4 Steps To Measure Customer Satisfaction And Track Your Business’s Success

Regardless of your industry, customer satisfaction is one of the most critical factors of your business’ success.

The problem? Customers are getting harder to impress.

Staying ahead of customer expectations is crucial to achieving satisfaction and retention in the long run. The best way to do this is to measure customer satisfaction.

But does tracking customer satisfaction mean just having numbers and graphs?

To truly captivate your customers, you must diligently consider their sentiments and thoughts in relation to your business goals.

Here’s a 4-step guide to get you started:

Why Should You Track Customer Satisfaction?

According to PwC’s 2018 Future of CX report, 73% of customers consider experience to be a significant factor when choosing a brand. The same study also found that 43% would pay more for an improved experience.

Customer satisfaction not only influences client retention — it also impacts your business’s profitability.

The best way to improve customer satisfaction is to track and quantify it. Measuring customer satisfaction allows you to do the following:

• Assess front desk performance more clearly. Customer satisfaction is a telling sign of how your front desk is performing. High customer satisfaction indicates excellent performance, while low customer satisfaction highlights areas of improvement.
• Serve as a foundation when setting business goals. Customer satisfaction significantly impacts customer loyalty, retention, and profitability, so it can be a solid basis for setting growth goals.
• Pave a clear path of improvement for your staff. When quantified, customer satisfaction guides your front desk staff on how to improve further.

How To Measure Customer Satisfaction

Measuring customer satisfaction involves more than just calculating metrics — it’s a meticulous process with clear objectives and actionable steps.

To ensure that you know how to measure customer satisfaction for business success, here are four steps you should take:

1. Review Your Business Goals

Customer satisfaction is a vital key performance indicator (KPI) of your front desk that impacts many areas of your business. However, you may have other factors or priorities with your business that you must consider first, such as your waiting area or product services.

Meet with your management team first to discuss your business goals before considering improving your customer satisfaction. Identify which goals take top priority and determine where customer satisfaction ranks. If your business is yet to evaluate customer satisfaction as a primary goal, discuss it with your team in depth so everyone is aligned on its importance.

The emphasis you place on customer satisfaction will determine your future actions post-evaluation.

2. Calculate Customer Satisfaction

Collecting customer satisfaction measurements entails using tried-and-true tools that collect sentiments based on how you structure the questionnaire. Some tools are more effective than others, depending on your business goals.

Specialized tools, such as front desk check-in software offered by platforms like WelcomeWare, feature a reporting management system that allows you to track key metrics indicating customer satisfaction.

There are various types of customer satisfaction surveys. Here are 3 common methods you can try out to collect customer feedback regardless of the tools you have available:

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT is a general score that a customer gives (e.g., from 1 to 5, with five being the highest) to summarize their experience based on a question such as “How satisfied are you with our service?” usually with a range of 1-5 or 1-10. CSAT surveys are simple but effective tools for collecting data on customer sentiments without burdening them with long questionnaires.

Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI)

CSI refers to individual weighted scores for specific areas of the customer experience (e.g., “How satisfied are you with the responsiveness of our customer service?”, “How satisfied are you with your wait time?”). CSI offers more in-depth, actionable insights about what your customers feel about your business, though finding willing respondents may be difficult, given the length of the questionnaires.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a single score from 1 to 10 that customers give to indicate how likely they are to recommend your business to a friend or family member.

3. Analyze The Data

After collecting the data, you must analyze it for critical insights.

Your data can be highly indicative of various aspects of your front office and your business services. Most of the time, your front desk plays a crucial role in promoting a positive experience for your customer base that makes them want to return and engage with your business. However, other staff who are typically non-customer-facing can also play a part in facilitating the customer experience.

Your business goals should inform the way you view your data, but sometimes, biases can cloud your judgment, which may lead to misinformed decisions. Prevent yourself from falling into biases by following some of these best practices:

• Conduct a regular meeting with your management team. Schedule a meeting (ideally monthly and quarterly) to discuss data trends about your customer experience strategy.
• Avoid relying only on quantitative data. Integrate qualitative data that provide critical insights that quantitative data is unable to give.
• Consider feedback from all your staff. Listen to what every team member has to say, as they can give interesting feedback that you may have yet to consider.

Read our blog on seven best practices for using KPIs for receptionist training to learn more about making the most of your quantitative data.

4. Plan Future Actionable Steps

Once you’ve gleaned key insights from your data, the next step is to plan your actions.

Depending on your business growth objectives, there are several ways to leverage your customer insights to improve customer satisfaction. Here are three sample action steps to start you off on the right foot:

• Front desk training – Clarify areas of improvement for your receptionists so they can achieve greater customer satisfaction.
• Workflow modification – Learn which protocols must be added, removed, or modified to streamline customer-facing interactions (for best results, use CSI). For example, live virtual receptionist services like WelcomeWare can significantly improve front desk productivity.
• Managing business goals – Utilize customer insights to inform your strategies to achieve business goals, be they long-term or short-term.

Customer Happiness Spells Business Success

While having satisfied customers is just one aspect of business success, it is a significant one. As you focus on advancing business services and technologies at the forefront of your organization’s growth, remember that customer satisfaction should always be a factor to consider. The same Dimension Data study found that 81% of organizations see the customer experience as a competitive differentiator. Thus, when you track your business’s customer satisfaction, you’re also tracking the path of its success — so long as you do it systematically. To achieve maximum customer satisfaction, invest in WelcomeWare, a front desk software and hardware platform that enables your receptionists to cover the front desk remotely while tracking KPIs so you can improve and measure your customer satisfaction continuously.