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10 Ways to Boost Customer Satisfaction

• G. Tomas M. Hult
• Forrest V. Morgeson

Takeaways from an analysis of millions of consumer data points.

Customer satisfaction is at its lowest point in the past two decades. Companies must focus on 10 areas of the customer experience to improve satisfaction without sacrificing revenue. The authors base their findings on research at the ACSI — analyzing millions of customer data points — and research that we conducted for The Reign of the Customer : Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Customer Satisfaction. For three decades, the ACSI has been a leading satisfaction index (cause-and-effect metric) connected to the quality of brands sold by companies with significant market share in the United States.

Despite all the effort and money poured into CX tools by companies, customer satisfaction continues to decline . In the United States, it is now at its lowest level in nearly two decades, per data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Consumer sentiment is also at its lowest in more than two decades. This negative dynamic in the customer-centric ecosystem in which we now live creates the challenge of figuring out what is going wrong and what companies can do to fix it.

• GH G. Tomas M. Hult is part of the leadership team at the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI); coauthor of The Reign of the Customer: Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Customer Satisfaction ; and professor in the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. He is also a member of the Expert Networks of the World Economic Forum and the United Nations’ World Investment Forum.
• FM Forrest V. Morgeson is an assistant professor in the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University; (Former) Director of Research at the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI); and coauthor of The Reign of the Customer: Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Customer Satisfaction .

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Customer Satisfaction: The Ultimate Guide

How to Measure, Improve, and Manage Customer Satisfaction to Grow Your Business

If you don’t satisfy your customers, your business will fail.

The data backs this up.

Growing businesses are more likely to prioritize customer success than those with stagnant or decreasing revenue. Successful customers can become your best salespeople, as well; our research shows that 77% of people have shared positive experiences with companies in the past year.

Furthermore, keeping your current customers happy is good business in the long term. Common business wisdom tells you that acquiring customers is 5 to 25 times more expensive than keeping current customers.

A bad customer experience or bad customer service is also a leading indicator of customer churn (which is massively detrimental to growth ).

In our 2018 State of Inbound report , 61% of respondents noted "generating traffic and leads" as their number one marketing challenge, which can probably be tied back to another problem: They’re also struggling to keep their existing customers .

A business simply can’t grow sustainably if it has a churn problem, and we can find early red flags of churn by gauging customer satisfaction (and working to improve it over time).

of growing businesses rate customer success as "very important"

Acquiring customers is

more expensive than keeping current customers.

of companies believe retention is cheaper than acquisition

In an attempt to demystify customer satisfaction and make the measurement actionable for businesses of any size and type, we wrote a comprehensive guide that ranges from customer satisfaction definitions all the way to tools and tricks to make sure you’re gathering data correctly and actually using it to grow your business.

Without further ado, let’s dive in. Feel free to read it from start to finish, or skip around to sections that are most applicable to you.

What is customer satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction a measurement we use to quantify the degree to which a customer is satisfied with a product, service, or experience. It measures how a customer feels about a brand interaction.

Many terms in business are nebulous and vague. Customer satisfaction is one of those terms.

In practice, this could be executed using many different survey design tactics, such as differing questions, survey response scales, and collection methods. Sometimes, we collect these measures right after a transaction or other times at a fixed date in the customer relationship. Sometimes we use a five-point Likert scale, and sometimes we use a Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) survey. In fact, there’s some ruckus around the term “customer satisfaction.” After all, as the argument goes , customer satisfaction is simply the absence of customer frustration. If you have a great meal at a restaurant, you don’t sit back, smile, and say, “that meal was ... satisfactory.” The argument is that we should aim for delight. We’ll ignore arguments of semantics in this guide, but it’s important to note that the focus generally shouldn’t be on providing an average experience, but rather, on creating raving promoters for your business. Still, measuring customer satisfaction can help us do this (no matter what we call the metric).

Why measure customer satisfaction?

If you don’t measure customer satisfaction, you can’t identify unhappy customers. If you don’t know who is unhappy, you don’t know who will churn, and you can't figure out why they're unhappy. If people churn faster than you can acquire new customers, your business will fail.

“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and, eventually, to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”  ― H. James Harrington

Without contact or feedback from the customer, we isolate ourselves in a sort of bubble.

The truth is, however, that even the best, most innovative, top-performing businesses all have faults and opportunity areas. These companies are elite because they measure things like customer satisfaction and act upon the data.

If you’re open to the idea that you could improve, it’s worth spending the little bit of time it takes to set up measurement solutions and to collect the data. What’s the harm? You might find problem areas that are worth massive amounts in terms of ROI.

That’s the general truth about measuring and data. Specifically, though, what’s the importance of customer satisfaction to business health?

Customer retention is arguably the most important factor in long-term business growth. You can acquire customers as rapidly as you’d like, but if they aren’t sticking around, you don’t have a sustainable business.

Retention affects every part of a business, from the customer acquisition cost to the customer lifetime value to word of mouth and customer loyalty. In fact, the ratio of these metrics (CAC/LTV) is important, too: You can spend more money to acquire customers if they retain for longer and are worth more. It’s one business lever that truly impacts every other.

If you’re still not convinced, check out these two data points:

• 82% of companies agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition.
• A repeat customer spends 67% more than a new customer.

Retention is good for business. Here’s how Brian Balfour , former VP Growth at HubSpot, puts it :

“The point is, every improvement that you make to retention also improves all of these other things — virality, LTV, payback period. It is literally the foundation of all of growth, and that’s really why retention is the king.”

Okay, we’ve established that customer satisfaction matters and that you should measure it. Now the question is: How?

How to Measure Customer Satisfaction

Every method of collecting data on customer satisfaction comes down to a customer survey .

With digital analytics, we can determine if users are researching a goal, how they are interacting with a feature, or even their relative struggle completing a given task. But we can’t gauge their emotional response to any of that.

That’s the secret. Measuring customer satisfaction gives you a peek at your customers’ emotional responses.

If we simply judge customer experience on conversion rates and goals completed, the DMV would score very high — much higher than something with higher funnel drop-off, like, say, buying a Tesla.

Luckily, most businesses know not to measure things so myopically. We look at data in the right context and with a blend of attitudinal and behavioral data. When it comes to optimizing for customer experience and improving customer satisfaction, that’s the way to go.

Surveys: When do you send them? To whom do you send them?

These are great questions — and it depends on what you want to answer.

Most often, with a customer satisfaction survey, you’re looking to answer a very specific question such as, “How did the customer feel about this specific situation?” This situation is usually transactional, such as buying a pair of socks or getting an oil change.

In this case, you’re best off sending the survey as soon as you can. The longer the delay, the more likely it is that your data will be skewed. The memory does strange things, especially when it comes to emotions and experiences. If you want a true reflection of the customer’s experience, send the survey ASAP.

Sometimes, however, we want to learn if there has been a longitudinal change in customer satisfaction, either on an individual or aggregate level ... basically, have we improved or not over time? In this case, you just need to control for time and make sure that all surveys are being sent to users in a similar time interval (immediately, six months after purchase, two years after purchase, etc.). This allows you to analyze users in cohorts to determine differences in customer satisfaction scores over time. 

Who should fill out customer satisfaction surveys? Ideally, every customer that has an experience with your business. Wherever you can bake in an effortless customer satisfaction survey, I would do so (barring an annoying user experience, of course).

In some cases, you’ll want to isolate certain groups of customers to do more in-depth surveys. In this case, again, it depends on the answers you’re looking for. If, for instance, you want to find out what it is your best customers love about your business, you would isolate customers with that cluster of characteristics and survey them. Same goes for any group of customers from which you’d like to get insights.

What does a customer satisfaction survey look like? What kind of questions do you ask? How do you determine a customer satisfaction score?

These questions are tough to answer in a broad sense because there are many different schools of thought and they are constantly evolving. 

To a certain extent, you also need to customize the survey itself to your business goals. What do you want to know? Which questions (and their scores) can be used as leading indicators of growth or churn? 

Just look at the difference between a customer satisfaction survey like this  ... 

... a great example of an NPS survey using a tool like Nicereply  ...

... and a nice looking and simple NPS survey using a tool like Typeform .

I’m personally a fan of simpler solutions, as they tend to be more understandable and actionable for the business, so NPS wins for me. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect for your situation.

You can customize things to your own use case. Here's a nice simple customer satisfaction survey example using Google Forms .

About general experience ... 

• Overall, I am very satisfied with my experience with [Company].
• How would you rate [Company] overall?
• How well do our products meet your needs?
• How responsive have we been to your questions about our products?
• How likely are you to purchase our products again?
• How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague? (NPS)

About the product itself ...

• How would you rate the quality of the product?
• How would you rate the value for money of the product?

You can also ask more open-ended questions (and with the right software or data science, you can even run a sentiment analysis to quantify the responses in a way) ... 

• How would you describe your experience/our company in three words?
• Why did you purchase from us today?
• Was there anything you would improve about your experience?

I briefly mentioned that these are usually measured using “ordinal scales.” Without getting too into the weeds, this essentially means you’re measuring your customers’ responses on a scale , usually on a scale of 1 to 5 (such as the commonly used Likert Scale ) or 1 to 7.

I’m going to save you the trouble here (because there is a lot of boring academic debate over which method is best) and say that it’s more important that you simply choose a method and stick with it. Change over time is more important than what the number is. I’ll finish this section off by mentioning a very popular type of customer satisfaction (and loyalty) survey called Net Promoter Score ®, or NPS®. Calculate your Net Promoter Score by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

NPS is quite popular right now, especially in quickly growing companies. We use it regularly at HubSpot to track our customers'  and  employees' happiness. It’s a simple metric that you can use to rally your team around to improve customer satisfaction and retention. But there are critics. Mainly, the argument is that the metric is too simplified and not quite predictive of retention or loyalty. However, no customer satisfaction metric is perfect, so it’s all about how you’re able to use the data. Here’s how Craig Morrison at Usability Hour addresses that:

“When talking about the Net Promoter Score, you’ll often hear people say it isn’t accurate, or it doesn’t work, or that it depends on how you phrase the question, etc. But the thing is, what are you actually doing right now to keep track of how your users experience with your product? Anything? Surveys? Interviews? Many startups I work with are doing absolutely nothing. So while this system might have its flaws, it’s way better than doing nothing at all. It’s the best way to keep track of how the changes you’re making to your product are effective your user experience.”

In truth, I like the simplicity and actionability of the NPS. I also like that you usually add a follow up open-ended question, such as “What’s the reason for your rating?” to couple your quantitative measurement with some qualitative insight. Another benefit of NPS is that it can be benchmarked against others in your industry to truly understand where you stand with regards to customer satisfaction. Rallying your company to focus on NPS, a customer satisfaction metric, will help you create a culture of customer-centricity and improve this score with time. In summary, there are many different ways of measuring customer satisfaction, but what’s important is that you can measure changes over time and that you can actually use the data to improve the customer experience. If your method is too complicated for your organization to rally behind, it won’t be useful. That’s the power of a single question like NPS.

How to Improve Customer Satisfaction

• Ask for customer feedback.
• Educate customers and provide answers.
• Leverage social media.
• Make things easy to accomplish.
• Wow your customers.
• Use focus groups.
• Check out your competitors.

Now that we’ve discussed the importance of customer satisfaction, as well as some methods for measuring satisfaction, the obvious question is, “How do we improve customer satisfaction?”

The obvious answer is that there is no tried-and-true silver bullet strategy here. (Sorry.)

However, there are some guiding principles and evidence-based tactics that can get you some quick wins. Hopefully, they’ll get you started on the path to an improved customer experience.

1. Ask for customer feedback.

This one is table stakes: Make it easier for your customers to complain.

If your customers can’t give you feedback or complain to you directly, they’ll do so on social media or to their friends. They’ll be doubly frustrated — first with their poor experience, and second with their lack of an outlet to fix their poor experience.

This means investing in customer feedback tools and customer support.

Often, if you have a well-placed mechanism to catch customer feedback and respond in real time, you can prevent a user from becoming a detractor in the first place. If you can react quickly, you can turn the situation into a positive one.

Customer success expert Lincoln Murphy put it well :

“Don’t let customers get to the point where they’ll be a detractor in the first place; you do this by understanding their Desired Outcome and operationalizing around ensuring they achieve that — also known as Customer Success. Make sure you give the customer other places to provide feedback ad hoc: feature requests, bug reports, open support tickets, chat with your team, etc. Don’t let the NPS survey be the only way — or the only time — they can give feedback to you. Continually remind them that those other feedback modalities are there for them to use. This way, when you do get a detractor you know it’s probably legit and not venting all of the pent up — and not even entirely negative, but it becomes so with no outlet — sentiment.”

There are many ways you can do this. One way is with live chat . This technology is rapidly improving in its scalability and targeting capability, as well as reporting. Another way is with feedback forms, such as those that companies like Usabilla offer.

The vast majority of dissatisfied customers will simply walk away unhappy, and you’ll never know. They’ll then tell their friends and your reputation will worsen. Negative word-of-mouth is no treat for a company. According to AllBusiness.com :

“Most unhappy customers don’t take the time to complain, they just quit doing business with you. But guess what: They didn’t say anything to do, but they definitely tell all their friends. The experts say, the average upset customer tells nine people. So what can you do? To avoid losing customers because of a bad experience, you need to make it easy for them to complain. That’s right. Let them know their complaints are welcome. Keep in mind, a complaining customer cares enough about the relationship with your business to at least bring the issue to your attention.”

Collecting customer feedback is important in itself, and not enough businesses do it. But it can be complicated, and companies tend to make common mistakes. I reached out to survey design and customer feedback expert, Dr. Matthew Champagne , and he gave a super comprehensive summary of mistakes to avoid:

"So many customers WANT to help their favorite businesses improve, but they are obstructed at every turn by companies who give them transparently bad survey questions, insulting incentives, ask the wrong questions, ask when it’s too late or when memories have faded or make it a painful process to answer. Companies always use the 'autopsy approach' to customer satisfaction: wait until the event is over to figure out what went wrong. Customers should be asked questions while it still matters to them and while their feedback could still make a difference. The only incentives that matter to customers are answering their questions: (1) was my voice heard? (2) did what I say make a difference? and (3) how do I compare to others? Instead, companies annoy and insult customers by offering them some unknown (but probably minuscule) chance of winning some generic gift. Companies still think it’s 1999. Telling customers to 'please take your time to help us improve our products and services' didn’t work 20 years ago and certainly doesn’t work today with savvy customers. With attention at a premium, companies have to stop focusing on self-centered rationales to fill out surveys and instead give customers internal incentives. 'Representativeness' is critical and few companies consider this. Getting responses from 3% or even 10% of customers is meaningless if you don’t know what the “silent middle” is saying. Companies take action on the misleading results from a non-representative portion of their audience because it’s all the data they have. That’s one reason there are so many mediocre companies."

2. Educate customers and provide answers.

All customer questions should be readily answerable, either manually, within your interface, or with documentation.

It’s incredibly frustrating when you can’t find an answer to a question or concern while using a product or browsing a website. How many times have you experienced that and tried, to no avail, to find a live chat or some way to get an answer? It’s far too common.

You have a few options here.

First, and no matter what, conduct user experience (UX) research. If you simply run a few user tests and watch some session replays (using a tool like HotJar), you’ll find tons of UX problems that you never would have noticed otherwise. It’s both alarming and insightful, but it’s inarguably useful.

From there, you should have a solid list of low-hanging fruit that you can prioritize and fix.

Second, look into smarter content and documentation. When you’re fielding support inquiries — or really, any customer touchpoint — make sure you’re writing down, categorizing, and quantifying common questions and complaints (and where they occur). This data will be your building ground for a solid help documentation plan.

Where are users struggling and with what? How can you answer that with content in real time so users don’t even need to reach out to you? We do this here at HubSpot with user guides in our HubSpot Academy knowledge base.

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.

It’s expected of most businesses nowadays to have live chat software . The stats are undeniable.

• 63% of customers said they were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat as opposed to one that doesn’t.
• 44% of people said that having live chat available while shopping online was one of the most important features a company can offer.
• 79% of customers say that they prefer live chat because of the immediacy it provides.

The research pretty much all confirms that live chat is the most preferred form of customer service , and that expectation is only growing.

Then there’s a whole new emerging field of chatbots and artificial intelligence solutions. Read about what we’re doing with chatbots at HubSpot here .

3. Leverage social media.

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. This could be on Facebook Messenger, Twitter, or in Instagram or LinkedIn comments. 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. Consider offering live chats or Q&A sessions where customers can ask pressing questions, express concerns, or merely connect with your service or sales team.

The great thing about social media is it meets your customers wherever they are, allowing you to improve their satisfaction in the process.

4. Make things easy to accomplish.

Usability is important to the customer experience. Despite this, it’s not often thought about in terms of customer satisfaction.

We think about the power of our features and what you can accomplish with the product, but we forget that users have to learn how to use the platform — that it’s often not an intuitive experience.

The easiest-to-use products are the most addicting.

Facebook knows this, and so does every other app on which you spend too much time. They make things so frictionless that, when you receive a trigger (either internal or external) to use the app, there’s no difficulty in doing so.

Companies with positive, healthy missions think a lot about this as well, because their whole goal is to create habits. Think about products like HeadSpace and Duolingo: It’s not easy to meditate or to learn a foreign language, but the ease of the app makes it easy to do so.

One reason I love Amazon so much (but my wallet doesn’t) is how easy they make it to purchase. One-click purchase? I’m all in.

5. "Wow" your customers.

Satisfy your customers? That’s a good start, but you should really be aiming to delight your customers . To wow  your customers.

At least that’s the advice that Warren Buffett gives ... so it’s probably pertinent wisdom.

According to Buffett ,

“Any business with delighted customers has a sales force they won’t have to pay; You don’t see them, but they are talking to people all the time.”

Here’s where things get tricky when it comes to tactical advice, though; there’s no silver bullet strategy to delighting your customers. 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. When you truly rally your company around customer delight, you don’t need to worry about the individual tactics; those ideas will come. 

Whether it’s something quirky like sending hoverboards to your best customers, something remarkable like staying on a call for a Guinness Record amount of time (like Zappos ), or something thoughtful like writing handwritten thank-you notes to your marketing partners, delighting your customers can bring about amazing business results.

6. Use focus groups.

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. 

7. Check out your competitors.

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.

Customer Satisfaction Tools & Software

Now that we’ve covered why you should care about customer satisfaction and how to measure it (and some ways to improve it), let’s cover some actual tools and software you can use to measure and improve customer satisfaction.

Tools for Measuring Customer Satisfaction

The first thing you need to figure out is how you’ll collect customer satisfaction data. 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. Similarly, after a user makes a purchase on an e-commerce site, you’d ideally be able to trigger a survey to get their immediate thoughts.

There are many tools to do this, and more joining the market every day. A few popular options today include:

If you’re trying to target a specific class of users or at a specific time interval, sending out email surveys might be a good option. 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:

• SurveyMonkey
• Google Forms  (and G Suite )

There’s no shortage of customer survey software out there, though. Just do a quick Google search and see what I mean. It’s hard to compare all the options, which is why I recommend using something simple like Google Forms or Survey Monkey, but if you want to do some more research, here’s a good resource to learn more about customer survey software .

Customer Satisfaction Measurements and Methods

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. There’s no shortage here, either.

First, as we mentioned previously in this guide, NPS is a popular method because of its simplicity and actionability. Data is useless if you can’t use it to make better decisions, and NPS seems to have both high predictive validity and actionability. People understand what it means, so it can be put to use in an organization quite easily.

Then there are other “one question” satisfaction methodologies like SUS and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score). CSAT is the most commonly used satisfaction method, and it’s likely the most straightforward as well.

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 – 10. Most academics disagree on which scale is the best to use.

It’s not as important to spend too long weighing which scale to use, but rather to implement something your team can agree on and sticking with it. It’s more about establishing a baseline and improving than it is to be perfectly accurate in measurement.

Customer Effort Score is another popular “single question survey.” Instead of simply asking your customers how satisfied they were, you ask how easy it was to purchase or to complete an action in your product.

Apparently, this score is more predictive of consumer behavior than CSAT or NPS, but again, there’s a lot of disagreement among academics on the specifics, and it’s mostly important that you choose one you can take action upon.

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.

Boost Your Customer Satisfaction Today

Customer satisfaction (or delight or loyalty or whatever word you use) is incredibly important to the health of your business. If your customers are unhappy, they’ll leave, and no business can survive and compete long term with a serious churn problem. 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. Now it’s on you to implement these measurement strategies and customer satisfaction programs. It’s up to you to iterate and even innovate in the area of customer satisfaction. Your business growth depends on it .

Alex Birkett

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How to measure customer satisfaction: 4 key metrics.

22 min read Customer satisfaction is about more than just minimizing complaints. Here’s an introduction to the subject, along with 4 key customer satisfaction measurements that are critical to your business success.

Customer satisfaction is a common method used to determine how well you meet – or exceed – customer expectations . It is used as a key performance indicator of customer service and product quality.

Customer satisfaction may be best understood in terms of customer experience. Customer experience (or CX) is the total sum of a customer’s perceptions , interactions, and thoughts about your business.

Customer satisfaction is a composite of many different aspects, and it is likely to change over time. Here’s a model of the various facets that contribute to customer satisfaction (or not):

Get started with our free CSAT survey template

Why should you measure customer satisfaction?

Customers who develop attitudinal brand loyalty – that is, they have a positive emotional connection to a brand – have been shown to be less price sensitive than their less-loyal counterparts. They’re also more likely to convert when they buy from you. Highly satisfied customers are also likely to tell friends and family about their experiences and to promote your brand.

According to Mckinsey, you can see the impact when you improve customer satisfaction below:

The cost of serving customers decreases, while revenue increases when customer satisfaction improves.

Customer centricity pays off, as meeting – or better yet exceeding – customer’ expectations makes you more competitive. You’ll be more likely to keep your customers, and prevent them from going to a competitor. Merkle found that 66% of consumers care more about their experience than the costs when making a brand decision . But in times of economic uncertainty, if the experience isn’t worth the cost, they’ll go elsewhere. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) estimates that good experience reviews spread by word of mouth recommendations account for 13% of consumer sales and represent $6 trillion in yearly consumer spending . It’s clear there are tangible benefits to improving customer satisfaction.

These are good reasons to aim for a level of customer experience and customer satisfaction that exceeds rather than simply meets customers’ expectations. But accurately knowing that you provide great customer service can be difficult without measuring customer satisfaction.

So how do we start effectively measuring customer satisfaction?

4 key customer satisfaction metrics to track

Here are 4 key customer satisfaction measurements that are critical to your business success. They take into account the different dimensions of customer satisfaction, such as affective (emotional) and cognitive (rationally judged) reactions to a product or service and behavioral intentions (such as likelihood to recommend or repurchase) as well as taking overall scores of satisfaction as judged by the respondents.

1. Overall Satisfaction Measure (Attitudinal)

This question reflects the overall opinion of a consumer’s satisfaction experience with a product he or she has used.

The single greatest predictors of customer satisfaction are the customer experiences that result in attributions of quality.

Perceived quality is often measured in one of three contexts:

• Overall quality
• Perceived reliability
• Extent of customer’s needs fulfilled

It is commonly believed that dissatisfaction is synonymous with purchase regret while satisfaction is linked to positive ideas such as “it was a good choice” or “I am glad that I bought it.”

By using the perception of quality and product satisfaction as a guide, we can better measure customer satisfaction as a whole.

2. Customer Loyalty Measurement (Affective, Behavioural)

This single-question measure is the core NPS (Net Promoter Score) measure.

Customer loyalty reflects the likelihood of repurchasing products and services. Customer satisfaction is a major predictor of repurchase but is strongly influenced by explicit performance evaluations of product performance, quality, and value.

Loyalty is often measured as a combination of measures including overall satisfaction, the likelihood of repurchase , and the likelihood of recommending the brand to a friend (as measured by Net Promoter Score).

A common measure of loyalty might be the sum of scores for the following three questions:

• Overall, how satisfied are you with [brand]?
• How likely are you to continue to choose/repurchase [brand]?
• How likely are you to recommend [brand] to a friend or family member?

Understanding customer loyalty in this form of metric helps you to measure customer satisfaction from the angle of future behavior. It can be helpful not only for understanding customer satisfaction now but also for developing future purchase predictions.

3. A series of Attribute Satisfaction Measurements (Affective and Cognitive)

Example question: How satisfied are you with the “taste” of your entre at La Jolla Grove?

Example question: How important is “taste” in your decision to select La Jolla Grove restaurant?

Affect (liking/disliking) is best measured in the context of product attributes or benefits. Customer satisfaction is influenced by the perceived quality of product and service attributes and is moderated by expectations of the product or service. The researcher must define and develop measures for each attribute that is important for customer satisfaction.

Consumer attitudes toward a product developed as a result of product information or any experience with the product, whether perceived or real.

Again, it may be meaningful to measure attitudes towards a product or service that a consumer has never used, but it is not meaningful to measure customer satisfaction when a product or service has not been used.

Cognition refers to judgment: the product was useful (or not useful); fit the situation (or did not fit); exceeded the requirements of the problem/situation (or did not exceed), or was an important part of the product experience (or was unimportant).

Judgments are often specific to the intended use application and use occasion for which the product is purchased, regardless of whether that use is correct or incorrect.

Affect and satisfaction are closely related concepts. The distinction is that satisfaction is “post-experience” and represents the emotional effect produced by the product’s quality or value.

Using this metric to measure customer satisfaction helps you to narrow down the causes of customer satisfaction levels. Unhappy customers may have a particular emotive response to products and services, rather than quality being the issue, for example.

4. Intentions to Repurchase Measurements (Behavioural Measures)

When wording questions about future or hypothetical behavior, consumers often indicate that “purchasing this product would be a good choice” or “I would be glad to purchase this product.” Behavioral measures also reflect the consumer’s past experience with customer service representatives.

Customer satisfaction can influence other post-purchase/post-experience actions like communicating to others through word of mouth and social networks.

Additional post-experience actions might reflect heightened levels of product involvement that in turn result in an increased search for the product or information, reduced trial of alternative products, and even changes in preferences for shopping locations and choice behavior.

How to use these metrics to develop customers satisfaction KPIs

Measuring customer satisfaction to gather your customer feedback , illuminate the risk of customer churn , and discern loyal customers is useful, particularly over time.

However, it is better to measure customer satisfaction with particular goals in mind. By having scores you’re aiming to meet, whether that is an internal or industry benchmark, you’re able to track your progress over time and react to how you’re doing. If your actions aren’t improving your CSAT score, you might need to re-evaluate where you’re going wrong.

So how do you set a realistic goal for your customer satisfaction score that can act as your KPI?

Improve on your past customer satisfaction score

The most obvious answer is to consistently be improving customer satisfaction feedback. Taking an initial score as a benchmark and taking stock at regular intervals will help to not only measure customer satisfaction over time but to constantly improve your service. Your score might refer to one part of the customer journey – for example, ordering a new car, or picking it up. Try to figure out what is causing the scores you’re receiving – speak to customers, product teams, frontline staff – all of them have useful insights to help you improve. Of course, customer satisfaction will continue to change and evolve and you should treat it as such.

Just because your score is high doesn’t mean it will stay that way – constantly look to improve customer satisfaction! Customer expectations will flux and evolve, and your efforts to create happy customers will need to follow suit.

Take a look at the competition

Your competition will almost certainly be measuring customer satisfaction. Understanding – to whatever extent you can – where you stand in comparison to your competitors will help you to set yourself customer satisfaction goals for the future. They are likely seeing the importance of customer satisfaction – so don’t get left behind.

Judge by industry benchmarks

Your industry will almost certainly have customer satisfaction benchmarks that will provide you with a solid guideline for measuring customer satisfaction. If you’re not meeting your industry’s baseline, then it’s likely that your customer experience is falling short of the expectations of your consumer base.

How to measure customer satisfaction for increased performance

You understand each customer satisfaction metric you need to score – but how do you actively gather your data on the customer experience? What are the best practices for gathering customer satisfaction information, and once you have it, what do you do with it?

Here are ways of measuring customer satisfaction for more happy customers and business growth, as well as recommendations for best practice:

Use agile customer satisfaction surveys to gauge success and take action

Gathering customer satisfaction data and developing KPIs is an important process, but measuring customer satisfaction is often seen as a rote exercise to complete.

A customer satisfaction survey is a useful tool in a brand’s arsenal for gauging success, but it is often seen as a “must-do” action rather than a useful tool. Instead, to prioritize customer success, brands need to develop an agile, adaptable approach to customer surveys.

Developing a system of delivering customer surveys that is agile and well-targeted will help you to not only take the pulse of customer sentiment , but it will also help to create targeted actionable insights on an ongoing basis.

A quarterly or an annual measurement will only provide you with a snapshot of customer success. It won’t help you to measure the reaction to a new launch, or the integration of a new system. It also won’t help you to narrow down whether overall customer sentiment has changed, or whether specific actions you’re taking have had an effect.

Collecting customer feedback in an ongoing approach will help you to see the micro-trends of customer satisfaction. You can quickly adjust your customer journey to help new customers experience the best of your brand, rather than take delayed action.

Always be listening to your customers, no matter where they are

Your customer satisfaction scores aren’t everything. Though they’re very useful, improving customer satisfaction is about understanding the underlying reasons why loyal customers and satisfied customers feel the way they do – as well as finding out what would make dissatisfied customers stay.

For example, using natural language understanding (NLU) and conversational analytics to gauge how customers are feeling in real time as they speak to you or about you allows you to see the reasons behind the scores. Is it that your customer support efforts are lacking, causing feelings of frustration? Have you provided a particularly exceptional customer experience that left customers feeling elated?

Understanding this type of customer feedback gives you more detail and background information than metrics or customer surveys can. It gives you insight into how customers feel, and that is vital when looking to increase customer satisfaction. Positive customer emotions can lead to a high customer satisfaction score and repeat customers, while failing to make customers happy can drive down customer satisfaction scores.

Taking action to improve customer satisfaction

As outlined previously in this article, there are four key metrics that you should use to help you improve customer satisfaction.

However, simply gathering this customer satisfaction data isn’t enough to help your business thrive. Narrowing down the key triggers for unhappy customers and taking action to improve customer satisfaction is the most vital part of the process.

Whether it’s poor customer service or customer frustration at a particular ordering process, finding the core causes of customer dissatisfaction – and conversely, what makes customers happy – is the right approach. Ideally, you’re completing these actions in real-time, using conversation analytics and other tools to resolve issues in the moment.

The customer satisfaction process will constantly need improvement to meet new demands and to avoid stagnation in a highly competitive market.

For example, this diagram shows a potential customer satisfaction process improvement cycle:

Here, customer follow-ups and customer satisfaction surveys are a fundamental part of the development of customer experience. At each stage of the customer interaction, gathering customer data and formulating a response is a given part of the process – meaning your customers’ satisfaction is never left to chance.

Your internal process should include a number of stages that will form an understanding of  customer sentiment and take appropriate action :

1. Customer satisfaction data gathering

Listen to what your customers are saying on a rolling basis. This data can be gathered effectively through customer satisfaction surveys , but it can be bolstered by social listening and unsolicited customer feedback (customer lifetime value, etc). Conversational analytics can be used to analyze customer emotion, sentiment and intent in real time, no matter where the conversations are being had or with whom.

Often, a customer satisfaction survey will return insights at the extremes, such as highly negative feedback and a very positive review. Customer interactions at particular points in the customer service journey (such as customer service conversations) may also generate more extreme results. Gathering further data, particularly in real time, and collating it all within one platform can help you to tease out the truth of customer satisfaction.

2. Understanding customer journey touchpoints and their effect

Knowing the particular journey your customer has experienced is important for determining touchpoint value. This is again why ongoing customer satisfaction surveys or conversational analytics can be more effective than taking a static, scheduled approach. When you track customer satisfaction across the customer journey, you’re able to take the best action, rather than applying the same approach to the pre, during and post-checkout experiences.

Once you understand how customer satisfaction is tied to particular touchpoints , you can prioritize action more effectively. Fixing issues in the moment – such as increasing customer support efforts when emotions are volatile – can go a long way to get more positive reviews and achieve customer satisfaction.

 3. Narrowing down the drivers of customers satisfaction

It’s not enough to know how your customer base feelsl – discovering the drivers of their satisfaction is key for progress. There are many deciding factors behind customer satisfaction, and they’re likely to differ between customers. Determining which drivers affect each audience segment helps you to better meet their needs and expectations.

For example, a key driver could be communication. How long has it taken for a customer to get a response? How quickly was their query resolved? Did you provide status updates throughout, and were they given on the channel they’d prefer? Customers might expect that you’ll acknowledge and resolve issues quickly – but if you’re only getting back to them a week after they reach out and they’re constantly asking you for updates, you’ll get negative customer feedback from dissatisfied customers.

4. Empowering your employees to take action

Brands need to evolve their internal processes to help drive customer satisfaction, but they also need to empower their employees to take action. Employee coaching can also help to create customer experiences that are not only satisfactory, but memorable.

Creating a culture of action – where issues are identified and closing the loop is consistently achieved – will help your employees to be proactive in their approach to making customer satisfaction important. Enable your entire company, from frontline employees to sales team to marketing and more, to see relevant insights that will improve your overall customer satisfaction.

For example, it’s no good if your customer service team is the only one seeing a disconnect between what you promise your company’s products can do and how they actually perform. Your marketing team, sales team and product teams should know if repeat issues are being flagged in customer feedback, word of mouth reviews or social media posts. Use the right tools to not only track customer satisfaction, but share key insights as well.

5. Automating your actions

Another way to ensure your employees are able to take quick, effective action is to automate the process. Rather than relying on human effort to ensure that tickets, alerts, and follow-up actions are scheduled, use technology to improve customer satisfaction at scale.

You can deliver actionable insights to the right teams at the right time automatically – meaning you’re never missing a step when it comes to addressing customer dissatisfaction. By uncovering and taking actions for problems on a micro level, your team has the time to tackle wider strategic and macro issues more effectively.

Why you should use customer satisfaction measurement tools

Learning how to measure customer satisfaction is only part of the wider customer experience picture. Customer satisfaction is complex and ever-changing, and as a result, it’s important to take frequent measurements across a range of metrics in order to get the most accurate picture possible.

The wider measurement picture

Your customer satisfaction score should always be considered among a broader picture of data, including customer effort score, Net Promoter Score (NPS), conversational analytics and more. This will help you to understand customer sentiment and customer loyalty in relation to the service you’re providing.

As mentioned, there are more ways of measuring customer satisfaction than a customer satisfaction survey. Social media monitoring, focus groups, customer retention data, and more can help you to establish why existing customers stay and why new customers might not develop their customer relationship with you.

But how do you keep track of all those customer satisfaction metrics, and how do you analyze them relative to one another to one-another and gather actionable insights?

Measure customer satisfaction with Qualtrics

As mentioned, we recommend taking an ongoing approach to customer satisfaction along with other metrics as part of a broader customer experience program .

Increase satisfaction, boost loyalty and lower customer churn by listening to what customers are saying to or about you, all the time. Using Qualtrics XM™ allows you to listen 24/7, schedule surveys, automate tickets, send actionable insights and more to ensure you’re tracking satisfaction at every part of the journey, and improving broken experiences in real-time. Use our customer service support products like XM Discover to understand how customers feel in real-time to enhance your customer satisfaction efforts.

By measuring and analyzing your customer satisfaction metrics within a single platform, you’ll not only benefit from powerful analytic tools and easy-to-interpret results, but you’ll also be able to integrate your findings with other elements of your customer experience data. But most importantly, you’ll be able to take action on your insights across the organization far more easily, resulting in more satisfied customers.

Start measuring customer satisfaction today with our free CSAT survey template

Related resources

What is csat 8 min read, customer delight 18 min read, improving customer satisfaction 11 min read, customer satisfaction 16 min read, customer satisfaction (csat) surveys 21 min read.

Customer Journey

Customer Interactions 11 min read

Customer Service

Customer Service Experience 13 min read

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Customer Experience Research: Steps, Methods, Best Practices

Have you ever wondered what sets successful businesses apart? The answer often lies in their commitment to understanding and enhancing the customer experience. How do industry leaders consistently deliver exceptional service? The key lies in strategic customer experience research.

Customer experience research is a systematic process of gathering and analyzing data to understand and evaluate the interactions between a customer and a company throughout the entire customer journey. 

It involves studying customer perceptions, expectations, and satisfaction levels to enhance and optimize the customer experience.

In this blog post, we will explore the essential steps, methods, and best practices for conducting effective customer experience research.

What is a Customer Experience Research?

Customer experience research is a systematic and strategic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data related to customers’ interactions with a brand, product, or service. The objective of this research is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the overall customer journey, perceptions, preferences, and satisfaction levels. 

Through various research methods such as customer satisfaction surveys , interviews, focus groups, and observational studies, businesses seek to uncover insights that can inform improvements in products, services, and customer interactions. 

The ultimate goal is to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the overall quality of the customer experience, contributing to the business’s long-term success. 

Importance of Customer Experience (CX) Research

The significance of customer experience (CX) research cannot be overstated, as it plays a pivotal role in various aspects of a business’s success. Here is a more detailed exploration of the importance:

Customer Retention and Loyalty Building

Customer experience research dives into understanding the intricate nuances of customer needs and expectations. Businesses can tailor their products, services, and interactions to create meaningful and positive experiences by gaining insights into what truly matters to customers. 

This, in turn, increases customer loyalty, as they feel understood and valued and are more likely to continue their association with the brand. Retaining existing customers is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones, making customer retention a key focus for sustainable business growth.

Competitive Advantage in a Crowded Market

In a fiercely competitive marketplace, where products and services may be similar, the quality of positive customer experience emerges as a powerful differentiator. 

Companies that invest in understanding their customers and consistently deliver exceptional experiences gain a distinct competitive advantage. Positive customer interactions become the brand’s trademark, setting it apart from competitors and attracting a loyal customer base.

Driving Revenue Growth through Customer Satisfaction

Satisfied customers are likely to make repeat purchases and become brand advocates. Customer experience research helps identify the touchpoints that leave a lasting positive impression, encouraging customers to choose the brand repeatedly. 

Satisfied customers are more inclined to recommend the brand to their networks, effectively becoming brand ambassadors. This word-of-mouth marketing can significantly contribute to organic growth and increased revenue streams.

Operational Efficiency and Cost Savings

CX Research provides valuable insights beyond enhancing customer satisfaction by pinpointing pain points in the customer journey. It can lead to operational improvements within the organization. 

Streamlining processes, eliminating bottlenecks, and resolving pain points can increase operational efficiency and cost savings. This dual benefit of enhancing customer experience while optimizing internal operations is a strategic advantage that can positively impact the bottom line.

Steps Customer Experience (CX) Research

Conducting practical customer experience (CX) research involves a series of well-defined steps to ensure that you gather meaningful insights that can drive improvements in your products, services, and overall customer interactions. 

Here are the key steps for conducting customer experience research:

1. Define Objectives

At the outset of any customer experience research initiative, it is imperative to outline and define the goals and objectives meticulously. These should serve as the guiding principles throughout the research process, helping to maintain focus and relevance in enhancing the overall customer experience.

2. Identify Touchpoints

To comprehensively understand the customer journey, mapping out each touchpoint where customers interact with the brand is essential. This involves a detailed exploration of various phases, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. 

Identifying these touchpoints provides a holistic view of the customer experience, highlighting crucial moments that significantly impact satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Select Metrics

Choosing the right metrics is important to measure customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall experience accurately. Metrics should align with the defined objectives and touchpoints, encompassing quantitative and qualitative aspects. 

Relevant metrics may include Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction scores, and key performance indicators (KPIs) specific to each touchpoint.

4. Collect Data

Employing a multifaceted approach, customer data is collected through various methods, such as surveys, interviews, and analytics tools. Surveys offer structured insights, interviews provide in-depth qualitative information, and analytics tools offer quantitative data on customer behavior. 

This comprehensive data collection process ensures a well-rounded understanding of customer preferences and sentiments.

5. Analyze Data

Once the data is collected, a rigorous analysis is undertaken to discern patterns, identify trends, and pinpoint areas for improvement. Advanced analytical techniques may be applied to extract actionable insights. 

This phase transforms raw data into meaningful information that can guide decision-making and strategy formulation.

6. Implement Changes

With the insights from data analysis, strategic improvements are implemented in the customer experience. 

This phase involves making necessary adjustments to processes, communication channels, or any other touchpoints identified as potential areas for enhancement. The objective is to align the customer experience more closely with the defined goals and objectives.

7. Monitor and Iterate

The customer experience journey is an evolving process that necessitates continuous monitoring. Customer feedback, both solicited and unsolicited, is consistently reviewed. 

This iterative approach allows organizations to adapt swiftly to changing customer expectations, ensuring the customer experience strategy remains dynamic and responsive. Regular reviews and refinements based on ongoing feedback contribute to the sustained improvement of the overall customer experience.

Customer Experience Research Methods

Customer experience (CX) research employs various methods to gather insights into customers’ perceptions, expectations, and interactions with a brand. The choice of methods often depends on the research’s specific goals and the business’s nature. 

Here are some common customer experience research methods:

• Structured Questionnaires: Design surveys with clear and concise questions to collect quantitative data on specific aspects of the customer experience, such as satisfaction levels, ease of use, and overall impressions.
• Scale Utilization: Implement rating scales, Likert scales, or Net Promoter Score (NPS) scales to quantify responses and measure the degree of customer satisfaction or loyalty.
• In-Depth Exploration: Conduct one-on-one or group interviews to dive deeply into customer experiences, emotions, and perceptions, allowing for a nuanced understanding of their thoughts and motivations.
• Open-Ended Questions: Open-ended questions encourage customers to express themselves freely, providing rich qualitative data beyond predefined categories.

Observation

• Ethnographic Research: Immerse researchers in the customer’s environment, whether physical or digital, to observe natural behaviors and interactions, revealing insights that may not emerge through traditional surveys or interviews.
• Task Analysis: Break down customer interactions into specific tasks to identify pain points, bottlenecks, or areas where improvements can be made.

Social Media Monitoring

• Sentiment Analysis: Employ sentiment analysis tools to gauge the overall sentiment of customer conversations on social media platforms, helping identify positive and negative trends.
• Engagement Metrics: Track engagement metrics, such as likes, shares, and comments, to understand which aspects of the customer experience resonate most with the audience.

Usability Testing

• Task-Based Testing: Design usability tests with specific tasks for participants to complete, assessing how easily they can navigate products or services.
• Iterative Testing: Conduct iterative usability testing throughout development to identify and address usability issues early on.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

• Standardized Scoring System: Use the NPS scale to categorize customers as promoters, passives, or detractors based on their likelihood to recommend the product or service.
• Follow-up Qualitative Questions: Supplement NPS surveys with open-ended questions to gather additional insights into the reasons behind customers’ scores and their suggestions for improved customer satisfaction. 

Best Practices for Customer Experience (CX) Research

Practical customer experience (CX) research requires careful planning and adherence to best practices to ensure the insights gained are meaningful and actionable. Here are some best practices for CX Research:

Customer-Centric Approach

• Understanding Customer Personas: Develop detailed customer personas to comprehend different customer segments’ diverse needs, preferences, and behaviors.
• Journey Mapping: Create comprehensive customer journey maps that outline every touchpoint, from initial awareness to post-purchase support, ensuring a holistic understanding of the customer experience.
• Empathy Building: Encourage customer service teams to adopt an empathetic mindset to see the world from the customer’s perspective and better anticipate and meet their needs.

Multi-Channel Analysis

• Integrated Data Systems: Implement integrated data systems that consolidate information from various channels, including online and offline interactions, social media, and customer support, providing a unified and comprehensive view of the customer journey.
• Omni-Channel Strategy: Develop an omni-channel strategy that ensures a seamless and consistent experience across all customer touchpoints, regardless of their chosen channel.

Regular Feedback

• Real-Time Feedback Mechanisms: Implement real-time feedback mechanisms, such as post-purchase surveys, online reviews, and social media listening, to capture immediate customer sentiments and preferences.
• Periodic Surveys: Conduct routine surveys to dive deeper into specific aspects of the customer experience, allowing for more in-depth insights into identifying evolving trends.

Employee Involvement

• Training and Awareness Programs: Provide employees with comprehensive training on the importance of customer experience and equip them with the skills to understand and respond to customer needs effectively.
• Employee Feedback Loops: Establish feedback loops where employees can share insights from customer interactions, fostering a collaborative approach to improving the overall customer experience.
• Recognition and Rewards: Recognize and reward employees who contribute positively to the customer experience, reinforcing a customer-centric culture.

Data Security

• Compliance Measures: Implement robust data security measures to ensure compliance with privacy regulations, such as GDPR or HIPAA, and build customer trust in handling sensitive information.
• Transparent Data Practices: Communicate openly with customers about data collection and usage, providing clear information on how their data is stored, protected, and utilized.

Continuous Improvement

• Agile Implementation of Findings: Adopt an agile approach to implementing research findings, allowing quick adjustments to products, services, or processes based on customer feedback.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Establish KPIs to measure the impact of changes implemented due to customer experience research, ensuring that improvements align with business goals.
• Benchmarking: Regularly benchmark against industry standards and competitors to identify areas for differentiation and innovation, fostering a commitment to continuous improvement beyond immediate customer feedback.

How QuestionPro CX Can Help in Customer Experience Research

QuestionPro is a survey and research platform that offers various tools for conducting customer experience (CX) research. It provides a range of features to help businesses gather feedback, analyze data, and make informed decisions based on customer insights.

Here’s a general overview of how QuestionPro CX can be used for customer experience research:

NPS & Churn Risk

• The NPS Survey Dashboard provides an advanced analytics platform for measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS) and predicting churn risk.
• Isolate, identify, and predict customer churn based on NPS data, allowing businesses to address issues and retain customers proactively.
• Leverage customer interactions to make informed decisions for improving products and services.

Sentiment Analysis

• Sentiment analysis helps classify text feedback as positive, negative, or neutral, offering more profound insights into the quality of interactions between customers and the organization.
• Move beyond numerical ratings to understand the emotional tone and sentiment behind customer feedback.
• Identify areas for improvement based on sentiment trends and patterns.

Advanced Dashboards

• Access customizable dashboards with various widget configurations, enabling you to tailor your dashboard to specific needs.
• Customize filters, chart types, labels, and month-tracking widgets to effectively visualize and analyze customer feedback.
• Gain a holistic view of customer experience data through visually appealing and insightful dashboards.

Workflow Setup

• CX Workflow allows you to assign and send surveys to customer segments within the same data file.
• Automate survey reminders to improve response rates and gather more comprehensive feedback.
• Streamline survey processes for efficient data collection and analysis.

Disposition Metrics

• Monitor emails sent continually to collect valuable data at every engagement point.
• Track changes in customer behavior over time and identify key touchpoints influencing customer satisfaction.
• Use disposition metrics to refine communication strategies and enhance customer engagement.

Closed Loop

• Capture the customer journey at various touchpoints in real time.
• Share feedback with different teams to foster collaboration and implement organizational improvements.
• Implement a closed-loop system to address customer issues promptly and enhance the overall customer experience.

Incorporating customer experience research into your business strategy is a proactive approach to building strong, lasting customer relationships. By following these steps, employing effective research methods, and embracing best practices, you can gain valuable insights that drive positive change and elevate the overall customer experience. 

Remember, a satisfied customer is not just a one-time buyer but a potential brand advocate who can contribute to the long-term success of your business.

QuestionPro CX empowers customer experience research through advanced NPS analytics, sentiment analysis, customizable dashboards, workflow automation, disposition metrics monitoring, and closed-loop feedback. 

This comprehensive toolset enables businesses to proactively identify issues, understand the sentiment, and continuously enhance customer interactions, ensuring a superior and informed customer experience.

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Pillars of Customer Retention in the Services Sector: Understanding the Role of Relationship Marketing, Customer Satisfaction, and Customer Loyalty

• Published: 20 May 2024

Cite this article

• Mazhar Hussain 1 ,
• Asad Javed   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4630-3595 1 ,
• Samar Hayat Khan 2 &
• Muhammad Yasir 1  

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This research aims to examine the impact of relationship marketing on customer retention, as well as the moderating role of customer loyalty and the mediating role of customer satisfaction by means of relationship marketing theory. In today’s business climate, companies of all sizes and types prioritize customer retention and acquisition. Customer retention, satisfaction, and loyalty are essential for a company’s profitability and growth, whereas building strong, long-term relationships with customers is at the core of relationship marketing. Developing trust, commitment, communication, and conflict management skills are all essential components of fostering these relationships, which ultimately result in increased customer satisfaction and retention. The study population consisted of 5276 employees working at different courier services offices across the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan. A sample size of 385 was calculated using the Krejcie and Morgan sampling formula, and data were collected through self-administered questionnaires adapted from previous studies. The data-driven results indicate a positive relationship between relationship marketing, customer satisfaction, and customer retention in the services sector of Pakistan. Additionally, customer satisfaction mediates this relationship, while customer loyalty moderates it. These results have significant implications for companies seeking to retain and satisfy their customers.

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Hussain, M., Javed, A., Khan, S.H. et al. Pillars of Customer Retention in the Services Sector: Understanding the Role of Relationship Marketing, Customer Satisfaction, and Customer Loyalty. J Knowl Econ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-024-02060-2

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23 Excellent Customer Satisfaction Survey Examples [+ Templates]

Published: May 30, 2023

Your product or service revolves around your customers and their experience.

How do you gauge their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with your products? And, how do you decide to work on a new feature if you don’t know whether the customer needs it or not?

This is where customer satisfaction surveys come in, as their results let you know exactly how your customers are feeling — how satisfied they are.

This journey of providing your customers with a positive experience starts from the moment they land on your website and extends beyond the moment they become your customer. Without question, delighting them and encouraging them to become loyal customers is a never-ending commitment. As Derek Sivers from CD Baby puts it, “Customer service is the new marketing.” And that couldn't be truer.

In this post, we’ll cover:

The Importance of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction survey questions, best practices for creating customer satisfaction surveys, customer satisfaction survey template.

• Customer Satisfaction Survey Examples

5 Free Customer Satisfaction Survey Templates

Easily measure customer satisfaction and begin to improve your customer experience.

• Net Promoter Score
• Customer Effort Score

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Customer satisfaction surveys help businesses better understand and utilize the voice of the customer to sustain growth. There are several key reasons above and beyond this overarching goal that make customer satisfaction surveys a top priority for customer centric businesses.

1. Identifying negative themes in the customer experience: By conducting customer satisfaction surveys, companies can pinpoint negative themes that customers are having and work to resolve them. This helps improve the overall customer experience and increases customer loyalty.

2. Gauging customer loyalty: These surveys give customers a chance to share feedback that yields their propensity to be a loyal customer. Companies can use this information to better retain customers.

3. I dentifying customer trends: Surveys allow companies to identify trends in customer satisfaction over time. For example, if several customers have the same complaint about a product, there may be a shift happening in the market that your business hasn't noticed yet. Acting on this feedback can keep your business ahead of the curve to not only keep existing customers, but acquire new ones who are interested in that same trend.

4. Providing a competitive advantage: Companies that regularly conduct customer satisfaction surveys and make adjustments based on feedback are likely to outperform their competitors. This is because they are better able to meet customer needs and expectations.

5. Validating business decisions: Customer opinions and feedback are two of the most essential factors that validate decisions within your business, allowing you to become more equipped to meet their specific and immediate needs instead of basing your strategy on assumptions.

6. Shaping the customer lifecycle: Their opinions also shape the customer lifecycle. If you don’t know their thoughts, you have a lower chance of retaining them, delighting them, or enticing them to make future purchases.

With all of this in mind, you get opinions and information about satisfaction levels through your customer satisfaction surveys. Without them, you’d never know how your customers were feeling, and you’d never be able to meet their needs.

• What is your level of education?
• What is your approximate annual household income?
• Where do you work and what’s your job title?
• What industry are you in?
• What’s your most important priority when (insert something related to your industry)?
• What’s your biggest roadblock when (insert something related to your product)?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your in-store experience today?
• How likely are you to recommend (insert product or service) to others?
• Rate your satisfaction with our team in resolving your issue.
• Did you feel that our team answered your inquiry promptly?
• Do you agree or disagree that your issue was effectively resolved?
• How likely are you to purchase again from us?
• How likely are you to return to our website?
• In your own words, describe how you feel about (insert company name or product here).
• How can we improve your experience with the company?
• What's working for you and why?
• What can our employees do better?
• How can our employees better support your business’s/your goals?
• How can we improve your experience with the website or the in-store location?
• Why did you choose our product over a competitor’s?
• What would be one word you’d use to describe us and why?
• May we contact you to follow up on these responses?
• In the future, would you be willing to take this survey again?
• If we were to update (insert product feature here), could we reach back out to talk about these changes?
• Can we connect you with a customer success manager via chat?
• Would you be open to discussing upgrade options for your product?
• Can we send you a list of useful resources for getting the most out of your product?
• How long have you been using the product?
• Which alternatives did you consider before purchasing the product?
• How often do you use the product or service?
• Does the product help you achieve your goals?
• What is your favorite tool or portion of the product or service?

If you want to obtain valuable feedback from your customers, then you have to ask them the right questions. Sharing information isn't always an easy task, and it's not the customer's job to provide your business with constructive criticism. Instead, it's the surveyor's responsibility to create a thought-provoking prompt that engages the participant.

Customer Feedback Questions

To get the most out of customer feedback you’ll need to make sure you’re asking the right questions. Open-ended questions are a great way to gain more thorough explanations about your customer’s experience with your brand, but they’re not the only types of questions you can ask.

If you're getting stuck on deciding what to ask your customers, here are some of the types of questions we recommend including on your customer satisfaction survey:

Product Usage

When it comes to customer success and satisfaction, your business must collect feedback about your product or service. If you don't, then it's more difficult to assess customer needs and provide effective solutions.

Finding out how satisfied your users are with your offer provides your marketing and product teams with valuable information that can be used to improve customer retention .

Some questions that you could ask in this section are:

• What would you improve if you could?
• Which product features do you consider the most valuable?
• Which product feature do you use most often in your day-to-day ?
• What points of friction have you encountered while using the product?
• If there was one new feature you could suggest, what would it be and why?

Demographics

Demographics are essential to marketing and sales teams because they make it easier for companies to segment customers into buyer personas . By grouping customers based on key characteristics, this categorization helps employees visualize their target audience. Marketing and sales teams can then use that information to pursue leads that are most likely to convert.

When asking these types of questions, be sure to embrace a proactive and inclusive approach. These questions shouldn't be mandatory, so always provide an option for customers to omit an answer. Your goal is to extract honest information, but you don't want it to come at the expense of the customer's comfort.

Here are some demographics questions that you should consider including in your next survey:

• How old are you?
• Where are you located?
• If applicable, what gender do you identify as?
• What is your employment status?
• What is your marital status and do you have children?

Psychographics

Psychographic questions dig deeper than demographic questions, uncovering information relating to your customers’ preferences, habits, behaviors, and tendencies. It’s not about who your customer is, but why they do what they do.

Psychographic questions may seem intrusive, but they’re highly valuable pieces of information that give you a glimpse into the reasons for your customer’s buying habits. They’re usually phrased concerning your industry and not specifically about your product.

These questions are instrumental in customer satisfaction surveys because you can indirectly find out how you can better serve your customers.

Here are a few questions you might ask:

• Do you prefer to shop on your phone or your laptop?
• E.g. if you’re a mortgage lender, you might ask, “What’s your most important priority when buying a home?”
• E.g. if you’ve created a recipe-sharing app, you might ask, “What’s your biggest roadblock when trying to access the best recipes online?”
• How much time do you spend on (insert social media platform you’d like to use for advertising)?
• How much does sustainability matter to you in purchasing a product?
• How do you feel about (insert product type)?
• E.g, if you sell women’s razors, you might ask, “How do you feel about women’s razors?”
• What do you dislike about (insert product type)?
• How many hours a day do you spend doing (insert something that relates to your product)?
• E.g. if you sell ergonomic car seats, you might ask, “How many hours do you spend driving?”

Satisfaction Scale

Sometimes there are aspects of your offer or business that you want feedback on, but they aren't things that your customers are actively addressing. In these cases, it helps to be direct and ask customers how they feel about these specific details.

Before you do, you'll have to determine a quantifiable way to measure their responses. Adopting a satisfaction scale section is a great way to create a consistent approach to quantifying this subjective survey feedback. A few ways that you can implement this scale are:

• A scale measuring from 1 to 10 (or another number). 1 means the customer was extremely unsatisfied and 10 means the customer was very satisfied.
• A descriptive scale that measures a customer's response from unsatisfied to satisfied. The customer is given a shortlist of responses to choose from that range from “very unsatisfied” to “very satisfied."
• A picture scale that uses images to symbolize customer satisfaction. For example, you can use happy, sad, and indifferent emojis to quickly gather customer feedback.

Example questions include:

Open-text questions are survey questions that allow the participant to write out their response within a text box. This allows users to fully express their opinions using the customer's voice instead of the company's pre-written responses.

While they can sometimes be time-consuming to analyze, these questions encourage the participant to be honest and give them the freedom to address any topic. Open-text questions can be an instrumental asset when determining the core values of your customers.

Here are open-text questions you can ask in your next survey:

• Do you have any additional comments or feedback for us?

In the last section of your survey, you'll want to include questions about the steps that'll happen after submission. These questions permit your team to follow up with the participant in the future.

This comes in handy when you roll out changes and want to get updated feedback from the same customers that were surveyed earlier. You can phrase these types of questions in a few different ways:

While measuring customer satisfaction can be tricky to manage, asking effective questions can reveal highly valuable customer insights — and the questions we’ve listed above will do the trick.

Next, we’ll go over best practices for creating customer satisfaction surveys.

• Make sure you choose the right survey tool.
• Always ask short and relevant survey questions.
• Send the surveys at the right time.
• Always A/B test your surveys.
• Thank your customers for their feedback.

Designing a customer satisfaction survey is no easy task. Luckily, there are a few best practices that will help you increase response rates and get much-needed feedback from your customers.

1. Make sure you choose the right survey tool.

Choosing the right survey tool is important because it can significantly impact the quality of your results. A good survey tool should be easy to use, customizable, and be able to provide in-depth analytics. It should also have the ability to automate survey distribution and analysis.

Without the right customer survey feedback tool , you’ll have a whole lot of data and no way to distill it or glean valuable insights from it. Choose a tool that gives you the ability to ask different types of questions, examine basic metrics such as response rates, and track customer sentiment over time.

2. Always ask short and relevant survey questions.

No one enjoys spending a lot of time answering surveys, so be sure to keep your survey questions short and to the point. Asking short and relevant survey questions is the key to earning high completion rates. Long and complex survey questions can be overwhelming and may discourage customers from providing any feedback at all.

On the other hand, shorter questions allow customers to easily comprehend what is being asked and are more likely to provide accurate responses. When asking open-ended questions, keep the minimum character count short, make the question optional, or offer an incentive.

3. Send the surveys at the right time.

Give a lot of thought to the placement of your surveys throughout the customer journey. It wouldn’t make sense to send a survey to someone who’s only just subscribed to your blog — nor would it make sense to send one year after a customer stopped doing business with you.

Sending surveys at the right time is critical to getting accurate feedback. Customers are more likely to provide feedback when they are in a position to evaluate their experience with your company.

When do you send a customer service survey? Send it after a lengthy interaction with one of your teams, a few weeks after purchase or onboarding, and a few times throughout the year to measure the customer’s happiness.

4. Always A/B test your surveys.

A/B testing is an excellent way to find out whether your surveys are as effective as they can be. Simply create two versions of the survey with minimal changes. You can change the order of the questions, the number of questions, the wording, and even the color of the buttons. (Change only one thing at a time so you can accurately measure its impact on the survey.)

By comparing the results of each version, you can determine which version yields the highest response rate and provides the most accurate feedback. This can help you refine your survey strategy and improve the overall quality of your survey data.

5. Thank your customers for their feedback.

Thanking customers for their feedback is important to show that you value their opinion and are committed to improving the customer experience. It also helps to improve customer loyalty and increases the likelihood that they will provide feedback in the future.

Whether it’s through a gift card, a discount, or simply a nice email, always thank the customer for their time, regardless of the nature of the feedback.

By thanking customers for their feedback, you signal that you take their opinions seriously and are committed to addressing their concerns. This can help you maintain strong relationships with your customers and drive long-term business success.

Ready to craft your own customer satisfaction survey? Use the template in the next section to get started.

How To Use Customer Satisfaction Survey Results

1. define customer segments..

Customer satisfaction surveys can be used to segment customers based on their preferences. With these survey results, you can tailor your approach to specific customer groups and provide more personalized experiences.

2. Track customer satisfaction over time.

Identifying changes in customer sentiment can be difficult if you don't have multiple data points over a long period of time. Regular customer satisfaction surveys can be used to track this and address issues before they become systemic problems.

3. Benchmark against competitors.

Customer satisfaction survey results can be used to benchmark your company’s performance against competitors. This way, you'll identify areas where your company may be falling short and implement changes to improve your standing in the market.

The following customer satisfaction survey template can help you get answers from your customers in one easy step. It asks one simple question: “How satisfied were you with your experience today?” If you’d like, you can add more questions to get more details from your customers.

To make a copy of this template and get 4 bonus templates, click here .

Now you’ve got a template and are ready to create your customer satisfaction survey. In need of some inspiration? Take a look at these examples we pulled from different companies.

Customer Satisfaction Survey Examples from Real Brands

We’ve covered why asking for customer feedback is important and the types of questions to include, but you still might be wondering how to put it all together. Let’s check out the customer feedback example questions below from real companies to gain insight into how to roll out a survey of your own.

HubSpot is another company that uses NPS surveys to assess customer satisfaction. This score primarily comes into play with its customer support and success teams, who can be reviewed after each new interaction.

HubSpot's engineers then use these responses to address areas in their software that could use improvement. By using this scoring system, HubSpot can attain both qualitative and quantitative data to direct its product development efforts.

What we like:

HubSpot uses its surveys to create product-level improvements, and the best part is that for customers, answering one question is an effortless way to give feedback. So it’s a win-win on both sides. When you carry out surveys, be sure to forward the feedback to the right department to address any issue that your customers brought up.

The Hilton Hotel company provides its customers overnight stays with promising customer service, upholding its century-old reputation.

To better understand what people’s stays were like, it offers a one-page survey where customers can willingly submit their feedback. It’s just a few questions long, most of which are logistical (such as where the visitor stayed and how long they stayed there for). Users then have the option of elaborating.

This seemingly simple survey from Hilton gives unhappy guests an easy, friction-free opportunity to submit feedback about their recent stay. It’s hosted on a public URL that guests can access without needing to get through any barriers. The questions are simple and easy to answer.

Uber has two target audiences — the drivers and the passengers — and it does a great job collecting opinions and reviews from both. The passengers give ratings after every ride, and the drivers rate the passengers as well.

This survey makes it fair and transparent for both the driver and the passenger, and these ratings affect both parties’ reputation as well. If a passenger has a lower rating, the driver has the authority to decline the booking. If you run a business with two target audiences, create a survey for both.

Netflix provides its customers with curated entertainment recommendations that would not be possible unless they had a great understanding of customer satisfaction.

Overall, Netflix brings out its A-game when it comes to customer experience. With its recommendation system, it is as customer-friendly as one can get. Netflix studies the behavior of all of its customers and recommends movies and shows per their ratings, likes and dislikes, or just what they have been watching. It also collects feedback periodically to improve its offerings.

In this survey, Netflix tries to better understand users’ behaviors and preferences. This shows that even if you dominate the market like Netflix does , you shouldn’t stop there. Continue collecting feedback from your customers and users, and don’t be afraid to get granular to understand their needs.

Slack is a business messaging app that helps professionals connect from anywhere. It bases its product development entirely on customer feedback.

In fact, customer feedback is at the epicenter of its efforts. For instance, there's a command within the application where users can send feedback to the Slack team, or just tell them what features the users would like to have. The co-founders read all the user feedback and made sure they responded to every ticket raised.

In the email above, Slack invites the user to take a survey to improve its offering. The email is short and to the point.

Slack’s commitment to collecting customer feedback is commendable, and so are its invitations to take the survey. In the above example, Slack makes the survey seem more exclusive by mentioning that it was only sent to a few people. Don’t be afraid to curate a short list of customers to send the survey to, especially if it seems like those customers would be more likely to answer.

Drift provides businesses with a revenue acceleration platform that caters to a buyer-centric world. The above survey asks one simple question: “How likely are you to recommend Drift to a friend or colleague?” Sometimes, that’s really all you need.

Drift sends Net Promoter Score®, or NPS, surveys. NPS is a critical SaaS metric used to measure customer satisfaction. The only question it asks is whether the customer is likely to recommend the business to a friend or colleague — and this can be enough of an indicator of a customer’s happiness with your brand.

Paytm has always taken customer opinions into account and has taken serious steps to improve the customer experience.

Taking customer experience and security to another level, Paytm has created a “ bug bounty ” to catch fraudulent merchants. If customers accidentally buy fake movie tickets through the platform, for example, Paytm allows them to get refunds on their bookings.

Paytm gives users the opportunity to tangibly improve the product by giving them the ability to report bugs directly on the app. Plus, it not only collects customer feedback, it acts on it, too, by fixing those bugs. Overall, Paytm provides plenty of avenues for turning an unhappy customer into a happy one.

Another example of a product that provides great customer service is Skype, a business recognized for its telecommunication technology. If you call people using Skype, you know that it asks for feedback after every call. But more than that, it believes in immediately solving customers’ problems.

In the survey above, Skype asks for feedback on the quality of the call. It’s just three questions long, and when it comes to surveys, the shorter, the better. It also gives users the ability to quickly answer the questions by offering multiple choices instead of letting them write out an answer (though they have that option, too).

Skype gets straight to the point in this simple three-question customer satisfaction survey. Even more, it keeps the focus on the product by only asking about “Audio Issues” and “Video Issues.” If you sell a product where users might run into issues, consider asking targeted product performance questions, then leave a blank text box for users to elaborate.

Amazon, one of the most popular eCommerce websites in the globe, exceeds user expectations by collecting all kinds of information. When you contact its customer service department, it sends you a customer feedback survey that asks three questions about your interaction:

• Please rate the service provided by the Amazon representative.
• Please rate how well you could understand the Amazon representative.
• Anything else to add?

But Amazon doesn’t stop there. It makes information easily accessible in a knowledge base , so users can find answers and troubleshoot on their own. This reduces the chances of incorrect purchases, which can make all the difference in a customer's buying decisions.

Amazon’s customer satisfaction survey is a great way to gauge how happy the customer is after getting help from the customer service team. It’s important because customers only reach out when they’re unhappy — so sending a survey like this one helps Amazon understand whether the customer is happy again. Like Amazon, be sure to send surveys after your customers interact with your service team.

10. Twitter

Zomato is one of the largest food delivery and review websites in the world, and its success can be largely attributed to customer satisfaction.

Another product with two types of audiences — restaurants and hungry diners — Zomato puts both of their needs and expectations into consideration. Every restaurant gets rated on the food, and every buyer gets to rate the restaurants. In the above survey, it asks for feedback with one simple statement:

“Tell us what you love about the app, or what we could be doing better.”

Then it allows users to free-write their thoughts.

This open-ended survey format is perfect for websites and apps. You would ideally always include the option to give feedback in a pop-up button, banner, or tab that users can click. That way, you don’t need to contact users first; they can voluntarily submit feedback to you.

12. Greyhound

H&R Block Advisors sent another well-timed customer satisfaction survey — just after “Tax Season” in the U.S.

For accountants and financial advisors, the months before the tax filing deadline are the busiest, so a prompt survey after filing with H&R Block helps the company gauge how many returning customers it can expect.

H&R Block Advisors smartly sends the survey at a busy time for its business. If your business also has busy periods or periods where people are more interested in your products, send surveys during those time ranges to optimize the amount of responses you receive. You’ll get more submissions simply because you have more customers during those months.

Measuring sentiment, in addition to satisfaction, is important when surveying your customers.

In this survey, GEICO asks about customer sentiment regarding a specific interaction during the purchase process — and the general feeling of the experience as well. In this way, GEICO can smooth out specific roadblocks throughout the customer journey, and get an in-the-moment snapshot of its wider customer sentiment.

GEICO’s example is simple, short, and to-the-point. It only has three questions and gives an additional avenue for contacting GEICO’s customer service team. Always give respondents a second option for submitting feedback or contacting your team to better gauge how satisfied they are with your brand.

16. Taco Bell

HubSpot for WordPress is a plugin that adds CRM functionalities, forms, and live chat to WordPress websites. In this survey, HubSpot aims to find out whether the plugin has been working as designed. It has just one simple request: “Rate your experience using HubSpot for WordPress.”

We recommend using this format for product-related surveys — specifically those that have to do with a single specific feature. For instance, if you recently rolled out a new update, this single-question survey can help you measure your customers’ opinions about the new addition to their software or product.

The five-star scale is simple to understand and makes it easy to answer, because all the user has to do is provide a star rating. The users can also answer straight in their email, instead of needing to access an external survey link. Sometimes, you don’t need to include complicated questions and options to create an effective customer satisfaction survey.

19. McDonald's

McDonalds is a fast food company that knows exactly how to cater to its customers, even deploying different strategies in countries across the world. One way it tracks success is through incentivized feedback.

One feature that stood out on this McDonald's survey was the labeled receipt on the right-hand side. The element is highlighted so participants know exactly what McDonald's is asking them about in the corresponding survey. Not only does this ensure McDonald's gets accurate information from the survey, but it also reduces any friction customers may have if they're unsure or confused about a question.

20. Home Depot

When customers go to hardware stores, they’re looking for a business that will satisfy their home renovation needs, and Home Depot delivers just that. It collects feedback from customers to improve its offerings and provide better service moving forward.

To entice participants to take the survey, Home Depot offers a $5,000 Home Depot gift card. Offering a sweepstakes entry up-front is a great way to ensure that you get feedback from customers who are more likely to purchase from you again. If you weren’t interested in Home Depot, you wouldn’t take a $5,000 gift card. Right away, you get to gauge the customer’s continuing interest in your business.

21. INBOUND

INBOUND is a yearly experience that brings together professionals and business leaders who are interested in growing their company the inbound way. To improve the experience every year, INBOUND asks for feedback — but first, it thanks attendees for coming and provides a link to the year’s recorded content.

This more easily compels the recipient to continue engaging with INBOUND. Even if they don’t answer the survey at the moment, they may come back later if they watch a recording of an INBOUND talk.

INBOUND’s example is great because it not only thanks attendees for attending, it also provides value by providing a link to the content library. Additionally, it gives respondents alternative ways to reach the INBOUND team. In your surveys, thank your customers for their business and provide additional value so they continue engaging with your brand.

Etsy’s customer satisfaction survey takes a slightly different approach. Rather than sending the survey from a customer service rep’s email, it is sent from Etsy’s research team instead. Even more, a picture of the research team member is included at the end, making it easy to forge a human connection with the person who might actually read the survey responses.

Once you click on the link, you’re taken to an extensive survey that asks a multitude of questions. While shorter surveys are typically better, Etsy establishes the right expectations by sending the survey from the research team. This gives you the impression that the survey will be long and extensive, because it’s being used for research purposes.

Etsy’s example is a winner because it opens with a personal greeting from one of Etsy’s team members. Even if the email was mass-sent, that greeting immediately makes it feel more personal, and the picture of the Etsy staff member only personalizes it further. Lastly, if you plan to send a long survey, feel free to call it “research” to establish the right expectations.

23. Autonomous NYC

Sometimes, you don’t need a fancily designed email to ask for feedback. Instead, you can send an email just like Autonomous NYC’s. And if you don’t feel comfortable including a picture of yourself like in the Etsy example, you can simply include your first name to give the survey request a more personal feel.

Once you click on the link, you’re taken to a 2-page Google Form survey that measures the user’s happiness with their experience on Autonomous NYC’s website. The survey is clear, succinct, and easy to fill out.

Autonomous NYC’s customer satisfaction survey hits all the right notes. It’s short, but not so short that Autonomous NYC’s team can’t glean any insights. It also makes most questions optional, so that users have the choice to walk away after answering two questions. Give the same option to your survey recipients by making at least a few of the questions optional.

Get More Customer Feedback to Grow Your Business

Knowing how your customers feel about you is instrumental in growing your business. Use customer feedback surveys to collect information that can create lasting and positive changes in your company. When you know how your customer feels, you can make decisions that lead to higher revenue and increased customer retention, empowering you to grow better.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in November 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Payers target current challenges and competitiveness with 2025 tech investment surge, reveals black book research survey.

More Than 5,000 Health Plan IT Clients Evaluate 400 Software Firms, Advisors, and Service Vendors Across 35 Operational Areas in 15th Annual Payer Survey on Customer Experience and User Satisfaction

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / May 30, 2024 / In preparation for the upcoming budget year, health plans are bracing for a substantial 23% uptick in their IT and services spending, according to the Q1-Q2 polling which included two-thirds of all U.S. payers. Their strategic focus lies in bolstering investments across several critical areas, notably data analytics, outsourcing, cybersecurity, and AI solutions.

Black Book Research has revealed the leading IT and outsourcing companies in various market segments, as determined by the industry's most extensive survey of managed care organizations. Renowned for its unbiased, crowdsourced competitive intelligence and buyer opinion insights, Black Book has announced the 2024 awards for the highest user experience and client satisfaction in health plan technology and outsourcing.

"This proactive approach underscores the commitment of health plans to harness cutting-edge technologies to enhance operational efficiency and meet evolving industry demands," said Doug Brown, President of Black Book.

Black Book is dedicated to pioneering research, ensuring customer satisfaction, and analyzing strategic buyer issues in the managed care marketplace without vendor influence or financial affiliations in exchange for evaluations. "It's an exciting time at Black Book as we introduce unparalleled user experience surveying tools, the industry's most comprehensive client satisfaction database, innovative reporting features, and a knowledge management system that allows customers to share relevant, informed feedback in real time," said Brown.

More than 5,200 health plan users participated in the crowdsourced polling from January to May this year. Vendors were evaluated on 18 key performance indicators relevant to payers including data security measures, customer support, best-of-breed technologies, and product implementations.

"If you aim to curate a selection of the top-performing payer software, outsourcing services, and advisory firms for your health plan, this is the definitive list for 2024," asserted Brown. "Rated exclusively by health plan users, these vendors and consultants have demonstrated these vendors' ROI, reliability, trustworthiness, and innovation within the industry."

Detailed methodology and category ratings are available at Black Book Market Research .

The top client-rated 2024 vendors serving the payer industry are:

PAYER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & NLP-ENABLED SOLUTIONS

HEALTHWORKS AI

END-TO-END PROVIDER DATA MANAGEMENT & CREDENTIALLING SOLUTIONS

MEMBER WELLNESS OUTREACH & CONSUMER EDUCATION SOLUTIONS

SYRA HEALTH

CARE MANAGEMENT & COORDINATION SOLUTIONS

INFOMC INCEDO CARE MANAGEMENT

PAYER QUALITY MANAGEMENT, ANALTYICS & REPORTING SOLUTIONS

PAYER IT CONSULTANTS

WEST MONROE PARTNERS

EMPLOYER-SPONSORED HEALTHCARE SOLUTIONS

MARATHON HEALTH

PAYER RISK ADJUSTMENT SOLUTIONS

PAYER VALUE-BASED CARE PERFORMANCE & REPORTING SOLUTIONS

QUEST ANALYTICS

HEALTH PLAN DATA INTEGRATION, EXCHANGE & TRANSFORMATION PLATFORMS

COMMERCIAL PLANS CLAIMS ADMINISTRATION PLATFORMS

VBA SOFTWARE PRIME

PAYER IT SYSTEM INTEGRATION INITIATIVES

PROVIDER-SPONSORED HEALTH PLAN CLAIMS SOLUTIONS

EPIC TAPESTRY

MEMBER EXPERIENCE & COMMUNICATION PORTALS

PAYER ENTERPRISE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CONSULTING & SOLUTIONS

ABACUS INSIGHTS

END-TO-END PAYER POPULATION HEALTH MANAGEMENT SUPPORT SOLUTIONS

PRICE TRANSPERANCY & MEMBER PAYMENT ESTIMATE SOLUTIONS

HEALTHCARE DATA ANALYTICS (HDA)

PAYER CLOUD PLATFORM

PAYER TELEHEALTH & VIRTUAL CARE SOLUTIONS

BEST BUY HEALTH

PAYER MEMBER SAFETY, PBM & PHARMACY SOLUTIONS

SURESCRIPTS

COMPLIANCE, FRAUD & ABUSE SOLUTIONS

HEALTH EQUITY & PAYER SDOH STRATEGY SOLUTIONS

STANSON HEALTH

PAYER DATA VALIDATION & ACCURACY SOLUTIONS

ATLAS SYSTEMS PRIME

PAYER CONTRACT MANAGEMENT & PROVIDER BENCHMARKING

RIVET HEALTH

PRIOR AUTHORIZATION SOLUTIONS

COHERE HEALTH

PAYER BUSINESS PROCESS OUTSOURICNG: MEMBER SERVICES INTERFACE & CONSUMER EXPERIENCE SOLUTIONS

PAYER IT OUTSOURCING: INFRASTRUCTURE & CORE TECHNOLOGY MODERNIZATION SOLUTIONS

PAYER IT OUTSOURCING: APPLICATIONS DEVELOPMENT & MOBILE HEALTH SOLUTIONS

PAYER VALUE-BASED CARE, NETWORK DEVELOPMENT & CONTRACTING SERVICES CONSULTING

PAYER IT & SYSTEMS TRANSFORMATION CONSULTING

FTI CONSULTING

END-TO-END REVENUE CYCLE MANAGEMENT OUTSOURCING

COGNIZANT TRIZETTO

PAYER BPOL FRONT END CLAIMS SERVICES

EXL SERVICE

UTILIZATION MANAGEMENT & ANALYTICS OUTSOURCING

CLEARINGHOUSE ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS

PAYER CLAIMS OUTSOURCING BPO: MIDDLE & BACK BUSINESS OFFICE SOLUTIONS

About Black Book

Black Book™, its founder, management, and staff do not hold any financial interest in the vendors covered in its satisfaction surveys. Black Book publishes satisfaction and client experience rankings before notifying vendors of the results and does not charge participation, review, inclusion or consultation fees, as it directly polls vendors' clients.

Since 2010, Black Book has polled over 2.5 million users on vendor satisfaction and industry trends in healthcare software, technology, and outsourcing globally. It has earned a reputation for independent, unbiased crowdsourced surveying, expanding to IT, clinical, operations, and financial professionals, as well as physician practice administrators, nurses, consultants, executives, health plans, and hospital IT managers.

Contact Information

Press Office [email protected] 8008637590

SOURCE: Black Book Research

View the original press release on newswire.com.