Customer satisfaction is the fundamental force that propels the prosperity of a company. A company cannot rely on inadequate data or sparse interaction with customers and expect better results.
To retain their primary assets, i.e. the customers, organisations have to strategize their operations to improve customer experience. Achieving this requires measuring specific parameters to evaluate the benchmarks of customer service. This article explores various parameters used in customer closed loop feedback surveys and shows their importance in the customer experience management process.
Why Is Customer Feedback Vital for a Business?
· Recognize customer preferences
Customer feedback is an integral part of the customer experience management cycle. It helps to point out particular needs and preferences of a customer. Customer-centric feedback tools gather data to understand what features people want in a product or service, which is very helpful to design targeted marketing campaigns.
· Boost competitiveness
To remain relevant in the marketplace, an enterprise needs to be competitive. Customer reviews allow a business to compare its products with its competitors. This, in turn, allows pinpointing any shortcomings in the service and measuring the overall performance. Thus, a business could readily overcome its weaknesses and design a better service.
· Opportunity to improve customer service
Customer is the key to the profit for any company. For this reason, customer closed loop feedback becomes a critical tool in evaluating customer satisfaction. A satisfied customer is a happy customer who is more likely to generate recurring revenue. Research shows that around 30 percent of consumers will gladly pay more for excellent service, a 6 percent increase over 2019’s figures. (Source) So, feedback becomes a potent instrument to improve customer experience.
· Identify market trends
Customer feedback is essential to catch the market trends. The paradigm of market segmentation can help a business group its clients into groups and understand their demands. This approach potentially enables a company to perform well in a niche by utilising the market trends.
· Resolve customer grievances
Customer closed loop feedback enables a company to fix any complaints of the customers to avoid losing them. A dedicated enterprise always focuses on doing anything to win their customers back, for which feedback is the first step.
How to Collect Customer Feedback Data?
There are several other methods a company can use to collect personalised responses from individuals:
- In-app surveys
- Using chatbots
- Social media polls
- Email surveys
- Post-call surveys
- Voluntary feedback
According to research, 69 percent of customers prefer a phone call, while 54 percent like to get an email. Around 46 percent like online chat as a medium to submit their feedback. (Source)
How to Measure Customer Feedback?
· Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – CSAT is the most straightforward way to obtain data about customer satisfaction. In this method, a series of simple questions are asked regarding the purchase of a product or service. For example, “How satisfied were you with our product?” The customers answer this on a scale of 1 to 5. The higher the CSAT score, the more positive the feedback is considered.
· Net Promoter Score (NPS) – Net Promoter Score is a potent instrument to improve customer experience via word-of-mouth. NPS is a market research metric developed by Fred Reichheld that utilises a single survey question asking consumers to rate the likelihood that they would recommend a brand, service, or product to a friend, relative, or colleague. As NPS asks emotionally inspired questions, they have a higher rate of success than CSAT in garnering customer closed loop feedback because an unsatisfied customer never misses such opportunities to share their experience.
· Customer Effort Score (CES) – 80 percent of customers feel more emotionally linked to a brand when customer care solves their issues. The Customer Effort Score is an efficient way to segment customers. In this approach, the customers get asked what amount of effort they will put in to obtain better customer service.
Conclusion
The best brands worldwide are the most customer-centric enterprises. They make it a regular practice to determine customer satisfaction through customer feedback. To gain an edge over the competitors, they incorporate surveys to get valuable insights into customer preferences through various metrics. These metrics help them reduce the churn rate, improve customer experience and earn a handsome revenue in the process.