Maintaining happy customers allows your business to grow sustainable and make money. However, ignoring customers and their desires can cause losses for your business, since customer retention is a huge driver for growth.
Although many ecommerce businesses try track this information, many are struggling with the when, why, and how to ask for feedback. Luckily, measuring customer satisfaction is easier than it seems. After all, it comes down to learning about your customers, seeing how they react to your business, and changing it to meet their needs.
In this piece, we’ll dive into the customer experience , teach you how to track and measure customer satisfaction, and what to do with the customer feedback you get.
The purpose of tracking customer satisfaction
Some may wonder why they should track customer satisfaction and how it benefits them. When you track customer satisfaction in ecommerce, you can identify ways that your business needs to improve to increase customer retention. Tracking this information leads to benefits, but ignoring it can cause serious consequences.
Consider these customer satisfaction statistics:
Ecommerce and customer satisfaction go hand-in-hand, and the above statistics make the best case for evaluating customer satisfaction.
- If a customer has a poor service experience, you will most likely lose them.
- Customers will pay more for a better service, but the majority of businesses don’t meet those expectations.
- You lose more customers to poor customer service than to pricing or product issues.
In short, these points show how your customer interactions affect your ecommerce margins. When customers like your brand and the customer service provided, you gain more sales, more loyal customers, and a willingness to spend more money on your great product line . Brand loyalty allows your business to succeed as you keep your customers satisfied.
As you collect data about customer satisfaction, you can see what they like and what they dislike. Consider their opinions so that you can build your business around their desires. As you meet their needs and provide them the products and services that they want, they will feel happy and appreciated.
How to measure customer satisfaction: metrics and customer survey examples
You know that you should put your customer first and make sure they’re happy, but how is customer satisfaction measured? There are a few different approaches to gathering feedback.
First, you need to consider what types of metrics and surveys measure customer satisfaction, and how to track them.
- CSAT: Customer Satisfaction Score
- CES: Customer Effort Score
- NPS: Net Promoter Score
How to track customer satisfaction with a CSAT survey
A CSAT survey gives you the freedom to set it up however you like. You typically ask for simple feedback: “Please rate your experience with our store/at checkout/with customer support.” This, like most low-commitment surveys, is followed by a simple box where customers can leave longer comments about their score.
From there, you can apply a range like 1-3, 1-5, or even 1-10. The larger your range is, the more space there is for nuance. However, if you have a lot of scores but not a lot of people leaving comments about those nuances, customer satisfaction may be harder to track.
That said, a shorter range isn’t necessarily better. For example, leaving only three potential responses (1-3 range, negative, neutral, and positive), doesn’t leave your customer a lot of room for mixed feelings and puts them into one box or another. Don’t be too surprised if you end up with a lot of neutrals.
What you need to do with a CSAT is to find what works for your customers and your ecommerce store. Once you find the benchmark that works best, you’ll be able to accurately measure customer satisfaction.
How to measure customer feedback with a CES
Particularly well-adapted for determining the effectiveness of your UI/UX, a CES doesn’t focus on customer feeling, but instead on the amount of effort a customer used to complete an action.
For ecommerce, this would be useful after checkout, or perhaps after returning a product. Unlike other methods of tracking customer satisfaction, for CES, the lower the score, the better.
Typically, you can define your range, say 1-7, with 1 being the least amount of effort and 7 being an extreme amount of effort. With customers valuing simplicity and ease-of-use, a good CES satisfaction rating can be a good indicator of loyalty and retention.
Note: Some CES surveys can be flipped so that the highest range stands for “very easy” and the lowest stands for “very difficult.” There’s ultimately no difference as long as your survey question is clear and your customer knows how to respond.
How to evaluate customer satisfaction with NPS
An NPS survey is one of the best tools for customer satisfaction measurement—it’s low-commitment, fast, and tells you everything you need to know in one simple question.
“Would you recommend our store to a friend or a family member?”
Followed by a one-click rating scale from 1-10, this is the simplest way to gather and measure customer feedback. Many ecommerce brands often include a text box after that initial question for any feedback a customer feels inclined to give, but it’s usually optional.
This customer feedback survey helps you understand what percentage of your customers are:
- Promoters: Those who respond 9 or 10. These are your best customers who will actively advocate for your shop and recommend it to others.
- Neutrals, or passives: Those who respond 7 or 8. These customers won’t actively promote your brand, but they won’t discourage others either.
- Detractors: Those who respond 1 through 6. These are the people who have had such a bad experience that they’ll actively discourage others from shopping with you.
From here, you measure customer satisfaction by subtracting your promoters by your detractors. For example, if you have 100 customers, and 65 of them are promoters, 25 are neutrals, and 10 are detractors, your net promoter score would be 55 (65-10).
You can then track customer satisfaction using your concrete NPS score to make improvements, see how satisfaction ebbs and flows through seasonal shopping, and make actionable decisions based on how your customers feel.
If customers add a specific comment afterwards, all the better. You’ll be able to listen to the voice that accompanies this important KPI.
Examples of satisfaction survey questions
Many companies use full surveys because it gets a direct response from customers. But when you’re figuring out how to track and measure customer satisfaction, it can be difficult to know exactly what to ask.
Start from what you want to know. NPS, CES, and CSAT make it easy to know what question to include in your survey, but if you want a more involved approach, ask the right questions.
Customer feedback survey questions
Maybe you want more in-depth responses than an NPS, CES, or CSAT provides. Create a customer satisfaction survey to gather feedback on a specific part of your customers’ purchase experience. You’ll be able to get a better picture with the right questions.
Here is a list of sample customer satisfaction survey questions to help guide your next survey.
If you want to know about your site:
- How easy was it to complete your purchase?
- How simple was it to create an account?
- Were you able to find the products or information you needed?
- Were our shipping and returns policies clear?
If you want to know about orders:
- How easy was the purchase process?
- Did your order arrive on time?
- Did you feel tracking was transparent?
- How would you prefer to receive tracking information in the future?
If you want to know about your products:
- Did you like the product?
- Do you feel product photos accurately represented the product?
- Was sizing/color/option accurate?
- How do you feel about the quality of the product?
If you want to know about support:
- Was your issue resolved quickly?
- Was it easy to resolve your issue?
- Are you satisfied with the resolution?
And above all, the best question you can ask for customer satisfaction:
“What could we do better?”
You don’t have to (and frankly, shouldn’t) ask all of these questions in one huge customer satisfaction survey. No one would ever fill it out.
Instead, prioritize what’s most important right now.
You can focus your customer feedback survey around one aspect of the entire experience if you’re looking to improve certain areas. Then, after you’ve received feedback, made changes, and received more feedback, you can prioritize another area.
Combine the findings you get from customer feedback surveys with customer reviews. Consider what they like and dislike. If they like something, then maintain that part of your business. However, if they dislike something, consider changing it so that you can satisfy more customers.
As for statistics, your website metrics will let you know how customers feel. Do sales increase? Do you have recurring customers? Are your website visits increasing? If your ecommerce metrics improve , that reflects customer satisfaction.
Bringing it all together
Once you know your metrics and how to measure them, you can adjust your business to increase customer satisfaction. Always seek to improve the experience for customers: after all, customer loyalty leads to sales, not just products. Yes, you need a great product, but strong customer service will help with customer retention.
As you place customers at the center of your business and build towards their satisfaction, you will gain customer loyalty. Along with this, they will also develop satisfaction for your company and continue to visit your business because of the services that it provides. Continue to work towards this goal so that you can maintain a strong customer base.