessary site element to have. The stats are undeniable. The research pretty much all confirms that live chat is the most preferred form of customer service , and that expectation is only growing. Customer satisfaction isn't always expressly, well, expressed. Customers will often take to third-party avenues like review sites and social media to share their experiences. When you track and monitor your customers' activities on social media, you can better understand any positive and negative feedback about your brand.

You can also feel better equipped to address this feedback and improve your overall customer satisfaction. Whether or not you use social media as an active customer service tool, your business should be poised and ready to respond to feedback within 24 hours.

A social media listening tool like HubSpot can help with this. You can also use social media to proactively collect customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction. The great thing about social media is it meets your customers wherever they are, allowing you to improve their satisfaction in the process.

Usability is important to the customer experience. Facebook knows this, and so does every other app on which you spend too much time. Companies with positive, healthy missions think a lot about this as well, because their whole goal is to create habits. One-click purchase? Satisfy your customers? To wow your customers. According to Buffett ,. To be remarkable, you have to, by definition, do something a little outside of the ordinary and not simply avoiding annoying your customers.

Some companies, like Zappos or Amazon, make that a core part of their operating ethos. It's one thing to offer customers various channels for sharing feedback; it's quite another to proactively seek and pay for feedback.

Focus groups gather a number of your target audience members or active customers with the intention of collecting constructive criticism. Focus groups allow for honest responses. Not only does it create a space for you to ask a variety of pointed questions without the risk of losing interest, but it encourages your audience to answer candidly.

When writing reviews or feedback, people often edit or "clean up" their answers. Focus groups happen in person, allowing you to gather unfiltered feedback and criticism — including from body language and nonverbal responses. These responses can be some of your best tools when understanding how to improve your customer satisfaction.

When customers are unhappy, they take their business elsewhere. So, where would your unsatisfied customers go? Take a look at your competition to understand how they may be making their and your customers happier.

What your competitors are doing right and wrong can teach you a lot about your customers, industry, and products.

Go to their website to understand their online customer journey. If they have physical store locations, visit those to understand how they engage customers in person. Contact their sales and service teams to see how they interact with potential and current customers. Find yourself delighted? Odds are, your customers are, too.

Incorporate some new ways to boost your own customer satisfaction. Depending on your goals, you could collect it via customer surveys and you could send your customer surveys multiple different ways , in-app surveys, post-service surveys, or even with customer interviews or longer form surveys. My favorite way? Right in your app or website, and right after a critical moment in the user experience. For instance, if you have a photo-sharing app, triggering a feedback survey after a user uploads their first photo could be a great inflection point.

There are many tools to do this, and more joining the market every day. A few popular options today include:. You can also usually collect more data from your customers this way. Be careful not to get greedy. Even if you give a reward for completion, long surveys are a pain to fill out , which can trigger the central tendency bias. My favorite tools for this are:.

Just do a quick Google search and see what I mean. Outside of the specific tool you use and the time you trigger the survey, you also need to consider which customer satisfaction methodology you use. First, as we mentioned previously in this guide, NPS is a popular method because of its simplicity and actionability. People understand what it means, so it can be put to use in an organization quite easily. You simply ask your customer to rate their satisfaction with your business, product, or service.

Your survey scale can be 1 — 3, 1 — 5, or 1 — Most academics disagree on which scale is the best to use. Eventually, things get more complex and you can add on more questions It's usually best to keep things simple, though.

People don't want to fill out long surveys, and you want to make sure you get accurate data. When you add enough complexity, you may have to consider hiring a survey design specialist. Customer satisfaction or delight or loyalty or whatever word you use is incredibly important to the health of your business.

This guide has defined customer satisfaction as well as given you ways to measure it. It has also given you ideas to increase customer satisfaction. But that's just a start.