Why retailers need to measure customer happiness
When retailers' customers aren’t happy, how do they really know? Many key metrics, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), are born from accumulated survey results and don’t capture true happiness. Surveys focus on whether a customer is satisfied, which is very different from happieness. These are two very different things. So, the question becomes: Are companies really primed to measure customer happiness, or are they settling for a rationalized alternative created by linguistic gymnastics in a survey?
This question is more important today than ever before. Customers today are in control of the buying process, and they want to feel the love from companies in exchange for their business.
Companies want to make an emotional connection with their customers, and rightly so. After all, active, engaged customers are the gold standard for customer satisfaction and customer advocacy.
But for most companies, attempting to measure customer happiness typically begins and ends with the customer satisfaction survey at the end of a transaction.
While surveys are an important tool in measuring customer sentiment, there are several flaws with this oft-used approach:
Surveys don’t offer complete pictures of customers: The surveys most companies use are fixed on a specific point in time, product or step in a process, instead of capturing the customer’s affinity towards his or her entire experience with the company.
The results are often biased or inaccurate: Customers who answer the typical customer survey are typically very happy with their experience or extremely disappointed. The sentiments of the vast majority of customers who fall towards the middle of the bell curve often go untracked.
Surveys are often off-putting to customers because they are too long: Ever agree to take a customer satisfaction survey in the spirit of helping the company out, only to find it’s eight pages long? It’s happened to just about everyone. And, guess what? Most customers give up on the survey before ever getting to page two.
Optimizing the survey score becomes the ultimate goal: When surveys are the means by which a company measures how it is satisfying customers, raising the level of the score often becomes the priority, rather than improving performance. The goal becomes raising the score, not improving customer experience.
Instead of using surveys to capture customer satisfaction at the end of a transaction, companies should be seeking to measure customer sentiment throughout his or her relationship with the business, from the first time the customer touches the company until after his or her purchase is complete. This can be achieved by employing three very specific tactics via surveys:
Expand the Scope of information gathering: Capturing data across more touchpoints, which are the engagements the customer has with the company. Collecting fewer data points across a greater breadth of interactions with a customer every time he or she touches a brand provides a more holistic view of customer experience.
Improve Concision: Make it short and sweet. Most companies make customer satisfaction surveys entirely too long, impinging on customer goodwill and patience. It’s important to tailor the length and essence of the survey to leverage a customer’s goodwill but not infringe upon it. This means the survey might be only one or two questions long or presented to the customer in a simple, yes/no format. By making surveys easy and quick, conversion rates on capturing information will go up.
Increase the Number of Times Data is Collected: Attempt to collect mini-surveys more frequently and throughout the customer lifecycle to have a better bead on what customers are thinking.
By beginning the process of collecting customer sentiment across the complete customer lifecycle, businesses will be able to establish important metrics like:
Why customers were acquired during a specific period in terms of both volume and value
Why customers were lost during the same period
What initiatives or touchpoints expanded or reduced the number of customers across the entire operation
These metrics provide clarity on how customer experience impacts financial performance, connecting customer experience to ROI. By measuring customer sentiment throughout their journey with a business, companies will be in a better position to understand if what they are doing is ultimately adding value to the lives of their customers, which is the true objective for any lasting business.
David Trice is co-founder and CEO of Engage.CX, the leading experience-driven CRM for enterprise. Prior to launching Engage.CX, Trice was VP of CRM at Oracle, where he led the launch of Oracle’s Fusion CRM.