The more specific measures mentioned previously are usually included in a general customer satisfaction survey as defined below:
Net promoter score (NPS)
The net promoter score has become a popular measure that has grown in importance because of social media and the Internet. This metric looks at the brand loyalty of a customer and whether they will recommend a business. In short, the net promoter score is a measure of a customer’s brand loyalty and how far they will go in promoting a business:
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Promoters: people who will recommend the business or say beneficial things about them over social media (Facebook makes gaining promoters easy via the “like my page” campaigns that drive related posts to promoter’s feeds)
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Passives: individuals who will do nothing to promote or detract from the business
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Detractors: those who will say poor things about their experience to others or via social media. Detractors can do a lot of damage to a brand quickly via social media.
The metric itself relies on specific questions in a survey (such as “how likely are you to do business with us again” and “how likely are you to recommend us”) as a percentage of positive responses versus the total number of responses. The metric is expressed as follows:
(Positive Responses – Negative Responses) / Total Responses
In this calculation, the passive or neutral responses are not considered. The final percentage shows the number of promoters, with the detractors removed, as compared against total responses. There may be other opportunities with passives and detractors, but these would fall into efforts for improving customer service.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer loyalty is impacted by the ability to engage and do business in an easy manner. A customer may leave one business for another simply due to ease of engagement. Thus, the customer effort score, which measures how easy it is to do business or conduct a transaction is critical. This score can be subjective, via surveys but can also leverage web site metrics to notice when a customer fails to execute a purchase. At the end of the day, if the effort to engage is too high the customer fails to purchase something or leave the provider altogether. Consider a scenario where a customer puts several items into a shopping cart, moves around the checkout process, but fails to execute the purchase. It is likely in a situation such as this that there was a design issue with the website making it difficult to finalize the checkout, causing the customer to abandon the purchase.
When surveying customer effort, a simple question asking how easy it was to obtain the desired outcome, with a sliding response scale enables a business to calculate the percentage of time it was easy or very easy vs. the percentage of time it was hard or too hard. The most important aspect of this measure compared to other methods of measuring customer satisfaction is that it is used as a means of churn prevention. Determining the aspects of engagement that are difficult enables a business to put improvements in place that improve the effort on the next transaction, helping with customer retention. A customer may do things “the hard way” once or twice, but if it’s always difficult to do business with a particular company, they’ll look for providers that make it easier. This is why CES is so important to customer satisfaction measurement. It’s also worth noting that this is a critical measure for web site experiences, where interaction with an employee may not happen. One way to avoid churn in this scenario is to have a chat window pop up if activity indicates a customer may be running into difficulty.
Customer Churn Rate (of interest to third-party IT providers):
The customer churn rate measures customer retention expressed as the percentage of customers who have stopped doing business with a provider. This metric directly expresses or calculates the overall churn, but when combined with customer effort and net promoter metrics can help a business determine when a customer will leave (churn) and how to prevent it. This knowledge leads to taking positive steps to impact retention. The metric is calculated as follows:
Total # of Lost Customers / Total Customers
Looking at the power of this area, measuring and prevent churn is an intentional effort to retain a customer and while it takes some effort, retention is an important activity in ensuring customer satisfaction.
Conducting Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Given their importance, it’s easy to see why customer satisfaction surveys need to be embedded across every customer-facing activity of the business. Anyone who uses app-based services, like Uber can see the attention to customer satisfaction surveys within the operation of the business. Each ride asks the customer to rate the driver and the driver to rate the customer. The results of these ratings form a two-way customer satisfaction survey: the primary focus is on the driver rating and drivers that do not offer a minimal level of service will be dropped (at the same time drivers might not pick up a poorly rated customer).
Thinking of this holistically, on-line services measure customer satisfaction in several ways:
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Immediate ticket-closure based surveys that request a star rating, like Uber and other apps
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Longer, periodic surveys that measure the overarching experience in a variety of way:
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Hotel and airline surveys measure most aspects of the experience from booking, to the service provided (flight or hotel stay), along with the ease of booking. This can be translated into an IT survey that asks users to rate the ease of reporting a problem through the process of getting it resolved.
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These same surveys assess the customer’s position as a net promoter: how would you rate us? Or: would you recommend us to others? Or would you contact us again?
Phone-based businesses often ask customers to stay on the line for a brief survey as well, enabling them to conduct transaction-based customer satisfaction survey and this is certainly a practice that can be adapted for use at the service desk.
The need for a holistic approach explains why customer satisfaction surveys will be conducted after an interaction after a transaction is completed and periodically as a general survey. The key is that since customer satisfaction can only be expressed by the customer, the customer satisfaction survey gets between the business and the customer to solicit their experience as well as possible and as often as possible.