For any business to succeed, satisfied customers are essential primarily because they are loyal and promise excellent word-of-mouth advertising. However, it’s not as easy to measure as it is to measure website visitors or the revenue earned. But there are metrics and methods available specifically for this purpose. The following are some of them:

1. Customer Satisfaction Score

This score is the standard metric for customer satisfaction and asks customers to rate satisfaction with your service or product. The average rating of your consumer responses makes up your average rating. Typically, the scale could be 1-10, 1-5, or 1-3. The best thing about this metric is its directness; however, what’s wrong with it is the fact that satisfaction is a fleeting sentiment, making it difficult to judge at times.

2. Customer satisfaction surveys

This is the standard way of working out the customers’ happiness. The questions ask customers how satisfied they are. Such surveys are of three kinds.

a. In-app surveys
These involve a subtle feedback bar within the website that generally has a couple of questions. This method has the highest response rate because the customer is asked for his or her opinion while being engaged with your company. These are especially useful for measuring standard customer satisfaction metrics. Good tools for such surveys include SurveyMonkey and Floq.

b. Post-service surveys
These focus on the customers’ specifications relating to a certain service. This survey is done right after the delivery so that honest feedback can be received while it is still fresh in mind. The best method for such services is sending a rating link via email.

c. Email surveys
Since the above two methods don’t offer in-depth information about customer happiness, the best solution is email surveys for greater insights. Despite having low response rates, these allow customers to take their time while answering their questions. An incredible tool for this is Google Forms.

3. Customer Effort Score

With this metric, you basically get to measure the effort it took consumers to get their problem solved. Usually, the customers are asked to rate on a scale of 1-7 with 7 being quite a lot of effort.
With this metric, the aim is to reduce the average score. There are several tools with which you can make your own customer effort score survey, such as CheckMarket.

4. Net Promoter Score

This measures the likeliness that the customer will refer your business to someone else. More than the satisfaction, it measures the customer’s loyalty. Customers have to rate on a scale of 1-10 the likelihood of recommending you.
Since this metric tests the intention of referring rather than satisfaction, customers find it easier to answer. With this kind of survey, you don’t have to question consumers whether your product is good enough.
It also has two benefits. Firstly, it gives you insight into how well you fare in the industry. Secondly, the option of referring is introduced to the mind of the consumers, something they might not have thought of previously.

5. Number of complaints

As the name states, this measures the number of complaints. This is called the things gone wrong metric and measures the number of complaints per certain number of either survey responses or units sold. For instance, it could be measured against 100, 1000, or 1,000,000 units sold.
While the standard for this metric is to measure complaints via customer surveys, you can also maintain internal metrics. At worst, your score could be 1 or higher, which means that you receive at least one complaint per your chosen unit (such as survey response recorded or unit sold).

6. Social Media Monitoring

It’s no secret that social media has a great impact on the business-customer relationship. While a great experience or poor service could only be shared with the closest friends before, social media now lets users vocalize their experience, even if it’s extremely bad, that reaches up to millions of people. Therefore, it’s the ideal place for knowing what customers think about your service.While both Twitter and Facebook are important platforms, you should also not dismiss the feedback you receive on TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Quora. Helpful tools for social media monitoring include social mention and Google Alerts.

Conclusion

The importance of measuring customer satisfaction cannot be underestimated. Once you know your customer satisfaction, you can start working on reaching greater levels and ultimately have more happy customers.