5 essential metrics to measure customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction metrics: group of smiling people around a conference table

The level of service customers receive during the customer journey stages could encourage them to remain loyal. On the other hand, poor customer satisfaction could influence customers to abandon a sale or never shop with you again.

This article will discuss the five essential customer satisfaction metrics to include in your business to understand your customers and provide everything they need.

What are customer satisfaction metrics?

It’s important to measure customer satisfaction throughout the customer experience to understand how customers view your organisation, whether they’re likely to be loyal, and how they might describe you to friends or family.

According to the January 2023 UK Customer Satisfaction Index, 16.5% of customers reported issues with organisations during the previous six months. Using different metrics can help you grasp how easy your product or service is to use and how customers feel throughout the buying process, as well as after using your product.

There are five main types of customer satisfaction metrics that you should be using for all your customers:

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

This metric uses a scale to measure how well your product or service meets customer expectations. It focuses on the customer’s view of your product or service rather than the process before or after they make a purchase.

The scale is often a set of five responses, allowing customers to select an answer that best fits their experience.

For example, you might ask: How satisfied are you with the quality of service we delivered? The response scale could range from highly satisfied to highly dissatisfied. Once you have responses, you can compare the satisfied and dissatisfied responses, and your score will be the difference between the two.

Viewing the results can provide insights to help you make changes to service or product features, delivery time, or customer support. You can see which areas require quick fixes and which you can change over time.

This metric tends to be limited to each customer-to-company interaction rather than showing the bigger picture.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS focuses on customer loyalty and retention. The questions are structured around customer satisfaction and how likely a customer is to recommend your organisation.

For example, after a purchase or interaction, you might ask a customer: How likely are you to recommend us to a friend? Responses can be on a scale of any number but often are on a 10-point scale.

Scores from 0-6 are named detractors and are the customers who are unlikely to recommend you to others.

Scores between 7 and 8 are passives who are somewhat loyal and satisfied. They may recommend you but may be easily swayed by another brand.

Scores between 9 and 10 are promoters. These are your happy and loyal customers who are highly likely to recommend you.

NPS mainly provides quantitative metrics that you can use for customer satisfaction reviews, but you can also add questions to gain qualitative insights. For instance, once you've asked how a customer rates you on a scale, you could ask them to explain their answer to give you more details.

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

This metric measures the effort required to buy from or interact with you and the effort needed to use your product or service. Ideally, you want low effort and ease of accessing and using your product or service.

CES uses a five-point scale. A question related to product effort might be: How easy was it to set up your product? The scale may go from very easy to very difficult and reveal where product or service changes could be beneficial.
A question relating to the effort to access the product could be: How easy was it to find the product on our website?

4. Customer churn rate

This refers to the percentage of customers who abandoned the product or service transaction. It might be somebody who was in the process of purchasing from you but left during the process, or it could be someone who left during a trial period.

This is an important metric to understand why people aren't following through and what stops them from staying with or buying from you.

There are different ways to measure this. Looking at the customer churn rate each month can show how many potential new customers start the process through a sales lead but don't continue. It can also spotlight the number of customers who leave when you make pricing or product changes.

The CES survey can also help you measure churn rate by pinpointing customer issues before they occur or uncovering why customers aren’t following through with your organisation.

5. Customer Health Score (CHS)

This focuses on using different metrics to gain an in-depth view of customer satisfaction with your brand. Using CES data, the churn rate, and the CSAT can give you a broad understanding of how customers feel about the organisation as a whole.

This metric uses a colour scale where:

Find out more about how ServiceNow can help your organisation improve customer satisfaction.