Regardless of if you’re in the B2B or B2C industry, customer experience (CX) is becoming the hottest new marketing trend and business “must-have.”
A good customer experience means your customers will spend more. In fact, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
But what exactly is “customer experience,” and how do you measure it? Customer experience is your customers’ perception of how your business treats them. These thoughts generally affect their loyalty and whether they will stay with you or jump ship to your competitors.
Simple surveys such as customer satisfaction surveys, customer feedback surveys, or even product surveys, can not only help you gauge how you as a business is doing but can also help your clients feel a better sense of loyalty to your overall brand, incentivizing them to purchase from you more often or in larger quantities.
Why Customer Experience Is Important
The Harvard Business Review conducted a study in 2002 to determine how customer surveys impacted consumers' loyalty, purchases, and experience. Their results were staggering.
“A year after the survey was conducted, the customers we surveyed were more than three times as likely to have opened new accounts, were less than half as likely to have defected, and were more profitable than the customers who hadn’t been surveyed.”
These clients spent more money within the business and rated their customer satisfaction higher than those who weren’t surveyed. Why is that, though?
If they’re like most people, it’s because our own thoughts and experiences are often our favorite topics of conversation. On average, people spend over 60% of their conversations talking about themselves.
When you reach out to ask your customers about them and their experiences, they’re usually happy to do so - especially when you offer incentives.
Back to our original question of “why is customer experience important,” it’s because they spend 14 times as much revenue as a somewhat dissatisfied customer, and acquiring a new customer costs seven times more than maintaining an existing one.
If you’re looking for the best way to increase your revenue and keep customers loyal...customer surveys are the way to go.
Types of Surveys to Send to Your Clients
There are three main survey types you can send to your customers to gauge their experience with your business, a particular product, or their overall experience.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Survey
Customer Effort (CES) Survey
Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey
A Net Promoter Score Survey, or NPS survey, is a generic customer service survey that measures the loyalty of consumers to a business.
NPS is often held up as the gold standard customer experience metric. First developed in 2003 by Bain and Company, millions of businesses now use it to measure and track how their customers perceive them.
NPS scores determine segmenting between poor and positive feedback by asking a straightforward question…
“How likely is it that you would recommend Business Name to a friend or colleague?”
Promoters respond with a score of 9 or 10 and are typically loyal and enthusiastic customers.
Passives respond with a score of 7 or 8. They are satisfied with your service but not happy enough to be considered necessarily ‘loyal.’
Detractors respond with a score of 0 to 6. These unhappy customers are unlikely to buy from you again and may even discourage others from buying from you.
This is the best type of customer service survey if you’re trying to measure customer loyalty, how your business stacks up against the competition, and what or why your customers choose to buy from you.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Survey
A CSAT survey is an excellent customer feedback survey to send to your clients if you’re looking to measure a customer’s satisfaction with a specific transaction, item, or event.
Unlike other survey types, CSAT offers specific insights into particular customer interactions. This provides a detailed view of how a particular digital or in-person experience exceeds, meets, or misses a customer’s expectation.
Common use cases for CSAT surveys include:
Right after a customer support conversation
After an item has been purchased
After a visit to a service center or retail store
Customer Effort Score (CES) Survey
A CES survey is a customer experience survey used to measure the ease of service experience with a business. It asks customers to rate the ease of using products or services on a scale of “very difficult” or “very easy.”
Unlike an NPS survey, a higher CES doesn’t necessarily indicate customer satisfaction and can’t accurately tell your customer’s loyalty. Customer Effort Score is a customer feedback metric that measures how easy something was versus if they are a loyal customer.
If your business has a high average, it is indicative that your company is making convenient experiences for your customers. A low average indicates there’s room for improvement to make the customer experience easier.
Benefits of Customer Experience Surveys
The most significant benefit of a CX survey is that it can help your customers or potential customers get from one part of the customer journey to the next and helps lead them from the awareness stage to the loyalty stage.
It can also accurately determine which areas of your business need improvement. If the customer had a positive experience and loves the product or service provided, feel free to congratulate yourself!
However, if the customer sees room for improvement, they are more likely to tell you so. Even if you believe they are wrong, reducing the thought of a bad experience from your actions is a good idea.
CX surveys can also improve your customer relationships. According to Accenture, $1,600,000,000,000 is lost every year in the U.S. because of poor customer service. You read that right…
More than one and a half-trillion dollars is lost every year because of a negative customer experience.
Suppose you’d like to keep some of that money in your pocket. In that case, sending out a survey to measure your consumer’s experience, opinions, or thoughts is an excellent way to increase their chances of becoming loyal customers.
How to Conduct a Customer Survey
Considering 99% of adults check their email up to 20 times a day, so sending your survey through that platform is one of your safest bets.
On the other end of the spectrum, a 2016 study found receipt surveys were found to be “not used for meaningful customer listening” and “critically flawed.”
Regardless of how you will get a survey in front of your customers, the contents are crucial.
Now, Go Survey Your Customers!
But really, go.
If you want the best, most accurate feedback about your product or service, a customer survey is the way to go.
Whether your goal is to improve your product or service, get feedback on a particular event, or gauge your customer loyalty, customer surveys are an excellent way to understand your consumer’s true feelings about your brand and its product or service.
Speaking of surveys, we’d love it if you could take one for us. Here at Zoek, we constantly want to improve the types of services we offer our customers. To do this, all we ask is that you take a quick survey to let us know what type of social media platforms you use, what your most significant business pain points are, and other similar questions so we may create the best experience for you.
Kellyann Doyle is a Content Marketing Writer at Zoek, an SEO, Web Design, and Digital Marketing Agency that assists small and medium-sized businesses with their online footprint. She earned her Bachelor's Degree in 2013 from the University of Houston with a Major in Communications and a Minor in Marketing and has been working in the Digital Marketing world ever since. When not working, you can find Kellyann trying new recipes, enjoying a good nap, or watching Friends for the 500th time.