Four Ways to Measure Customer Satisfaction Online

Customer satisfaction matters for so many reasons, it’s hard to cover in a single blog post, but here goes. First and foremost, you want to retain customers, and an unhappy one is unlikely to make another purchase. Secondly, there’s the potential positive and negative implications of that customer telling their networks about you, aka word-of-mouth. Finally, if you don’t measure customer satisfaction, you’ll never know how to improve. So why don’t more companies prioritize measuring customer satisfaction online?

Measuring Satisfaction in 4 Different Ways

1. Surveys

This tried and true method of measuring a customer’s level of satisfaction has made the shift online via hundreds of different survey apps that are available. You can prompt a survey after a sale, a customer service call, or during a website visit.
Pros: You get to ask pointed questions about points you may be concerned about, and offer some sort of incentive for customers to fill it out.
Cons: Because online surveys are often incentivized, customers’ motives are swayed, and they may do whatever it takes to fill it out quickly without much thought.

2. Loyalty

If a customer makes multiple purchases in a reasonable time period, it’s easy to surmise that they are satisfied. Use your CRM or analytics program to measure recency of a customer purchase in comparison with the averages.
Pros: It’s a pretty reliable data source.
Cons: If you don’t already have a report built, personnel is needed to analyze this Key Performance Indicator (KPI).

3. Reviews

If you aren’t monitoring online reviews across your own e-commerce, partner e-tailers, and review specific sites, you are missing out on some low hanging fruit.
Pros: See all of your reviews in one place. Sort them by positive and negative. Understand what is moving the needle with consumers now, which can predict retail sales in the near future.
Cons: You’ll need to find a company who aggregates these reviews for you. Channel Signal not only aggregates reviews, but provides professional analysis leaving you with actionable takeaways.

4. Online Monitoring

Method #1 is great because you can ask pointed questions, but the survey is solicited. Method #3 is more powerful because the opinions are based on product performance. It’s real, personal and knowledgeable. However, in both cases consumers have been asked to give their opinions, which can often sway them. What about monitoring what consumers are saying about your brands and products online when they haven’t been asked? When they are freely talking online. Consumer to consumer. Social monitoring with sentiment analysis allows you to do this.
Pros: See consumer opinions about your brand and products on websites, social sites and blogs when they weren’t prompted by something like a survey.
Cons: Traditional automated sentiment analysis tools have a margin of error. That’s why Channel Signal’s tools are always backed up with human editing and analysis to provide you with accurate sentiment.
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