Measuring Customer Satisfaction: Four Essential Evaluation Scales
Written by:
Daniela Araújo
It’s often said that "the customer is always right," but nowadays, customers are more demanding than ever. While it’s true that more and more companies are increasingly committed to ensuring customer satisfaction.
By knowing what customers think and what they need, companies can focus on their strengths and address their weaknesses in terms of products, services, and customer experience (CX).
This article walks you through four evaluation scales that give you key insights into your customer satisfaction and are easy to implement using contact center software.
How to Measure Customer Satisfaction
Before selecting a scale that fits your business, your customers, and the customer service methods you offer, you need to know what data collection methods are available.
We will introduce you to the current evaluation methods, their pros and cons, and how you can use them.
Quantitative Methods
Binary Answers
This method gathers information from simple “Yes” or “No” answers to questions like “Were you satisfied with our service?” and “Would you recommend our service to a friend or family member?” It is by far the fastest evaluation method.
The main advantages of this method are the speed of customer responses and the ease of analysis for organizations. However, it also has a major disadvantage: it provides limited data. Because you can only know if the customer was satisfied or dissatisfied, you can’t understand why.
Rating Scales
For a more detailed view, customer satisfaction can be assessed using a numerical scale. For example, you can ask: “On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied were you with our service?” Each value is associated with a specific degree of satisfaction, where 1 represents “very dissatisfied” and 5 is “very satisfied.”
Unlike binary answers, this method gives a more detailed picture of customer satisfaction. However, it also requires more response time and data analysis.
Qualitative Methods
Qualitative Classifications
Qualitative methods allow you to assess customer satisfaction using responses such as “very satisfied,” “satisfied,” “neutral,” “dissatisfied,” and “very dissatisfied.” For example, “Were you satisfied with our service?” makes assessing the various degrees of satisfaction easier.
As you can see, this method’s main advantage is that it captures the breadth of customer opinions. However, this method requires additional effort to interpret the data because of the subjectivity of the responses.
Descriptive Answers
With this method, you measure customer satisfaction using open-ended questions such as “What motivated you to choose our service?” This allows customers to share their in-depth opinions and feedback.
This method provides detailed insights into the customer experience. However, it’s the most time-consuming method in response and analysis because it requires customers to provide more detail and greater care in interpreting the answers.
Emojis
Driven by technology and digitalization, this scale uses emojis and infographics to make feedback more visually appealing and interactive, especially in online forms.
While emojis are easy to use, the analysis can be very subjective. It’s also important to remember that the use of emojis depends on a number of factors, such as the type of customer and the context of the communication.
How can these methods be applied in practice to measure customer satisfaction?
Now that you know what methods are available, we want to help you simplify the practice. In the context of the Contact Center and Customer Experience, here are some recognized scales used worldwide used around the world to measure customer satisfaction.
Net Promoter Score (NPS):
As Hubspot points out, NPS is a very important metric for the success of every business, that measures a customer’s willingness to recommend a company to others. It asks the simple question, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our products or services to friends or family?” Then, the customer selects the value that best suits them.
Customers are then placed into three groups:
- Promoters (those who gave a score of 9 or 10)
- Neutrals (those who gave a score of 7 or 8)
- Detractors (those who gave a score below 6).
Monitoring this metric is essential to a company’s success because it allows strategies to be defined that can turn detractors into promoters and strengthen customer relationships over time.
Likert Scale
This scale is one of the most widely used tools because of its simplicity and effectiveness. With this method, customers indicate their degree of agreement with a statement ranging from “totally disagree” to “totally agree.”
Example Questions:
- “I’m satisfied with the response time.”
- “The support team was helpful and efficient.“
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score
CSAT scores reveal customers’ satisfaction with a particular product or service, usually on a scale from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10.
Example Questions:
- “How satisfied are you with the service you received today?”
- “How helpful and efficient was the support team?”
4. Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES measures the effort required by customers to solve a problem or obtain a specific service. A customer’s effort is measured on a scale from “very difficult” to “very easy.”
Example Questions:
- “How easy was it to solve your problem today?”
- “How easy was it to navigate our website to find what you needed?”
GoContact can help you measure customer satisfaction!
Now that you know the tools available to evaluate customer satisfaction, it’s time to implement them. With a cloud contact center, such as GoContact, you can easily implement these evaluation scales into your service channels. Collecting feedback is fast and efficient, whether via email, chat, social media, or after voice interactions with customers, technologies such as DTMF or IVR can be used to gather feedback faster and more efficiently.
We can help you collect valuable feedback to continually improve your services. Are you ready to use data to make strategic decisions, transform your customer experience, and generate more satisfied customers?
If the answer is yes, talk to us now and find out how we can help you!
Share
