6 Essential Customer Satisfaction Metrics to Track

Customer satisfaction often gets left behind in a fast-growing company’s list of priorities. But, the sooner you start tracking customer satisfaction metrics, the sooner you can diagnose potential problems in your business and solve them. 

In this guide, I will walk you through all the key customer satisfaction metrics you should be tracking.

We’ll look at the following:

• How Do You Measure Customer Satisfaction?
• Why Do Your Customer Satisfaction Metrics Matter So Much?
• 6 Key Customer Satisfaction Metrics You Should Be Measuring
• How to Collect Customer Satisfaction Data

By the end, you’ll have actionable steps to implement in your business, allowing you to easily set up a system to collect feedback and track your customer satisfaction metrics.

Sounds good?

Let’s dive in.

You can use various metrics to measure customer satisfaction, including Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction Score, Customer Health Score, and more.

Most companies don’t need to measure every single metric (but it won’t hurt). Pick a few to focus on, figure out how to improve them, and move on to a new area to improve.

By looking at multiple metrics together, you can better understand how happy your customers are and how different parts of your customer experience affect satisfaction. 😇

As well as looking at quantitative data, running surveys and customer interviews to find insights that would be impossible to learn from quantitative methods.

Just because someone is paying you doesn’t mean they’re happy with your service. Having satisfied customers means tracking the customer loyalty through different kind of customer satisfaction surveys.

By keeping your ear to the ground, you’ll have a feedback loop between your customers and your team.

You can use your feedback to:

• Identify pain points in your product or service
• Implement user onboarding email or live chat sequences to improve the service experience
• Find out what your users genuinely care about and use that in your marketing

It’s not just a feel-good measure, either.

81% of consumers say a positive customer service experience increases the chances of them making another purchase. Happy and satisfied customers always lead to increased customer loyalty and a better customer lifetime value.

Once you start measuring your customer satisfaction levels, you can make decisions to improve them and ensure your customers stick around, which is key to sustainable business growth.

In the next section, let’s look at some of the most crucial customer service metrics.

Every business will have slightly different definitions of customer success, so some of these metrics will be more relevant than others.

The key is to adapt them to your business and use them appropriately.

First, we have the Customer Satisfaction score, or CSAT for short. It’s a general measure of customer satisfaction feedback.

The most simple way to calculate CSAT is to ask your customers: “How satisfied are you with [product/service name]?”.

To start measuring customer satisfaction scores you can send customer satisfaction surveys to selected customers.

For instance, you are searching for customer feedback whenever they interact with your customer support.

Then, they respond on a one to five scale:

1. Very unsatisfied
2. Unsatisfied
3. Neutral
4. Satisfied
5. Very satisfied

Once the results are in (aim to collect as many responses as possible), you can calculate CSAT with this formula:

(Positive Responses / Total Responses) * 100 = CSAT

Depending on your service, a good CSAT will vary but aim for at least 80%. 

You can easily run CSAT surveys via a live chat or the occasional email survey.

Anything less than that is likely to be undiagnosed problems in your product/service delivery.

This is the first Customer satisfaction metric you want to measure.

Next in line, we have NPS! Have you ever heard about it?

Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is a popular customer satisfaction metric.

NPS Surveys is different from Customer satisfaction score or CSAT surveys cause is not related to a single experience they had (not only customer service satisfaction). It’s related to the overall satisfaction that makes happy customers.

You’ll ask your customers: “How likely are you to recommend [company] to a [friend/ colleague]?”

As you can see from the image below, people will have a rating scale from 0 to 10.

You then categorize answers into three buckets based on the score they gave.

• Promotors: gave a score of 9-10.
• Passives: gave a score of 7-8
• Detractors: gave a score of 0-6. Those that spread negative word of mouth.

Research by Bain found that a customer experience promoter has a lifetime value of 600-1,400% more than a detractor.

To calculate your NPS, use the following formula:

% Promoters – % Detractors = NPS

It’s a great metric to track because it’s holistic.

Your customers wouldn’t recommend your product to their friends or coworkers if the support was terrible (even if your product is useful).

It’s a success metric for the entire company rather than one part of the product. It might depend on multiple factors but will also be related to the company’s growth.

A higher number of promoters will bring to an increased purchase frequency (repeat purchases), an increased average purchase value for your online store or product, and in the end an increased average customer value.

If your NPS is low, you can start by breaking up the customer experience into different parts and work on improving them individually.

For example, let’s say you have an average NPS of 60.

You redesign your onboarding process, changing nothing else in your product. Users signing up after the redesign now give an average NPS score of 75. You now know that your onboarding was a key pain point in the customer journey.

You can improve different parts of the customer experience and track how each affects NPS.

How to send NPS surveys

You can easily measure NPS using Customerly NPS surveys.

Head to the NPS tab in your dashboard, then set your parameters. For example, based on your customer interaction (such as an event)

Once it’s running, you’ll see data on your NPS score, vote distribution, and more.

As well as seeing quantitative data, you’ll see qualitative data with what your customers say about your company.

With the combination of quantitative and qualitative feedback, you’ll get a complete picture of your overall satisfaction.

Looking at your NPS will force you to confront that not everyone would recommend your product to others, and you can then figure out how to take the customer experience to the next level.

The Optimization of your Net promoter score NPS will certainly bring business success.

Not sure if you need NPS? Here are 7 Reasons why every SaaS needs to start measuring NPS.

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a good indicator of how easy it is for your customers to have their problems solved. 

It’s a good metric to understand how effective your customer support is.

How to measure Customer Effort Score

To measure your Customer Effort Score, ask your customers to score the ease of ticket resolution on a 1-10 scale. Then, use this formula:

Total CES Sum / Number of Responses = Customer Effort Score

But why measure CES? A couple of reasons.

CES is 40% more accurate at predicting customer loyalty than CSAT.

Understand how satisfied customers are with this Customer Effort Score Survey Template.

It’s also a good way to identify areas to improve in your customer service systems, for example, by adding a self-service knowledge base or chatbot.

Customers will spend less time looking for the information they need, and your team will spend less time on support calls or writing replies.

As always, it’s key to remember that the metric doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A CES will show a customer’s feelings at one point in time.

For example, you might consistently score well on your CES, but if a single customer then says it took a look of effort to resolve a problem, it will reflect poorly on your customer support team.

To improve your CES, focus on improvements such as:

• Reducing response time (even if the problem isn’t resolved immediately)
• Creating a self-service knowledge base

Create a Knowledge base to reduce customer tickets

Improve your Customer relationship with a self-serve help center (Knowledge base). This will also reduce customer service interactions and probably to having the best customer satisfaction metrics.

You can easily create an adequate knowledge base using Customerly that users can search through to solve problems quickly.

First, head to the Help Center on your dashboard.

Create your help center, and create collections and articles around common pain points your leads and customers have.

Once your knowledge base is live, your users can search through them directly from your live chat widget or get a series of suggested articles.

They’ll get instant answers, making the problem-resolution process effortless.

They can easily start a new conversation with your support team if there’s no answer to their question.

It’s a simple and effective way to help people solve their problems without routing every new question to your already-busy team.

At the end of every help doc, we ask if the article answers their questions to improve customer satisfaction and give you better insights on which articles you need to fix.

These are customer metrics to calculate your overall customers satisfaction with your knowledge base.

The lower the negative feedback, the higher your first contact resolution rate will be.

If people aren’t satisfied with the answer you provided, you know that there’s an opportunity to update your answers to help your customers.

Customer Health Score (CHS) is a metric unique to your company and product. You give customers a score based on whether they’re taking important actions.

For example, if you run an email marketing platform, you’ll consider outcomes like:

• If they’ve integrated their account with their email provider
• Number of subscribers a user imports to their email list
• First email campaign sent

These metrics are tied to success and customer retention with your product.

At Customerly, our CHS is linked to actions like:

• Help Desk being setup
• Customer feedback surveys implemented
• Number of contacts imported
• Whether someone launches an NPS or not

One way to calculate CHS for key actions is:

(Number of new users doing [valuable action] within 30 days / Total new users in last 30) days * 100

Your CHS will need to be updated whenever you ship new product updates or your onboarding process changes. The key is linked to someone being successful with your product.

An easy way to improve your CHS is to use an in-app live chat triggered at key moments or to run regular customer interviews with new users to find areas to improve in your onboarding. 

Surveys, feedback, and customer interviews are nice, but your churn rate is the real test of how happy your customers are.

To calculate your customer churn rate, you can use the following simple formula:

Total Number of Churned Customers / Total Number of Customers = Customer Churn Rate

There are other ways to calculate churn depending on your business model and growth rate. But however you choose to measure it, it’s a critical metric to keep track of. If your churn is high, it’ll be hard to grow. 🧨

The typical churn rate for SaaS companies is 2-8%, according to data from ProfitWell. If your churn is higher than that, you’ll have trouble growing your revenue, as a drop in revenue will offset every new customer.

For more loyal customers, you can ask these questions whenever a customer churn.

You are supposed to send this churn survey as soon as the user cancels their subscription or is about to do so, as suggested by ProfitWell, cofounder at SaaStock.

What if a customer makes the decision to cancel the plan freezing the credit card?

Well, you can then use this churn survey template via email to collect valuable feedback from nonactive users.

This survey, combined with other metrics, will give you the possibility to make customers happy again.

So, you now have a dashboard full of metrics to track weekly or monthly.

But don’t forget to ask your users for qualitative feedback.

Use in-app feedback questions, ask your customers for feedback in your marketing emails, and encourage them to communicate with you.

Over time you’ll discover unique insights that wouldn’t be possible without hearing about them from real users and wouldn’t show up in an NPS survey or churn rate calculation.

You can also monitor review sites like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot to find out how your customers feel about your product.

For example, you can monitor the What you dislike section on G2. 

Here’s some useful qualitative feedback one customer left Mailchimp:

You’ll see common areas your customers have problems with that they might not share with your team or feedback tools.

1. In-App Surveys

One simple way to collect feedback from active users is to use in-app surveys.

These are automated messages that you can trigger at particular moments.

For example, you could create a survey that triggers after someone completes the onboarding process, asking questions like:

• How easy was the onboarding process?
• Do you have any other questions about [product]?

You can easily set these up using Customerly by using one of our survey templates.

How to create an in-app Survey

Firstly, head to the Feedback section in your Customerly account, then click on the Surveys tab.

You can create any survey you want, choosing between options like:

• Radio buttons
• Long text answers
• Short textbox

You can also add logic to your surveys. For example, if someone replies to the above question saying it was “Very hard” to set up a campaign, you can send them an open-ended question to find out more.

Next, define who will see your survey and what events need to happen for them to see the survey. 

Some popular events to trigger surveys are when a free trial is activated or a paid subscription starts.

Test multiple variations, and see what your customers respond to most. 

Once your survey is finished, write a nice thank you message. After all, your users didn’t have to answer, so it’s good to show some appreciation.

When everything is in place, you can review your campaign, decide when you want it to start (you can also set an end date), and hit Send. 

Track survey responses

Your survey will go live, and you can start collecting valuable customer feedback on autopilot. 

You could ask for quantitative feedback, qualitative, or even use a net promoter score.

In-app surveys are also a great way to hear from unhappy customers before they churn.

As soon as someone leaves negative feedback, your team can reach out to them, solve the problem, and ensure their problems are solved.

2. Post-Churn Surveys

If someone cancels their subscription or doesn’t return after starting their trial, don’t take it personally.

It’s an opportunity to learn about what your product is missing or areas your customers struggle with.

When someone churns, send them a friendly email.

Ask a single, simple question.

For example:

What were you planning on doing with [product name], and what stopped you from achieving that?

It’s open-ended enough that people will be happy to answer, and you’ll uncover insights you may not have even thought about.

To easily start collecting feedback from churned customers, you can use the pre-built funnels in Customerly. 

You can use this churn survey template in correlation with a workflow to automate the sending whenever someone is churning.

We have a pre-built funnel template designed to collect feedback and recover churned customers.

You can easily edit the funnel using the visual builder, including the post-churn emails‘ contents.

Finally, add your campaign settings to ensure it delivers at the correct time. You can add extra details such as the team member who will receive notifications, days to send emails, and time between actions. 

Hit Publish, and your post-churn survey is live!

You’ll be able to learn from every customer that cancels, gather useful feedback, and recover customers that would have churned if you never reached out.

3. Social Media and Review Sites

Monitor your social media feeds, post comments, and review sites.

If you can, join Facebook or LinkedIn groups where your customers hang out. Engage in conversations and build relationships. You’ll quickly find out ways to cater to your customer base more effectively and prioritize areas for improvement. 🎯

It’s good to mix in social listening on review sites and social platforms because if you’re only sending out surveys, there’s a risk of your customers getting survey fatigue.

They’ll ignore notifications when they see your company name because they know you’re just sending another survey. Your customers might often not be fully honest with you because they don’t want to be rude, but on review sites and on social media, you’ll hear honest, no-fluff feedback.

To measure your customer satisfaction levels, you’ll need tools to collect and analyze the data you’re collecting.

Customerly lets you collect NPS feedback from customers and users using:

• NPS surveys
• Automated live chat sequences
• Short or long answer questions

Whatever type of feedback you need, creating a survey and collecting it will be simple.

One of the most popular survey types, the NPS survey, can be launched in a few clicks.

Firstly, head to your NPS tab in your dashboard.

Then, decide who you’re targeting. 

You can combine multiple targeting filters with and/or logic so you know exactly who will see your NPS. For example, you might want to understand your NPS for new customers still in the first 30 days of their subscription.

Decide when you want your survey to show. You can turn it on or off on certain days and decide what time you want it to show.

Your campaign will be sent to any user matching your targeting criteria, and you can start measuring how much your customers love your product.

You’ll be able to see data and gather insights to improve your product experience, find out what your customers really think, and deliver amazing support to your customers.

Pro-tip for your business success

Repeat business is what you want to have, right? It’s even better when it comes from word of mouth.

What if, based on customer metrics such as the NPS vote, you can redirect your promoters to your social media channels (Google Maps, Facebook Page, Capterra, G2) to ask for a proper review?

As you can see from the image above, you need to include your favorite review service URL to redirect the promoters, those likely to leave a good review, and Customerly will do it for you.

Understanding how your customer feels is one of your business’s most difficult and important parts. Considering that some businesses have an average customer lifespan of less than one month, you need to work on word of mouth and optimize as much as possible those customer experience metrics.

How much effort do you need to collect important customer experience metrics?

Ready to start measuring your customer satisfaction metrics?

Well, here is the good news, Customerly solves all these pains for you, giving you plenty of ready-to-use survey templates and a plug-and-play NPS survey system.

Get your free Customerly account today – our team will be happy to help if you have any questions.