10 Key Customer Satisfaction Measures

There are even some that suggest measuring customer satisfaction is as simple as asking customers the right questions (they’re not entirely wrong, find out more here).

With so much information overload, it’s perfectly normal to feel overwhelmed with keeping tabs on customer satisfaction.

This is why we’ve created this list of ten key customer satisfaction measures. Focusing on just one will help you on your journey to better customer satisfaction. But no organization is the same, and some measures might make more sense to you than others.

Our goal? To stop analysis paralysis, give you a sense of direction, and get you up and running right after you’re done with this article.

Let’s get to it.

The tools to measure customer satisfaction

You can’t start measuring without customer feedback data. At the same time, no audience is the same. They might be at the same physical location, or spread out across the globe. Perhaps they’re all online, or they interact with you mostly face-to-face. For every type of audience, there is a feedback collector that best fits their customer journey.

Smiley terminals

You’ve probably seen these at airports or other high-footfall areas such as shopping malls and stadiums. Smiley feedback terminals are great for capturing in-the-moment sentiment feedback without getting in your customer’s way. For most smiley terminals, all that’s required is a tap of a button -- or in the case of Ombea’s ExpressPods, a quick hover of the hand.

Anywhere surveys

Imagine being able to ask your customers for feedback at any point in their sales journey. That’s what Anywhere surveys do. It can be as simple as a text message with a smiley question asking how their experience was, or an email with a multiple-question survey. What’s more, you can also use QR-code technology to prompt your customers to give you feedback, for example placing a QR code while customers are waiting to pay. Anywhere surveys are also not constrained by question type. You can ask smiley-based questions, open-text questions, rating questions, and more.

Public review aggregators

As a customer, you know how critical public reviews from websites such as Facebook and Google are. A review can either make or break your business, so it’s important to keep abreast of them. With so many priorities pulling at you, however, always being on top of public reviews is impossible. That’s where public review aggregators such as Ombea’s Public module come along. These aggregators concentrate all your online reviews in a single place, so you always have a complete overview of your entire online presence. You can also respond to public reviews directly, allowing you to boost positive feedback and stop negative feedback in its tracks.

Metrics to measure

Assuming you’ve chosen the right collectors for your business, what should you measure? Again, this is a personal choice that is guided by the needs of your organization. No matter what you choose, always remember to benchmark.

Benchmarking against yourself allows you to visualize progress over a given period of time. Benchmarking against your competitors gives you an understanding of your market performance, and where you should improve to make sure you’re still a relevant player.

With that out of the way, let’s go through the 10 key customer satisfaction measures:

1. Speed

Speed measures how quickly you delivered your product or service to the end customer. For a physical retail site, it can be how quickly customers were able to find their product and pay for it. For an online setting, it can be the loading speed of the website or how many steps needed to be done before checkout. In specific industries like retail, speed can be a deciding factor between you and the competition, and this will only increase as consumers become less and less patient.

2. Quality

Quality is the extent to which the product or service was worth the customer’s time and money. It can be the value for money of a product, or the value received from a completed service. Measuring quality is keeping track of your ability to deliver what you promise to your customers, and you don’t need us to tell you how important keeping your promises is.

3. Pricing

It may seem brash to ask your customers about your pricing, but measuring perceptions on pricing is important for your business. If customers believe your prices are too high, it may be a sign that quality is suffering. If pricing is too low, then you’re probably on the right track and should increase your pricing.

4. Complaints

Pop culture these days emphasizes that you shouldn’t pay attention to your detractors. That’s not true. You know complaints propagate faster than praise, and they do incur a real monetary loss for your business. This is the perfect opportunity to use public review aggregators. Keeping tabs of complaints helps you address them immediately after they’ve occurred, or can even help you prevent them. Even if it is an apology, showing that you are listening to complaints demonstrates that you care about customer satisfaction.

Related: How to respond to public reviews

5. Customer loyalty

Brand loyalty is the degree to which consumers will pick your business over others. It’s also the degree to which your best customers will spread the word about your brand, and your detractors try to tarnish your reputation. Brand loyalty can have a direct impact on your customer acquisition costs, as loyalty ensures repeat business and word of mouth advertising. You could use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) indicator to track customer loyalty.

6. Intention to repurchase

Acquiring new customers is getting harder and harder. This means you need to ensure customers are sticking with your brand, and that they won’t go over to the competition. This is why measuring intention to repurchase is critical. It gives you an understanding of customer churn, but may also point the way to what you can do to increase intention to repurchase. Or simply, you might discover how you can get one-time customers to buy from you again.

7. Interactions with staff

In many businesses, customers need to interact with staff to obtain their product or service. And if you’ve ever read a public review, you’ve seen how a negative interaction can dampen a customer’s -- and your -- day. Measuring customer satisfaction with staff can help you avoid negative reviews, and gauge whether or not your staff is reflecting the values of your organization.

8. Satisfaction

Satisfaction can be many things. It can be the overall satisfaction your customer had while at your business. It can be satisfaction with just one or a few features or your product. Even if it's a simple “How satisfied are you today?,” collecting satisfaction feedback is one of the simplest metrics out there to measure, and one of the easiest to act upon.

9. Problem solving or goal attainment

This metric boils down to asking your customers whether or not your product or service helped them solve a problem or achieve their goals. Your customers come to you precisely because they have a problem or a desire, so if you’re not helping them out with it then there’s no reason why they should still come to your business. Asking your customers directly gives you insight into not just the quality of your product, but ways in which you can do even more to ensure you’re their number one go-to.

10. Customer effort

How hard is it for customers to use your product? How easy is it to get set up with your service? Tracking customer effort can let you anticipate potential issues before they crop up, or give you peace of mind that what you’re offering is not something challenging for customers.