Product Management - Getting feedback/Customer Satisfaction Score on what you have built

While you build a new product, you aim to deliver an exceptional product experience to your customers to solve their problems. Ultimately, happy customers are the lifeblood for any business. Hence measuring customer satisfaction (often abbreviated as CSAT score) is a key metric to measuring the success of your product. But how do you measure customer satisfaction or know if your customers are really happy with your product?

While you build a new product, you aim to deliver an exceptional product experience to your customers to solve their problems. Ultimately, happy customers are the lifeblood for any business. Hence measuring customer satisfaction (often abbreviated as CSAT score) is a key metric to measuring the success of your product. But how do you measure customer satisfaction or know if your customers are really happy with your product?Understanding how your users interact with your product, of course, is one way to gauge how well your product meets your customer expectations. Another way is just to ask them - what they feel about your product. Getting feedback from your customers can provide you with a lot of information that can help improve your product, better align it with your customer expectations, and finally to improve customer satisfaction.

A customer satisfaction survey is the most common method to gather feedback from your customers - because they are relatively easy to set up and also fairly simple for your customers to fill out. With standardized questions, answers can be compared more easily and can be used to gain valuable insights on what your customers really think about your product.

Here are some of the top benefits of customer satisfaction surveys:

1. Gain valuable feedback
2. Recognize trends
3. Understand customer perspective
4. Set your priorities based on customer feedback
5. Boost customer retention by bridging any gaps and improving customer experience.
6. Nurture brand promoters and maintain customer loyalty.
   

How to do Customer Surveys?

When designing the survey questions, give a thought about what you really want to find out - whether you want to gather feedback on a particular feature of the product or you want to focus on areas you can improve on your product or if you have ecommerce survey questions. Focus on one or two key areas, and design questions around the topic that prompts users to respond accurately as well as don’t take too long to fill out.

So, how and what do you ask your customers in surveys? Well, there are different ways you could ask customers satisfaction survey questions:

1. Multiple choice questions - Most surveys use multiple-choice questions. There are two main reasons. Easy to tabulate the results and also more likely that people respond to your survey as it requires less effort. There can be a variety of multiple-choice questions. Some of the most common types being ordinal questions or rating scale questions offering a range of multiple choice answers that maps onto a numeric scale, such as the likelihood of recommending your product or rating your customer service, etc, Nominal questions which identify different categories of answers, or semantics differential questions which asks the respondent to choose the option that best represents their opinion or attitude and so on.
   
2. Open-Ended questions - These type of questions gives respondents the freedom to write whatever they like. It makes the survey a bit challenging to process as well as difficult for the respondents to respond to. But these kinds of surveys are great if you are looking to gather new ideas and may result in discovering opportunities or issues that you never thought of.
   

You may use different types of survey questions depending on what data you are trying to collect. For example, if you are trying to measure the effectiveness of your product and how they like it, a semantic differential question may be helpful.

For example, How helpful was our product?

1. 1 - Not helpful at all
2. 2 - Barely helpful
3. 3 - Neither helpful nor unhelpful
4. 4 - Somewhat helpful
5. 5 - Very helpful

But, if you really need to understand what the customer wants to say about the product and you are looking for suggestions or new ideas, you need to give an open-ended question. Say, in the above case, if the respondent gives a score of 1-3, you may ask “Sorry to hear that! How could we improve?” or if they give a score of 4-5, you may ask “What did you like about the product?”.

Types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

In the above section, we saw some of the different types of questions that can be asked in a survey. But, the customer satisfaction surveys itself can be broadly classified into three types based on the metrics it collects or the purpose of the survey.

1.Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT is the metric that directly measures customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction surveys usually contain a simple question like “did our product meet your need?” with a binary response like yes or no. CSAT survey may also feature questions asking clients how happy they were with a certain product, feature of the product, etc, and ask the respondent to rate it on a scale of 1-5 or so. You can customize the CSAT questions and answers to make them more relevant to your product or brand.

CSAT score is calculated by dividing the number of satisfied customers to the total number of respondents for your survey. CSAT scores are usually expressed in percentage by multiplying the CSAT ratio by 100.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score survey asks the customer how likely they are to recommend your product and thus measures customer satisfaction as well as customer loyalty. NPS surveys are usually short and easy featuring only this one question. Respondents are needed to answer using a 0-10 scale, with 10 being very likely and 1 meaning very unlikely. Based on the response, your customers can be segmented as detractors who are unhappy with your product and are at risk of churning ( gives a score of 0-6), passives who like your product but don’t love it yet(7-8) and promoters who love your brand and will actively promote it (9-10). NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters and can range anywhere between -100 to 100. While NPS score under 0 is a bad sign, indicating you have more detractors than promoters and you are at a risk, scores between 0-30 may be considered good, between 30-70 is great, and over 70 is exceptional with high loyalty levels.

NPS surveys may be triggered at various stages of the customer lifecycle - maybe after the customer makes a purchase/start a trial, a few weeks before a subscription is nearing the end, and so on. Also, you need not limit your NPS survey to this single question. You may follow up with an open-ended question asking respondents what made them give that particular score or something like what they didn’t like about your product, or what you want to be improved, etc. Such questions can give you more insights into what actions you need to take to improve customer satisfaction.

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES score is a measure of how much effort it takes for a customer to use a product (or maybe fix a problem through customer support). Thus a CES question will ask a single question- how easy or difficult it is to use your product/or perform certain actions - may be using a particular feature of your producer or getting help from support, etc. Customers can choose between multiple answers - ranging from very difficult to very easy.

The intention of the survey is to find out if customers have a hard time performing actions or interacting with your product/brand. The collected feedback can be analyzed to understand your customer satisfaction and take action to improve the ease of use if necessary.

Now we have seen the different types of surveys and the questions that can be used for customer satisfaction surveys. To get a clear picture of how satisfies your customers are with your product, you may have to try combining results from the various types of surveys mentioned above. Each of these has a different purpose and give you different insights. Based on survey results, you can arrive at various conclusions about how customers respond to your product and what can be done to improve customer satisfaction. It is also important to send out the right survey with the right questions at the right time.

Popular Customer Satisfaction(CSAT) Survey Tools

So, now how can you go about distributing surveys and analyzing the results. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools available today that can do the job well making it a lot easy for you. You can create surveys with just a few clicks and you get the results, and analytics all in front of you, to make better decisions. Here are some of the most popular tools that you can check out.

1.Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey is one of the most popular customer feedback survey tools with a variety of customer questionnaires and customizable customer survey forms. It is a great tool for creating customer satisfaction surveys to collect customer feedback during different stages of the customer journey and analyze the results to pinpoint key drivers so that you can take meaningful actions.

2. BirdEye

An online review management tool that can be used to create simple and effective CSAT surveys. You can distribute NPS or CSAT surveys across multiple channels like email, SMS, websites and more. Its intuitive reports and dashboards enables decision making a breeze.

3. Qualtrics

A great tool to collect feedback from customers at every meaningful touch point and instantly analyze the comments. Qualtrics can also automatically route recommended actions to people in the best position to make changes, helping organizations drive continuous improvement. Isn’t that really cool?

4. Wootric

Another wonderful customer insight tool with machine learning capabilities to collect and analyze customer feedback. The advanced analytic capabilities can give immense insights on customer satisfaction and let you take appropriate action.

5. CustomerThermometer

Customer thermometer offers one-click email surveys that customers would love and provides great response rates. It’s simple and easy to set up and offers infinite ways to customize. It s powerful analytics and alerts platforms help you track real-time feedback.

All the above tools help you get feedback from customers, hear from them what they want from your product and analyze the results. But would you like to know more on how your users interact with your product? A heatmap and session recording tool like Broswee can give you more insights. They can give you a clearer picture of how users behave on your website/product and help you identify what works or what isn’t working.

Say, if you get a bad CES score, watch session recordings to identify where your users are getting stuck or what prevents them from having a smooth experience. Thus, by analyzing user experiences or product usage trends alongside the survey results can uncover unique insights into product areas that are meeting customer expectations or need improvement.

Knowing how well your product meets customer needs is the key to its success. So, get feedback and work on improving your product to meet their expectations. It can definitely make a great difference to customer satisfaction and your product success.

I hope the article helps you in collecting feedback from your customers. Leave us a comment if you have ever used customer satisfaction surveys. We would love to hear what you learned, how you used data, and what tools you used!