67% of customers list a bad service experience as their main reason for churning. If we’re keeping customers’ satisfaction top of mind, and constantly looking for ways to improve, we reduce the chance of something going wrong. As the old saying goes “what gets measured, gets managed.”

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a metric used to measure a customers’ feelings regarding a recent interaction. It is usually displayed as a percentage, representing the number of positive customer responses out of 100. For example, receiving 90 positive responses and 10 negative responses would result in a CSAT score of 90%.

Why measure Customer Satisfaction?

Happy customers stick around. Unsatisfied customers are on the other hand far more likely to cancel their service or not return in the future.

Customers who’ve had a bad experience with a company are only 40% likely to still be a customer in a year, compared to 75% of customers with great experiences sticking around.

CSAT is the most common metric for measuring customer satisfaction because it’s simple to use and easy to understand.

How to measure customer satisfaction?

When measuring CSAT, you ask customers whether they were happy or satisfied with their last interaction with us. They can respond positively or negatively. Responses, along with any additional comments, are collected, so that the team can address them.

You can fine-tune your CSAT collection process by a couple of things:

When to send CSAT survey?

You can ask customers for their opinion at two main points – either include the survey at the bottom of every email, or only ask once when you resolve the conversation.

CSAT survey in every email

Offering an opportunity to give feedback at every interaction means that the agent doesn’t need to wait until resolution to find out how customers feel. This means they can act quickly to turn a conversation around, when it starts to derail. Asking for feedback at the end of every email lead to 200+% increase of survey response rates at our clients.

CSAT survey after resolution

However, asking for feedback before the conversation is finished might create a misleading overall score. Customers who were really upset before they had all the information might update their rating when they are happy with the resolution. If the CSAT scores aren’t separated, it’s difficult to understand if customers are satisfied when everything is said and done – or if they are still waiting on a better resolution.

Ask Different Questions

Depending on how you ask the survey question, you might get very different feedback. Experiment with different survey questions to identify which ones gets the most actionable feedback. Here’s a couple of suggestions

• How nice was my reply?
• How was the help you received today?
• Are you satisfied with the resolution of our last conversation

Try Various Response Scales

There are several options for you when it comes to on what scales do customers rate their satisfaction.

A binary response lets your customers choose only between a good or a bad experience. A Likert Scale is a balanced range of options that scale from disagree to agree. It contains equal numbers of positive and negative responses, symmetrically balanced along the scale. For example, a common Likert Scale looks like:

• Strongly disagree
• Disagree
• Neither agree nor disagree
• Agree
• Strongly agree

You can also use a simple scale of 10 points (in Nicereply it’s 10 stars). Nicereply lets you choose from all these options with a binary scale of 2 thumbs, odd-numbered scale of 3 smiley faces or a standard 10 stars scale.

Start Measuring Customer Satisfaction with Nicereply for Salesforce

You can start measuring CSAT today in a matter of minutes and see the data pushed directly into your Salesforce account.

All you need to do is create a free trial of Nicereply (if you don’t already have one) and follow the basic setup instructions.

You can see the instruction on how to measure CSAT in every email you send out to customers here. Alternatively you can choose to send out a survey automatically after a conversation is closed, or at a specific time. You can read the instructions for that here.

Asking the customer for their feedback is the simplest way to get the truth. If a customer says they are dissatisfied it needs to be addressed.

Remember, your customers will never tell you, unless you ask them.

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