Anyone wanting to conduct customer satisfaction research to measure and improve customer satisfaction can use various methods. From traditional CSAT to NPS or, for example, CES. But even more important than the measurement method is how you use it within opinion research for your customers, product or services. After all, common assumptions such as ‘reducing customer effort increases customer loyalty’ are not always true. Additional customer effort can also lead to greater customer loyalty and customer satisfaction.
Measuring and improving customer satisfaction with CSAT, CES or NPS
Various KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) can be used to measure customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. A tried-and-tested option is CSAT (the Customer Satisfaction Score), in which customers use a score from 1 to 5 to indicate how they rate certain aspects. In 2003, this was joined by the measurement tool NPS (the Net Promoter Score), with an additional focus on customer loyalty and the longer term. In 2010, another powerful tool for customer opinion research followed: the Customer Effort Score (CES). CES indicates how much effort a customer feels they have to make to complete a particular action. Whether they are buying something or, for example, want to have a problem resolved by customer service.
Keep measurement flexible in customer opinion research
An organisation wanting to get started with customer opinion research often initially becomes fixated on systems and measurement methods for customer satisfaction. A false start that often immediately leads to delays, disappointment, postponement or even cancellation. What a waste! Make sure you have a flexible platform that can handle multiple measurement methods, and focus on what you really want to know. Start by measuring that. This generates new questions and insights, and soon allows you to look much further than you could have imagined beforehand. Where necessary, you will also look beyond the beaten track, because even the principles on which measurement methods are based are far from always being infallible ‘laws’. The opposite can also be true.
Learning from pancakes
A fundamental premise of CES is that service organisations primarily win loyal customers by reducing customer effort. This is certainly not always true. IKEA and pancakes teach us the opposite. Customers' sense of satisfaction and their experience – in other words, the customer experience (CX) – can also be more positive when customers actually have to make some effort themselves at certain stages, especially if they get something in return.
IKEA customer research looks beyond CES
IKEA makes clever use of this principle. Their customers are happy with an affordable, new Billy bookcase, especially because they have to assemble it themselves. And are you familiar with those bottles of pancake mix to which you only need to add milk and an egg? That egg could easily already be included in powdered form. It is designed this way solely to give the person making the pancakes the feeling that they are accomplishing a culinary feat. And it works!
Learn more by measuring customer loyalty
Sometimes, then, a solution is valued more highly when it does not simply fall into your lap. But you need to know VERY well which kinds of effort customers do and do not appreciate. That requires good measurement. Because then you can make informed choices between what customers do themselves and what you do for them. Good sales professionals gauge this. Ultimately, their organisation focuses extra attention primarily on those things that make a difference. And if customers can make a small effort that delivers disproportionately high satisfaction, it can be a good strategy to give them that role.
Thinking in terms of possibilities
Exactly where the opportunities lie to make a bigger difference for customers naturally varies by company, product and sometimes even by customer. Use this to your advantage, start measuring and, above all, do not let yourself be held back by becoming fixated in advance on measurement methods and systems for customer research.
Flexible feedback platform for customer research
GrowPromoter's online feedback platform deliberately gives you the freedom and flexibility to ask multiple types of research questions for customer research. After all, you may need NPS on one occasion, but a CES question or an entirely different method the next. At GrowPromoter, experience experts can help you consistently ask the right, insightful question at the best moment within your customer satisfaction survey. Or would you prefer to manage that yourself?
