3 Ways to Gauge Whether Your Customers Are Truly Happy
Depending upon your industry, it can cost as much as six times more to acquire new customers than it does to satisfy the ones you already have. That’s why businesses are more focused on customer success metrics than ever before and why customer experience (CX) leaders have proven support to be way more than just a cost center.
But, how do you know whether your support team is meeting or even exceeding customer expectations when it comes to your brand, product, and support experiences? Here are three ways to measure whether you’re providing what your customers want and need:
1. Know Your Net Promoter Score (NPS)
When it comes to your brand reputation, look to NPS, a universally recognized metric for customer experience management systems. NPS rates the willingness of your customers to recommend your products and services to others. A high NPS indicates you’ve managed to cultivate a happy base of customers, while a low NPS score means you have some disgruntled users on your hands who could easily churn and/or complain to anyone who will listen. When you make the customer experience as memorable and friction-free as possible, like by using help bots to automate satisfaction, you strengthen the link between happy, loyal advocates and new customers.
“Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley sees his firm’s Net Promoter Score every time he looks at the management dashboard on his screen. Bill Barton, CEO of California Closets, checks his company’s score first thing every morning and has built his highly successful business on it. Intuit product managers check their score every day and have been using it since it was invented 17 years ago. Some 40,000 employees use it at IBM, and the executive who oversees its use, Michelle Peluso, says, ‘It’s more than a metric. One could use the word ‘religion.’” – Goeff Colvin, Fortune
2. Watch Your App Store Ratings and Reviews
App Store ratings are like grades for your app—with one star being the lowest and five stars being the ultimate goal. While you might think this information is most useful for product managers and app developers, it can benefit your support organization, as well. The more you know about how your company’s new app or release is being received by the majority of users, the better you can address customer issues down the line.
You can easily monitor your scores and more subjective reviews for potential support issues using the AppFollow platform, for example, which also enables you to quickly respond to reviewers. Then, you can feed that information back to your product and developer teammates. This helps satisfy customers, foster team-building, and reduce hits to your company’s NPS.
“AppFollow’s research shows the average rating for apps and games in the stores’ top charts and featured sections hovers around 4.5 stars. Critically, apps with a rating under 4 stars lose up to half of their potential downloads. Users simply don’t click on apps with lower ratings—so it’s imperative brands do all they can to boost their scores.” – Anatoly Sharifulin, CEO of AppFollow
3. Monitor Your Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Scores
CSAT surveys help you elicit honest feedback about your organization’s support interactions. CSAT scores, when paired with how many support issues an agent has handled, help you see the big picture in terms of how well an agent is performing.
Example: when you enable CSAT within the Helpshift platform, you can see that your agent resolved 50 issues last week and that they received 5-star ratings on all of them. This is a good indicator of some happy customers. Also, with Helpshift’s in-app survey request capability, you can ask customers to rate their customer service experience on a scale of 1 to 5 before leaving the messaging channel.
“A year ago we set out to gently guide our customers toward a channel where we knew we could provide better service–and that channel is chat. There’s a history of the conversation, we can do ID verification, our agents can handle more than one case at a time, and our CSAT is historically higher. My hope now is that our customers have seen how effective chat is as a delivery channel and that they stay with it so we can better support them.” – Ben Terrill, Director of Customer Experience, Brex
Everyone wins when your customers are happy. When they’re satisfied, they spend more and become loyal ambassadors for your company and app. When they’re not, they cost more to serve and require more time and resources to recover from a bad experience.
Learn more about keeping customers happy, increasing loyalty, and saving money in The True Cost of Player Support webinar.
