Reading Time: 3 minutesAs a business owner, your primary goal is to drive the sales that keep your business on a growth curve and moving forward in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape. However, one aspect of business hasn’t changed—the need to build a group of satisfied clients that will not only return to your company again and again but influence others to do the same. How can you determine client happiness?
Gathering Client Happiness Data
It’s possible to get a rough estimate of your clients’ satisfaction with your products or services by tracking your revenue. Still, you won’t be able to determine how happy your clients are with the way your business operates—or make changes to drive more sales. Failing to track client happiness can cause you to make oversights and cost you business. Worse, it only takes one missed opportunity—according to American Express, as many as 33% of Americans state that they’re already looking at the competition after one poor client experience, and 67% of those may do so repeatedly, costing businesses as much as $75 billion each year.
So, what can you do? It’s crucial to gather happiness data and perform analysis so you’re aware of which measures you can take to improve. To do it, you’ll need to narrow your focus to several key metrics and the methods you’ll need to employ to measure them.
How to Measure Client Happiness
You should already have a general client happiness strategy—a set of rules, procedures, and even software platforms you and your employees utilize to streamline client access to your services and respond when things get bumpy. As a broader part of your business’s marketing efforts, client happiness involves the methods you use to draw in new clients, inspire loyalty, spread brand awareness, and more. On a more focused level, measuring client happiness delineates several steps you can take to assess the clients you already have.
Utilize these key metrics and methods of measuring client happiness to see where your business currently stands:
- Implement a customer satisfaction survey. Through a survey, you can pinpoint the specific data you wish to collect and gauge client happiness with multiple different factors of your business. When creating a client survey, be sure to use the same measuring scale throughout for improved comparison. Also, avoid leading questions, or meshing multiple questions into one, which can skew your data.
- Utilize social media and Google ratings monitoring. Social media and Google Business Profile accounts allow a platform for clients to share just how happy they are with thousands of other users—your potential clients among them. Whether through star ratings, client comments, reviews, or photos, it’s crucial to interact with clients on both ends of the happiness spectrum and address issues as soon as they become apparent. In addition, tools like Google Alerts can help you take notice when your brand or business is mentioned across the web and respond appropriately.
- Utilize CSAT ratings. Customer satisfaction ratings, or CSAT, are an essential metric to consider when building an overview of your client’s happiness. When measuring CSAT, you’ll ask clients to rate their satisfaction with your business as a whole—or even specific aspects of your business, products, or services—on a scale from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. The results can give you a relatively direct measure of client happiness, especially after changes to your website or offerings; unfortunately, client ratings can be skewed due to mood, one negative experience, or carelessness.
- Gauge CES responses. In contrast to CSAT, which asks your clients to rate their overall satisfaction with your business or a portion of your offerings, customer effort score, or CES, asks clients to assess ease of use on a reverse scale from 1 to 5. As clients are overall more likely to pass along bad experiences than good experiences, CES endeavors to reduce the amount of client effort necessary to use your services rather than shower them with attention after the fact. Asking clients to rate the ease of use after an encounter with your website—such as completing an order or utilizing customer service—and moving clients positively up the CES scale can correspond to increased client loyalty.
- Employ measures of net promoter score. Instead of asking how satisfied clients are with products and services they’ve utilized, NPS asks how likely clients would be to recommend the experience they just completed to friends and family. In short, NPS measures a client’s intent to share instead of their emotions. Clients that rate highly (9-10) may promote your business to others, while those that rate low (0-6) are likely to detract from your company. Calculate NPS by subtracting detractors from promoters and follow up by engaging with detractors regarding how you can make changes, asking passives how you can improve, and encouraging promoters to share with others.
Get the Full Picture
Be sure to set benchmarks by which you can measure your success and encourage employees to be mindful of continuous improvement. Of course, any one of these methods and metrics doesn’t provide you with a complete picture of how happy your clients are with your business. Taken together, however, you can use happiness metrics to gauge how you’re doing and begin to implement changes for improvement.
For more information about Google Business Profile, Social Media evaluation, and other satisfaction measures, contact Vizion Interactive today.
