Keep Them Happy: How to Make Your Customer Satisfaction Scores Skyrocket

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Step 1: Assess Whether You’re Delivering on Your Promises

Customer satisfaction is a tricky concept to measure because there are a number of reasons why a person may feel happy or unhappy about a purchase. You may have a great product or service, but your customers will feel frustrated if they’re dealing with long hold times for support.

One way to uncover more nuance is to reframe how you quantify happiness. Instead of looking at a composite score, ask yourself the more fundamental business question, “Are we delivering on the promises we make?”

In the B2B and SaaS world, there are generally three focus areas that contribute to long-term customer success:

• Whether your company delivers on promises made during sales pitches
• If your products and services help your customers achieve their goals
• Whether your customers are receiving the ongoing support that they need for success with your company

You need to be able to measure a concept as abstract as a promise. And you have to accurately capture the dimensions above. To accomplish these goals, ask three very distinct families of questions in your satisfaction surveys. Have your customers rate, on a scale from 1-10:

• Help desk quality
• Promises from your sales team
• Performance of your products and services

With this perspective, you’ll have opinion-based, actionable metrics. If you see that you rank low based on promises from your sales team, you know you need to adjust your messaging or make changes to your product. Should satisfaction scores about your help desk fall below 7, you may decide to create more self-serve options.

By breaking up your customer satisfaction scores into their different components, you’ll be able to see what’s working well and what isn’t—and focus on the right improvement drivers as a result.

Step 2: Read Between the Lines

Opinion surveys are valuable for answering tough-business questions head on. But they’re also prone to a well-studied phenomenon called response bias—the tendency for survey respondents to exaggerate answers or report upon what they think they want survey administrators to hear. The best way to counteract response bias is to figure out what your customers aren’t telling you. That’s where the magic of analytics enters the picture.

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Most likely, you’re already collecting a treasure trove of information about your audiences. Between your Google Analytics account and your CRM, you’re monitoring key actions they’re taking, as well as points of friction that may keep them from accomplishing their goals.

Just as you did in the first step, make sure you focus on the right metrics. Here are a few ideas to spark your data collection and analytics process:

• The amount of time your customers spend on hold with your support reps
• The number of support articles your audience reads per month
• Time spent with each support article
• Time to resolution
• Number of calls required until the customer achieves a resolution
• Satisfaction after calls with support agents

Put yourself in each customer’s shoes. What have been your favourite support experiences? What have been your least favourite? Focus on these two questions to determine exactly what you should be measuring.

Step 3: Cover Your Bases

When it comes to customer satisfaction, you need more than a one-size-fits-all approach. Most likely, your users, audiences, and partners are engaging with your brand through multiple channels. In measuring customer satisfaction, make sure you cover your bases to assess every potential touch point with your business.

• In person: Make sure that you check in with and measure customer success at the right frequency. Administer an opinion survey to collect feedback.
• Phone: Determine whether you’re reaching out to your customers at the right frequency while ensuring that you’re spending discussion time efficiently. Administer an opinion survey and collect data between the lines by measuring average wait times and using voice-based analytics to measure key phrases like “it works” and “awesome.”
• Social media: Ensure that you respond to customer questions quickly and that you’re redirecting them to the right channels. Also make sure you’re presenting the right public-facing persona as a company that is helpful, transparent, and takes customer concerns seriously. Collect data around sentiment and focus on the time it takes to answer questions.
• Your website: Make it easy for your customers to reach out with their questions, comments, and concerns. Run a mix of usability tests and opinion surveys to make sure customer success resources are easy to access. Use your web analytics to determine how much time audiences are spending with your content and whether they demonstrate any browsing patterns.

Focus on each channel individually so you can create a complete customer satisfaction picture and identify clear areas of improvement. Pay attention to a mix of what your customers are and aren’t telling you.

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Step 4: Mind the Gaps

The beauty of data is that it gets better over time. Statistics is a blend of art and science, which means there’s a degree of subjectivity (and human error) in the metrics that you’re collecting. As you continue to measure the performance of your customer satisfaction programmes, you’ll start asking even more questions. In some cases, it may be impossible to answer these questions quantitatively based on the systems you’ve set up. Before changing your analytics strategy entirely, focus on a few non-quantitative methods including:

• Conduct in-depth customer discovery sessions on the phone or in person
• Actively ask customers to share feedback around your support articles
• Ask for feedback within your product
• Include open-ended response categories on all of your satisfaction surveys

The key is to give your customers an opportunity to express themselves in an unstructured way. This perspective helps you determine what details—and opportunities to improve your customer success process—could be slipping through the cracks. Remember the golden rule of research: You don’t know what you don’t know. So don’t make assumptions. Find the answers you need instead.

The beauty of this process is that it sets you up to identify actionable areas of improvement. Look for changes over time and pinpoint specific steps that you can take to better support your customers. Always question your metrics and find ways to iterate upon your KPIs. Your data should open up important discussions and identify clear areas for strategic improvement. Treat your analytics as living, breathing assets, and your customer satisfaction scores will skyrocket.