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Take Charge Of Customer Satisfaction Metrics – Customer Effort Score, NPS & Customer Satisfaction Score

Customer satisfaction metrics and examples "There's a certain way of creating a service, hospitality, and experience that perpetuates people feeling like they matter." – Julie Rice, entrepreneur, and investor

Today’s tech-savvy customers are driven by experiences. Now more than ever, consumers look for trust, honesty, transparency, value, and an exemplary level of customer experience (CX) from brands they’re willing to invest in. This means that if you want to compete, you have to satisfy your audience consistently – and better than your competitors.

Forrester Research defines the ‘customer experience’ as: “How customers perceive their interactions with your company.”

Indeed, perception and interaction are the two most pivotal pillars of any customer experience – and exceptional customer experience often leads to improved customer satisfaction, a true catalyst for success in the digital age of business.

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Customer satisfaction metrics evaluate how the products or services supplied by a company meet or surpass a customer’s expectations. Businesses that want to retain their customers, increase consumer loyalty, and encourage brand advocacy must provide personalized, responsive, seamless experiences across all channels and touchpoints. By 2020, customer experience will surpass price or product as a key brand differentiator – and if you fail to deliver the goods to your audience, you will fall behind your competitors.

Part of creating a positive customer experience is understanding where your business is doing well and which areas need more attention or improvement.

For customer service industries, utilizing various customer satisfaction metrics like Customer Effort Score, Net Promoter Score, and Customer Satisfaction Score, with the help of the right KPI dashboard software will enable you to meet – or even exceed – your customers’ needs.

Moreover, measuring these metrics will also avert potential customer frustrations, monitor customer satisfaction levels, and give you a more concrete, informed idea of how your customer-facing team is doing. Although there are various KPI examples we could analyze, we will focus on these 3: Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, and Customer Satisfaction Score (click on the link to jump directly to the relevant part within this article).

We will delve into these very concepts to gauge your customer satisfaction levels and drive up your customer experience, exploring key areas including how to measure customer satisfaction, user satisfaction metrics, customer effort score calculation (knowing your CES customer effort score), and provide examples at the end of the article with simple and effective dashboards: general customer satisfaction dashboard, specific customer satisfaction dashboard, and support team satisfaction dashboard (click on the link to jump directly to the relevant part within this article).

Without further ado, let’s get going.

Exploring Customer Experience Analytics

Forrester states that 72% of businesses believe that improving customer experience is their top priority. As a result, more and more businesses are employing tools to help them achieve an improved customer experience, including user feedback tools such as Mopinion. These types of tools enable businesses to consistently collect and analyze insights from customers online, in-app or via email campaigns.

Businesses need analytics-driven insights focused on their team’s performance as well as customer happiness levels to determine the strengths and weaknesses that affect their overall business objectives. Popular customer service KPIs like the Customer Effort Score (CES),  Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) effectively measure a customer’s quality as well as ease of experience with a particular brand or business.

Determining accurate CES, NPS, and CSAT is easier when you are using an interactive, real-time dashboard that’s capable of providing elevated visualizations coupled with concise textual details.

How To Measure Customer Satisfaction?

Here are the 5 essential steps to measure customer satisfaction:

  1. Draft your goals and create a plan: You have to decide which customer data is worth collecting and how it will be processed later. That also means choosing metrics you want to use and decide when to measure it in accordance to customer experiences (that could be after they've bought something, interacted with the service, etc.). Include also expected costs and prepare yourself for unsatisfactory answers of some of your customers.
  2. Create a survey: There are various methods to create surveys. We're focusing on 3 different options in this post: NPS, CSAT, and CES. You can use different scales to measure the experience or emojis (visual representation of satisfactory levels).
  3. Choose what will trigger the survey and the exact timing: Whom you send your surveys and when, is of crucial importance since it can affect the quality of your data. Some examples for triggering event data include time since signup for a product, or complete user onboarding. You can also survey offline, with on-site surveys. But don't do it too often since it will also decrease the response rate.
  4. Analyze gathered data: This step should be clear. The data you have collected should be analyzed with the right online reporting tool and/or software that will generate invaluable insights for your future strategies.
  5. Adapt and repeat: The next step focuses on a simple question: what are you going to do about the results? In the case of strong unsatisfactory answers, you might want to consider investigating further and run additional experiments and advocacy programs.

This is a brief overview of how to measure customer satisfaction. We will focus more on specific metrics like Customer Effort Score and the Net Promoter Score – two of the most important customer metrics available to any modern business, regardless of sector, following by the Customer Satisfaction Score. How to present these metrics and how to visualize them with dashboards to get a clear overview is one of our top points in this article. But why?

These metrics are crucial to any business’s long-term success. If you don’t have your finger placed firmly on the pulse of customer sentiment, then you are missing out on an important opportunity to maintain the loyalty of existing customers while successfully engaging and converting new brand advocates.

Top 3 Customer Satisfaction Metrics

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

What Is The Net Promoter Score?

Net Promoter Score measures the loyalty and willingness of customers to recommend a company's product or services to third parties (e.g. friends). Customers are grouped as detractors (unhappy), passives (undecided), and promoters (loyal enthusiasts) of a company.

Your NPS is particularly useful for driving diverse success initiatives like segmenting customers into distinct categories to better tailor marketing experiences towards their specific wants or needs. Your NPS also correlates with profits or growth, so insights can help executives, investors, board members, and marketing teams address any issue or solve any problem based on customer satisfaction insights. An extensive marketing report can help you do just that.

customer satisfaction metrics example: net promoter score

This metric is all about referrals. If your customers are happy with the experience, then they are likely to refer your business’s products and services to someone they know. The NPS metric lets businesses understand how well they are doing in terms of both customer promotions and customer loyalty. Essentially, NPS is a metric for customer loyalty.

c) NPS at a glance:

To know who is a promoter and who is a detractor, you apply this scale to the results you get after asking the question “on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our services or products to a friend?”:

The Net Promoter Score is a KPI that helps you knowing which of your customers will recommend you to others (promoters), which ones are passive (neutrals), and which ones are unlikely to recommend your product and/or services (detractors).

**Source: surveysparrow.com**

As a result, we see that from 0 to 6, we have “detractors”, which is a lot more than “promoters”, who need to give a grade between 9 and 10. Passive customers rate fall in the 7-8 range.

NPS ranges start at -100, which means that everyone is a detractor, all the way up to +100, which means that everyone is a promoter. Many businesses consider an NPS of over +50 to be excellent, but it highly depends on your industry: Temkin Group performed a benchmark and came up with this chart to represent the range of NPS in different industries:

Industry benchmark for the different Net Promoter Scores

We see that an NPS of 10 or 11 is considered good for the telecommunication services, while it would be a disaster for an investment firm. Auto dealers and streaming media lead with the highest average NPS while the TV & Internet service score the lowest numbers.

You can use an NPS template to help you get started, and if you’d like to calculate your NPS based on a recent batch of feedback or survey responses, here’s a useful Net Promoter Score tool.

a) When to use NPS:

  • This most valuable of user satisfaction metrics is best (and most widely) used after a consumer has interacted with your service, whether offline in stores, or online as purchased a product from your website. The reason for this is that a consumer is likely to leave feedback about their experience soon after a purchase or interaction – invaluable information for gauging how likely someone is to recommend you to one of their peers.
  • When you’re in the process of developing or service, your NPS will prove invaluable. For instance, if you’re offering a free test or trial of a product or service online, you’ll be able to capture NPS-based data and understand how to evolve your offerings to better meet the needs of your consumers.
  • You can use social media NPS surveys to help capture customer feedback during most stages of the funnel to see how your brand stacks up in the eyes of your existing and prospective consumers.

b) How businesses can measure their NPS:

  • Transactional: Following purchases and interactions with your business’s customer service, companies can ask how likely their customer is to recommend their business to someone they know. The score is determined by the percentage of promoters minus your percentage of detractors.
  • Touchpoint-based data: You can use NPS surveys to capture quantifiable data via SMS, email, IVR, in-app chat, Facebook Messenger, post-purchase landing page, or mobile application. This will give you a wealth of data to help you calculate your overall Net Promoter Score and gain the ability to measure customer satisfaction.
  • Relationship-based buy-in: If you have loyal long-term customers and want to ensure they remain keen “promoters” of your business, you can reach out to them personally on a periodical basis and request feedback. Doing so will help you gain a more reliable NPS while providing you with the kind of data discovery or feedback that will help maintain your relationships with existing customers.
Your Chance: Want to visualize and track customer metrics with ease? Try our modern customer analytics software for 14 days, completely free!

2. Customer Effort Score (CES)

What Is The Customer Effort Score?

Customer Effort Score is a metric used to measure customer satisfaction usually on a scale level (1-10, for example) that tracks ease of interactions with a company or business. It helps to uncover and address concrete pain points in the overall user experience.

CES is, indeed, a great way for companies to discover any potential bottlenecks in the customer experience. It’s also a strong predictor of future purchase behavior, and the insights obtained are most often highly actionable.

customer satisfaction metrics example: customer effort score

The customer effort score benchmark is all about figuring out how fast and simple customers find their interaction with your business. Busy customers consider ease-of-experience as a true reflection of a business as well as a direct correlation between their satisfaction and loyalty.

a) When to use the CES:

  • To test concrete processes and actions (in comparison to NPS which is focused on the bigger picture) – following a specific customer service touchpoint, such as after an email-based support ticket has been resolved.
  • After customer consultations or meetings, online checkouts and purchases, visits to your website, and any interaction with your business’s customer service, whether it’s a live chat, social media, in person, or on the phone. A CES survey is particularly useful in these cases.

b) How to measure customer effort score:

  • By using a scale range or emojis: There are different scales (1-5, 1-7, 1-10) and emoji type queries that can determine this metric. For example, 1 indicates a low-level effort, and 10 indicates a high-level effort. A question is usually incorporated that asks the customer to rate how they agree or disagree with a statement. Our example of this is found above in the picture: “On a scale of 1-10, how much effort did you have to make to get the help you were looking for?”, with 1 being “no effort at all” and 10 “extreme amount of effort ”. This data is often obtained by conducting a CES survey.
  • Obtaining an average score: This simplistic approach only requires you to get an average of all the scores to calculate a mark out of 10. Therefore, Customer Effort Score = Total sum of scores divided by the number of scores.
  • NPS-style calculation: The CES is complementary to the NPS, and businesses can use an NPS-style measurement for calculating CES. Therefore, Customer Effort Score = % high-level effort – % low-level effort. You need to determine what is a high and a low-level effort: in the example above, with a scale from 1 to 10, low-level effort are customers who scored either a 1 or 2, medium-level effort are those who scored from 3 to 5, and high-level effort are customers who scored from 6 to 10. You can use another scale often utilized by businesses, from 1 to 7, and determine the high or low effort accordingly.

There are different types of effort you can include in the measurement of the Customer Effort Score: a financial effort (shipment costs), communication effort (no answer to emails or phone calls), wait time effort (shipment took up to a month, I was put on hold for 8 minutes), physical effort (package delivery was far from my place), process effort (repeated contact details to fill in), and other similar elements, should they prove relevant to your business.

3. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

What Is The Customer Satisfaction Score?

Customer Satisfaction Score is a broad term describing many different types of survey questions that can be asked to customers with the goal of measuring their satisfaction level with a product, service or interaction. The answers are usually expressed as percentages. It asks questions directly, concentrated mostly to the overall satisfaction, in comparison to NPS (which is indirect), and CES (which is used for specific processes).

customer satisfaction metrics example: customer satisfaction score

Offering a broader level of insight into the performance of your customer experience efforts, the CSAT provides feedback on your efforts based on a 1 - 5 scale, spanning from “very dissatisfied” to “very satisfied.”

By requesting this feedback post-purchase or post-customer interaction, you’ll be able to gain a general understanding of how happy or unhappy your consumers are with the products or level of service you’re offering.

Not only will this give you a firm foundation of your current customer success, but you will also boost engagement by asking people for their opinions (this will make them feel valued). Moreover, if you have a solid CSAT, you can display it on your website to showcase your success to prospective customers alongside testimonials.

A Better Understanding Of The Customer Experience With CES, NPS, And CSAT

Obtaining frequent feedback in the form of these customer satisfaction metrics can help organizations develop a more data-driven decision-making process around their promotional content, marketing techniques, and customer experience efforts. You can enhance your studies and benchmark thanks to a professional market research analytics software, helping you gather and visualize your data in a meaningful way. Additionally, it helps businesses effectively evaluate and measure progress.

1. Where do common customer frustrations originate?

Having an idea of where a lot of common frustrating customer experiences occur can inform strategies to correct these frustrations and guide you towards the right customer experience metrics. Interactions with customer service representatives and roadblocks that arise when engaging with a business on multiple channels are a significant area of customer dissatisfaction. An Accenture study found that 89% of customers get frustrated because they need to repeat their problems and issues to numerous representatives.

Customers become quickly frustrated and are more likely to sever ties with a business or brand when the following events occur:

  • A customer has to switch from an online channel to the phone.
  • A customer is transferred to a different representative or department to resolve an issue.
  • A customer has to repeatedly contact a business about the same problem.
  • A customer has to re-explain an issue or problem.

What these facts indicate is that a customer’s frustration corresponds to the amount of time and effort they have to apply towards interacting with your business in a dissatisfying or unfulfilling way. This is yet another example of why it is so crucial to use customer satisfaction measurements like CES and NPS to know whether your customers are happy and engaged with your business in a positive way.

2. Pros and Cons of using NPS, CES and CSAT

An overview of pros and cons of customer satisfaction metrics net promoter score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) by datapine

There are numerous upsides and a few downsides to using the NPS, CES and CSAT to determine customer satisfaction.

a) Pros of using NPS:

  • NPS is used to evaluate customer sentiments about your business. It provides baseline metrics to measure if customers are feeling positive or negative about your company over a certain period of time.
  • NPS helps businesses identify customers who recommend their brand.
  • It takes into consideration the prices and competitors to answer the satisfaction level of customers.

b) Cons of using NPS:

  • NPS cannot stand on its own and requires additional quantitative and/or qualitative analysis of the feedback.
  • NPS may reveal information in which customer responses don’t exactly align with actual customer behavior.

a) Pros of using CES

  • CES is great for looking at specific customer touch points and specific processes so you can find out how exactly they went about resolving their issue and how long it took them to find a way to address it so it is highly actionable.
  • The CES, or customer effort score, enables you to forecast common follow-up questions that customers frequently ask customer service teams so that your customer service representatives can lower callback rates and case reopen rates.
  • Customer effort score can be used for both customer success teams and product teams because both user experience and user interface depend on the ease of use, and it can identify points where customers begin to feel frustrated.

b) Cons of using CES:

  • The CES doesn’t provide exact reasons (or a precise customer effort score industry benchmark) why efforts are either high or low. It only gives answers on whether customers find it difficult to use the product or service, but why and what are those difficulties remains unanswered.
  • It also misses information regarding the customer's overall relationship/satisfaction with a company.

a) Pros of using CSAT:

  • By asking customers for their CSAT in a swift, simple format, you will be able to gather frequent customer satisfaction-based data that will help you boost your customer retention rates.
  • As it’s possible to relate your CSAT to almost any area of your business like quality, design, pricing, and service (due to its generalized nature), you can gain priceless performance feedback in a number of key areas, but NPS is the metric that drills down into deeper areas.
  • CSAT is an excellent way of tracking the success of changes to your products, services, or touchpoints in the short-term as gathering feedback is simple and painless.

b) Cons of using CSAT:

  • This metric can only ever offer an overview of your customer-driven success; it can’t answer specific questions or drill down into deeper areas of customer satisfaction, like NPS. It must be used in unison with NPS and a customer effort score benchmark to offer true value.
  • CSAT is best for acquiring short-term feedback. This metric can’t assist in offering predictive insights or account for your business’s potential growth.
  • CSAT doesn’t take into account how customers might be influenced by your competitors or product prices, in comparison to NPS where you ask for recommending the product to third parties.

3. The impact of customer satisfaction metrics on business

A bad CES, or a hit to your customer effort score industry benchmark, can negatively impact your business’s long-term success given that these numbers indicate a loss of customer loyalty. If your customers are not having an easy experience interacting with your brand, are not receiving a quick resolution to their concerns, or are unlikely to recommend your product or services, this means that your business is failing to provide a compelling experience.

According to NewVoiceMedia, American businesses lose $62 billion each year because of bad customer experiences. Considering the nature of online interactions in an increasingly digital world, customers have the ability to spread their opinions, both negative and positive, so it’s absolutely essential for you to provide your customers with something positive and delightful to say.

In summary, each of these pivotal metrics to measure customer satisfaction offers an accurate, viable means of grasping the of the level of CX you offer your customers and how they perceive your brand. By using these KPI management solutions together, you’ll gain the power to evolve, improve, and scale your efforts with the landscape around you – which in today’s business intelligence world is invaluable.

Your Chance: Want to visualize and track customer metrics with ease? Try our modern customer analytics software for 14 days, completely free!

Customer Satisfaction Metrics Dashboards

Using a business dashboard for your customer service management practices enables your business to easily understand all of your customer data in real-time with advanced predictive capabilities. With well-defined, organized visuals, your business is capable of evaluating a wide variety of customer experience metrics and KPIs.

These 3 customer satisfaction metrics examples showcase how dynamic online dashboards can help you improve your consumer-facing efforts on a continual basis.

We will show different examples of using dashboards in customer satisfaction on different levels. Two examples are more general while the last one is specific for customer support needs.

1. General Customer Satisfaction Dashboard

The Customer Satisfaction dashboard displays the Customer Effort Score, the Net Promoter Score, that both impact the customer satisfaction.

**click to enlarge**

Open In Full Screen The Customer Satisfaction Dashboard

This customer satisfaction dashboard provides a general overview that can be used in many different satisfaction scenarios. Let's see the metrics used in this specific example:

Net Promoter Score (NPS): As we saw, this metric lets you evaluate how well you are doing regarding customer referrals and determines how and where you can improve your services.

Customer Effort Score (CES): As discussed, this metric provides valuable feedback on the customer experience and your ability to provide user-friendly interactions with your website, technology, and overall business. KPIs linked to satisfied customers correspond to business growth, so it’s important to lower this number as much as possible.

Customer retention: This metric measures the number of customers that are returning for repeat business and purchases. A growing retention rate is what you should aim for, especially when we know that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing one.

2. Specific Customer Satisfaction Dashboard

Customer satisfaction metrics shown on a dashboard with specific scores on quality, pricing, design, and service, among others.

**click to enlarge**

Open In Full Screen The Specific Customer Satisfaction Dashboard

This dashboard is more specific and concentrates also on satisfaction scores from the point of quality, pricing, design, and service, which can deliver much more detail into the customer experience journey.

Primary KPIs:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
  • Customer Effort Score (CES)

When it comes to metrics to measure customer satisfaction, this digestible, dynamic, and interactive market research dashboard incorporates the 3 key metrics needed for ongoing consumer success.

Blending NPS, CES (customer effort score calculation), and CSAT seamlessly, this online data analysis platform provides a swift, simple, and inspiring way to monitor and improve the customer experience you offer your audience – one of the most effective customer satisfaction metrics examples imaginable.

3. Support Team Satisfaction Dashboard

Customer satisfaction metrics shown on a Zendesk dashboard

**click to enlarge**

Open In Full Screen The Support Team Satisfaction Dashboard

The support team satisfaction dashboard is specifically designed for the customer support team, it also includes agents' statistics and the overall Net Promoter Score.

Primary KPIs:

  • Top Agents
  • First Contact Resolution Rate
  • Utilization Rate
  • Net Promoter Score

As one of the planet’s premier customer service platforms, Zendesk serves up a wealth of invaluable operational data, both internal and external.

When it comes to understanding your customer satisfaction score, it's crucial to monitor the performance of your front-line customer support team across various touchpoints. The Zendesk dashboard offers the ability to drill down into the very best internal metrics to measure customer satisfaction, like top agents by solved tickets, the average resolution rate as one of the key success criteria in customer service, and detailed insights into tickets.

Offering interactive and highly-visual insights into key KPIs such as first contact resolution rate and top performing agents, this particular data dashboard will help you understand where your customer service-centric strengths and weaknesses lie while gaining the ability to support or motivate the members of your team that may need additional training.

By capitalizing on your strengths, working on your weaknesses, and boosting team morale, you will see an increase in your customer satisfaction score – and this panoramic platform will help you do just that.

Benefit From Your Customer Satisfaction Metrics!

Omni-channel customer experiences are continuing to grow, and businesses need comprehensive data visualization tools to understand how easily, quickly, and responsively their customers are able to interact with and experience their brand.

Companies can accurately calculate their Customer Effort Score and Net Promoter Score and apply the insights toward the evolution of their business, whether it’s resolving customer issues more quickly or improving support agent productivity.

Mitigating customer churn and frustrations should be the goal of any business, particularly those in customer-driven industries. Knowing how to measure customer effort score among other key metrics is the way to succeed.

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos

Your Chance: Want to visualize and track customer metrics with ease? Try our modern customer analytics software for 14 days, completely free!

While a great deal of data is generated through Powerpoint presentations, with the right software, every department of your business can gain access to the kind of insights that will help you enhance your customer satisfaction levels exponentially. An online dashboard tool like datapine’s provides organizations with the means to track and visualize their critical customer service data in a multidimensional and efficient way.

Measure, visualize, and share your customer satisfaction metrics with the help of modern, interactive dashboards in one central place and forget about Excel and PowerPoint! See for yourself and start your 14-day free trial today!