This is a guest post by Jakub Slámka, CMO at Nicereply
As customer service professionals, we’re in the business of making sure our customers get the highest quality support. We strive to help them succeed with the highest caliber guidance we can provide, and to solve their problems with excellent solutions and service. When we do that, it feels good.
To create long term relationships with your customers, you need to understand how and why they act the way they do. There are three surveys that work really well for this: Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter Survey, and Customer Effort Score. All of them involve surveying customers to get their opinion, but they ask different questions to find out different things.
Let’s break them down the Simon Sinek way so you know exactly Why, How, and What to measure when it comes to customer service quality.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is most often used to measure customer’s feelings about a specific interaction with your support team. It can also refer to how happy a customer is generally, though in the customer service industry it usually refers to an agent or a customer support team.
WHY should you measure CSAT?
Measuring customer satisfaction means having a better idea of what works to keep customers satisfied – and what leaves them unhappy. This way you’ll know what to keep up and what to fix. You’ll also be able to gauge performance of not just support generally, but specific teams and individuals as well.
HOW do you measure CSAT?
Customers will receive a survey asking if they were happy or satisfied with the service they received, which they can respond positively or negatively to. The customer chooses their response on a scale from bad (or not satisfied) to good (or satisfied). To calculate the CSAT score, subtract the % of customers who were unhappy from 100%.
WHAT does a CSAT survey look like?
You can set your CSAT survey in one of two different ways. Either you can send out an email with a survey after a ticket is closed, or you can measure it in every email interaction with your customers in the form of “instant ratings”. Survey itself can have many different looks. Nicereply CSAT survey usually looks like 3 smileys portraying different emotions, 2 hand with fingers facing upward or downwards or a scale of 10 stars.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) was specifically developed to measure loyalty and to provide you with feedback about how well your products are received. This metric will tell you, how likely your customers will recommend your services or products.
WHY should you measure NPS?
NPS brings a simple solution to finding out who is your loyal customer and transform unhappy clients into satisfied promoters. You can use NPS to enhance your customer service, but it can also be used by your marketing department to gauge your customers feeling toward your product.
How do you measure NPS?
NPS is usually measured via a regular survey (bi-monthly, yearly etc…). In this survey, customers are asked the above question “How likely are you to recommend *|COMPANY|* to a friend or colleague?” and they respond on a scale from 1 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely).
If a customer answers lower than 6, they are a detractor. If they respond 9 or higher, they are a promoter. Customers responding 7-8 are passives.
NPS is calculated by subtracting the % of customers who replied as detractors from the % of customers who answered as promoters. NPS scores are not a percentage and range from -100 (very bad) to +100 (very good).
WHAT does an NPS survey look like?
Due to it being based on a research by Bain & Co, NPS survey will always look the same—a scale from 0 to 10. The question itself can vary slightly. One such example could be a question “On a scale from 1-10, how likely are you to recommend this organization as a good place to work?”—this is also known as Employee Net Promoter Score.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score is a highly specific measure of how much work your customer felt they had to do to solve an issue. Support teams using CES are able to find and eliminate friction points that cause high-effort experiences.
WHY should you measure CES?
Imagine having a problem you need to solve. Now imagine you have to jump through several hoops and switch multiple channels to get hold of someone willing to help you fix it. Even though this support agent might be “super nice”, there’s a big chance you won’t ever want to go through the same experience again.
The idea of CES is that customers enjoy doing business with companies, that are easy to work with. It means, that CES measure the amount of effort customers were experiencing with your company as a whole.
HOW do you measure CES?
CES is often sent as part of a post-service survey and it’s measured by surveying customers after the resolution of their customer service conversation (usually 24 hours after a ticket is closed).
Similar to the NPS before, customers are asked to rate one simple statement: “The *|COMPANY|* made it easy for me to handle my issue.” a standard 1(low) – 7(high) scale whether they agree or disagree with the statement.
Your CES will then be the averages of these ratings, although we recommend to look not just at your average score, but at their distribution as well. Afterall, if your scores are bunch of 7s and 1s, it still means your experience is confusing a lot of people.
WHAT does a CES survey look like?
Being based off of a research paper by CEB, CES survey will always ask the same question. Original CES used a scale of 5 different answers, while updated CES 2.0 uses a scale of 7.
Measure, Manage, and Improve
As the old saying goes, “Whatever gets measured gets managed.” Measuring quality and using what you learn to better meet customer expectations is what will propel your efforts to truly serve your customers and drive your business forward.
Try Nicereply for Kustomer for free and measure any and all of these metrics to get more feedback out of your customer interactions.
Jakub Slámka is CMO a
t Nicereply.
