Author: Aimilia Aspri

If you’re expecting a… battle of the CX metrics to get to the winner, well this is not the right article for you! Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) are three different metrics that do three different jobs, so it’s no use pitting them against each other. 

So, let’s examine them one by one in an effort to clear any misconceptions and help you be sure that you use the right metric for your objectives and purposes.

Net Promoter Score (NPS): Where do you stand in terms of “Word of Mouth”?

What is NPS? NPS is the most popular CX metric and measures the willingness of consumers to recommend your product/brand/service to someone they know. 

What is the standard NPS survey question? “On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”

What is NPS good for? NPS is perfect when you want to segment your customers into promoters, passives and detractors and to use this segmentation to personalize the content that each will receive in the future in an effort to enhance their experiences with your brand. 

+NPS Tip:  Incorporate open-end questions in your NPS surveys so that respondents will be able to justify their score and provide you with a better understanding of what makes them like or dislike your products/brand/service.

Customer Effort Score (CES): Are you “too much work” or “easy breezy”?

What is CES? CES measures how easy or difficult it is for customers to get involved with your brand or products.

What is the standard CES survey question? “How easy was it for you to (e.g. complete your transaction)?” 

What is CES good for? CES provides more accurate future loyalty predictions than the other two metrics since it is well documented that customers with high effort experiences with a brand become disloyal.

+CES Tip:  Use CES surveys to pinpoint the “high effort” points in your customer journeys and see what changes can make things easier for your audience.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Satisfaction guaranteed or is there more to be desired?

What is CSAT? CSAT is a popular metric that tracks how satisfied customers are with their experiences with a brand, product or service.

What is the standard CSAT survey question? “How satisfied were you with our product?” 

What is CSAT good for? CSAT helps you separate satisfied from unsatisfied customers and discover your strong and weak points and come up with ways to enhance the former and fix the latter and boost engagement and retention.

+CSAT Tip:  Share the results of CSAT surveys with employees in different departments of your brand and brainstorm ideas on how to improve customer satisfaction in a holistic way that your audience will definitely appreciate.

So, which CX metric is the best?

As stated in this article’s introduction, comparing the three metrics to come up with the one considered “best” is a waste of time and effort. Instead, we believe that metrics synergy is the key to success when it comes to improving your customer experience, collecting valuable feedback and making your audience feel heard and esteemed. Opt for a platform, like e-satisfaction.com, that helps you incorporate NPS, CES and CSAT surveys into your strategy and let them work their magic into shining a light on what your customers want and see the results this can bring to your customer loyalty and revenue.

November 27th has come and gone and we hope that it has been an opportunity for you to gain new customers, see others return to you and make a significant increase in your sales. 

Black Friday 2020 might be over but your efforts to boost customer satisfaction, engagement and retention can now begin! 

All you have to do is to try some tried and trusted practices and capitalize on the Black Friday-generated buzz and the upcoming holiday shopping season:

• Collect and analyze all the Black Friday-generated raw data and feedback. This analysis will not only provide valuable insights on how to be better prepared for Black Fridays to come, but it will also highlight any need for fine-tunings that should be implemented regardless of whether a sales period is looming.
• Send an ad hoc survey to your Black Friday customers as a means to engage them and generate data. The survey can include questions concerning the evaluation of the buying process, a prompt for google reviews, an invitation for recipients to leave a product review or an incentive -in the form of a reward or a significant benefit- for the customers to repurchase during January and February, a period that sales tend to be on the low side. 
• Black Friday shopping means impulsive purchases for a lot of people, so it is natural if some of them change their minds and wish to return their products. Make sure that your return policy does not “punish” them and deters them from ever coming back to your brand. A simple return process can boost customers’ trust, as showcased by two interesting statistics from Return Magic:

– 72% of consumers said they would spend more and buy more often with merchants that make the return experience simple.

– 89% of repeat customers who had a good return experience are likely to buy again.

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Are you ready for some action? Before you begin, we have something that will come handy in your efforts. Download our free Black Friday eBook to find all the practices mentioned above in printable, checklist form!

Customer Satisfaction: the holy grail for any brand/business that wants to offer high-quality products/services/experiences to its audience. If you’ve been doing some research on how to measure customer satisfaction, you have probably stumbled upon CSAT. Now it’s time you get better acquainted with this metric and discover why it is widely used and trusted.

What is Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)?

Customer Satisfaction Score or CSAT is a popular metric that tracks how satisfied customers are with their experiences with a brand, product or service. It essentially quantifies your audience’s satisfaction level.

The question usually used in CSAT surveys is a variation of the one seen below:

In this example, customers are asked to rate their overall experience with an e-shop, but the question at the heart of a CSAT survey can be rephrased to ask for the rating of a specific product/service or process (e.g. delivery method). Various rating scales can be used (1-5, 1-7, 1-10, symbol scale etc.) and CSAT surveys call also be employed during different points in a customer’s journey.

A lot of discussions in the CX community have been centred around what constitutes a good CSAT score. While a CSTA score between 75% and 85% is certainly considered satisfactory, these percentages are empirical due to the fact that scores vary across industries. 

What makes CSAT an important and useful metric?

The premise of CSAT may seem simple, but it is that simplicity that makes it a powerful tool for collecting customer feedback, engaging your audience and enhancing loyalty. Apart from its straightforwardness, there are other reasons that justify its popularity:

• It is a metric that separates satisfied from unsatisfied clients. Negative feedback may not be pleasant, it is nonetheless essential and valuable because it acts as a diagnostic tool for problems that need to be solved and offers room for improvement. By recognizing and listening to unsatisfied customers, you can fix problematic areas, like your churn rate, and even improve a bad NPS (Net Promoter Score).
• At the same time, feedback from satisfied customers is a gateway towards discovering your brand’s strong suits and highlight them to protect and boost retention.
• CSAT is indicative of how “healthy” a brand/company is and the information it provides helps prioritize the actions of each department. When internally distributed, the insights produced via CSAT surveys can be used to improve customer satisfaction, produce ideas that will enhance engagement and attract new customers. Those insights can also serve as the basis for product updates guides, website tweaks and customer advocacy campaigns. 

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According to research by McKinsey “maximizing satisfaction across the customer journey has the potential to increase customer satisfaction by 20%, lift revenue by up to 15% and lower the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%.”

If you want to enjoy similar results, you need to start asking your customers how satisfied they are as soon as possible. And an easy way to create, send and collect insights from CSAT surveys is e-satisfaction.com. Book a demo and see how customer feedback can be used to help you reach your business objectives and make your brand stronger than ever.