What is customer satisfaction?
Commonly represented by the acronym CSAT, customer satisfaction, as the name makes clear, is a metric designed to measure the level of contentment clients have towards a product, service, or experience.
By mapping it, your strategic team gains insights into ways to optimize the strategy.
How you calculate customer satisfaction varies greatly according to the company’s objective and the specific situation. Generally, surveys are offered to consumers, who are encouraged to evaluate the element in question.
And remember, not only the qualities of products and services influence these responses. Yes, a quality product is important to generate satisfaction in the people who consume it, but it does not guarantee it.
After all, there is no point in offering a product full of features and benefits if, when the user starts using it, they are not sure how to do it.
Therefore, more than thinking about the development of solutions, it is necessary to focus on the consumer’s general experience.
Thus, in the end, we can define customer satisfaction as a direct reflection of how a person feels when interacting with your brand, not necessarily at the time of purchase.
The consumption of free content, for example, can be a factor that raises this feeling of contentment.
In other words, in the relationship with the modern consumer, profit is far from being all you should worry about.
In fact, this is a mistake often made by companies. Deceived by good business results, they fail to keep up with customer satisfaction, which can damage in the medium and long term.
But, after all, why is it so important to know if your consumer is satisfied with the experience offered by your brand? Isn’t it enough to know that they are spending money on your solutions?
No! And we explain why in the next topic.
Why is customer satisfaction so important?
To begin with, if you don’t measure customer satisfaction, how will you locate dissatisfied customers? Hard, isn’t it?
The possibility of finding and regaining those people can generate even more revenue for your company. More than that, it’s a way to avoid damaging your image.
That’s because we live in the age of digital transformation. Today, all shopping experiences pass, in some way, through the internet.
With fast navigation and efficient search engines, the user has access to basically any type of information, including the opinion of other customers about your company.
There, we need to remember the concept of consumer 4.0, coined by professor and marketing specialist Philip Kotler.
According to him, relations between customers and brands are marked by some suspicion in the face of large advertising campaigns.
Currently, what is most valuable in the customer’s decision-making process is precisely the opinion of friends, family, and even strangers on the internet.
That said, you don’t want a dissatisfied customer talking badly about the experience provided by your company, right? Have you ever thought about how many sales you could lose because of that?
So, this metric’s importance is in maintaining a positive image for your business, which enables its growth.
But that’s not all. Check out some other benefits of putting customer satisfaction at the center of your strategy.
You can also identify happy customers
If it is important to identify dissatisfied consumers, it is also essential to find those who are happy with the relationship they have with your brand.
They can become brand advocates, organically increasing the reach of your company and attracting more business opportunities.
Besides, these clients tend to return more easily. Therefore, it is interesting to conduct campaigns aimed at them.
For example, email marketing messages focused on these people can achieve much higher conversion rates.
You can enhance lead generation
Remember we mentioned that feedback from satisfied customers is fundamental for the modern buyer’s journey?
Studies prove that 71% of people declare themselves more likely to purchase after reading positive reviews about the company.
A more audacious strategy, but very effective, is to get in touch with customers with the highest level of satisfaction and collect testimonials about their experience with your brand. You can then insert them into an interactive landing page and watch the lead generation increase.
Sales teams become more effective
Did you know that 55% of customers are inclined to spend more money on experiences that they are sure will be good?
If your company has a good reputation in this matter, imagine how much easier this will make the work of your sales team!
Also, companies with high levels of customer satisfaction have this as a great competitive advantage, which generates interesting elements for the sales pitch of their representatives.
The use of graphics and other visual elements to express how satisfied the company’s customers are is highly convincing.
You gain the ability to upgrade products and services efficiently
To stay competitive in an increasingly dynamic market, you need to understand the product lifecycle and make upgrades where applicable. But to do so, you must adopt a strategic process, or the full potential of the solution may be wasted.
By tracking customer satisfaction metrics, you can identify which items in your portfolio need to be updated and why.
This way, the whole process becomes more efficient, increasing the return on investment.
How to improve this metric in your company?
At this point, you understand that ensuring a good level of customer satisfaction is vital to your business’s success.
So, what can you do to improve this metric?
The first step, of course, is to decide how to measure it. One of the most common methods is the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
The popularity of NPS comes from its efficiency and simplicity. It’s a one-question survey that should be very straightforward, like: “How likely are you to recommend us to your friends?”.
The scales go from 0 to 10 and is interpreted in the following way:
- 0 to 6: detractors, who are unhappy and can cause damage to your reputation;
- 7 to 8: passives, who are satisfied, but not so much that they will recommend you;
- 9 to 10: promoters, who are happy, enthusiastic, and tend to recommend your brand to others.
Then, a simple calculation is enough: the percentage of promoters — the percentage of detractors.
Monitor your social media
Social media channels are important meters of consumer contentment.
From the comments they leave on your posts to the variation in engagement level, there are several ways to find out if your followers find the experience valuable.
So, in addition to producing qualified content for networks such as Instagram and YouTube, for example, monitor their results and stay alert to what consumers are trying to tell you.
Ask for feedback
There are several ways to ask for feedback, and we have already covered one of them, the NPS.
However, this effort must extend to other channels in your company. An Instagram story, including a question sticker, may encourage followers to voice an opinion on how your brand can be improved.
In the same way, it is interesting to make room for your website users to leave reviews, especially if we are dealing with e-commerce.
Think about Amazon. All the products listed are accompanied by stars that indicate how satisfied consumers have been with it.
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