Customer satisfaction is an important metric for a company’s current successes and prospects for future growth. Whether or not a buyer is pleased with their recent purchasing experience can be informative telling. And when this is known for multiple customers on a consistent basis, a company can more thoroughly gauge its performance as an organization and its impact in the marketplace.
A lot of companies strive to uncover customer satisfaction measurements as a way to predict whether that customer will be likely to make additional purchases, recommend what they buy to friends and family, and be part of what ultimately makes up a company or brand reputation.
But customer satisfaction can also be a revealing key indicator of how a company is functioning, where its excelling, and where it needs to improve to avoid falling short of competitors. In simpler terms, a clear picture of customer experience shows what’s working and what isn’t, which is an invaluable metric for making better and more prosperous decisions to grow a business.
What Customer Satisfaction Says About A Company’s Performance
Every business wants happy customers because they continue to make purchases and encourage others to do the same. But happy customers also let a company know it’s doing something right, or more accurately, that it’s doing a lot of things right.
Consider all that it takes to offer a product or service and then provide it. Even in very basic markets, this requires consistent efforts and multiple systems to come together.
Companies that maintain high rates of customer satisfaction are accomplishing the following:
- Successfully identifying what a market needs and what it expects from a seller
- Establishing and maintaining capabilities to offer a product or service and deliver a buying experience that satisfies customer expectations and fosters brand loyalty
- Scaling capabilities to ensure that expectations can continue to be met as new customers are acquired and current customers are maintained
- Making the most of opportunities to foster and maintain positive customer impressions, whether through product quality, order fulfillment reliability, customer service policies, etc.
- Staying informed on how its target market may change and subsequently adapting and adjusting in response
- Addressing weaknesses head-on and seeking out blindspots to prevent the issues that lead to dissatisfied customers
How To Make Impactful Customer Impressions
Exactly what it takes to meet customer expectations and impactful impressions is going to vary by the marketplace, how a company conducts its business, and how it approaches opportunities to make positive customer impressions.
Customer satisfaction requires an understanding of customer expectations. Without some sense of what a customer expects, a company has little hope of confidently offering and delivering something that satisfies those expectations. Comprehensive market research and analysis of purchasing trends and customer behaviors is very useful for achieving this.
There is also the process of building on this to maintain loyalty and reclaim customers who may have strayed to competitors. Keeping and winning customers from the competition depends on whether a company can adequately respond to changes in the marketplace.
There are a lot of variables to address and even those companies with the most powerful insights into their markets aren’t going to do everything perfectly all the time. But to look at things simply, customers tend to be satisfied when they can get what they need or want without a lot of time, difficulty, energy, or unnecessary expense.
Customers also like to know they can trust a company to stand by what it delivers. If there is a situation in which their expectations are not met, they want to know the provider is willing and able to make things right.
Customers are going to choose companies that they perceive as reputable and able to deliver on their promises. A company will need to have the infrastructure and capabilities to fulfill what it offers and it will also need an understanding of its targeted market in order to meet buyers expectations.
Customers like to feel valued. Companies that can make their customers feel appreciated for their purchases goes a long way toward fostering loyalty. Loyal customers also like to feel noticed and rewarded.
Measuring Customer Satisfaction – How And Why
There are significant advantages when a company devotes resources to measuring and monitoring customer satisfaction. With this information, they can better direct resources to meet customer expectations and close gaps that might be hurting their ability to make positive impacts.
When a company refines its ability to provide a highly satisfying experience to its customers, it will also improve its performance and impact as an organization. This can open doors to identifying customer needs and wants with better efficiency and then providing relevant solutions.
How a company can measure customer satisfaction is more varied than why, but there are some reliable methods:
Customer Surveys
Gathering customer feedback, satisfaction scores, and other means of acquiring an opinion directly from customers is a popular way to collect customer satisfaction data. These surveying methods can be used to gather detailed responses related to purchases and the experience of dealing with the company. They can also be simple ratings that are distilled into a customer satisfaction score (CSAT).
Customer Reviews
Reviews across the internet, including on social media, blogs, marketplace directories, and e-commerce sites can reveal valuable insights into customer satisfaction. Reviews of competitors’ products and services can also be revealing.
Web-Analytics
Analysis of website traffic and buyer behavior can be useful for gathering information on repeat purchasing habits and other data that indicates whether a customer is loyal and receptive to your company’s offerings.
Return Purchase And Recommendation Methods
Offering incentives to customers that make additional purchases and refer friends, family, and colleagues can generate additional data for measuring customer satisfaction, enthusiasm, and loyalty.
FAQs
How do you define customer satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction is a measurement or rating that indicates the approval of a business, product, or service among buyers.
How do you build customer satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction is built by meeting customer expectations and delivering on offerings so that buyers perceive their purchase and experience as positive. Customer satisfaction is also built by addressing customer dissatisfaction and improving capabilities that make a company favorable over its competitors.
What is a CSAT?
In business and marketing, a CSAT is a customer satisfaction score. This score serves as an easy-to-gather and analyze metric for how customers feel about a business and products or services. It is expressed as a percentage, with 0 being the poorest and 100 being the highest.
Leveraging Customer Satisfaction To Boost Customer Perceptions
Promoting high customer satisfaction is an attractive prospect for any company that wants to lead with a positive reputation as a marketing asset. This is a solid approach, but it must be carried out with care.
View these press release examples to see how reputable and highly rated companies directly tie their reputations to the unique capabilities of their organizations.
Prospective customers will be influenced by the experience of past customers, but they also want to know what a company can do for them based solely on its offerings, capabilities, and mission. Press releases and other impact-focused marketing content can help create the impressions that drive buyers to become and remain customers.