What is the aim of any good social media campaign? Ultimately, you want people to have the best possible impressions of your company or business.
This means that sales will increase, positive word-of-mouth will spread, and customer retention will improve. However, when developing your social media campaign, you need to know what your customers already think about your products or services.
This is where Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores come in. CSAT is a super simple way to measure customer experience. It’s useful across all aspects of your business, and it can also be used to develop an effective and persuasive social media campaign. Most importantly you need to know how to measure CSAT.
CSAT means that your social media campaign doesn’t have to be based on guesswork or anecdotes—instead, you can have a clear scientific understanding of your customer base.
But first, you need to know a bit more about CSAT scores.
What is CSAT?
There is a range of different ways of measuring customer experience, including methods such as CSAT and NPS. However, CSAT is one of the simplest and most straightforward. Because of this, it is the most widely used.
A CSAT score is developed after asking questions to customers through a survey. Answers are divided on a scale of progressive satisfaction.
An example of this would be a scale going from 1-5: 1) ‘not at all satisfied’, 2) ‘dissatisfied’, 3) ‘neither satisfied nor dissatisfied’, 4) ‘satisfied’, or 5) ‘very satisfied’.
In order to then collect and compare satisfaction across your company, these answers are turned into a percentage. This final percentage is the CSAT score.
Being able to easily compare percentages is what makes CSAT one of the most useful customer experience metrics. It allows you to find out which of the specific products or services offered by your company are the most effective.
As well as this, expressing customer satisfaction as a percentage means that all employees are able to easily understand the metric—whether it refers to overall customer satisfaction or to certain departments.
Image sourced from bethebean.com
Why are CSAT scores important?
As the image above shows, prioritizing positive customer experience is a sign of a growing company.
Finding new ways to grow your business—such as through using social media—should be in the minds of anyone who owns a company, and customer experience is always important to this.
However, as well as this general importance, using CSAT scores is vital for a range of specific reasons—here are some (but by no means all) of these.
Identify problems with your product
Regardless of how much testing you might do, nobody can quite use your product or service like a customer. By creating different satisfaction tasks for specific parts of your product, you can get an idea of how happy customers are with each aspect.
These don’t have to be big or obvious issues—indeed, you will probably be aware of these before customers point them out. Instead, CSAT scores are important for recognizing parts of your product that you can make easier to use or understand.
Know your customers
Having a clear and accurate picture of who buys your products or services is crucial to almost every aspect of your business. This picture shapes the strategies used for marketing, product design, and customer relations.
However, businesses often don’t go beyond demographics when thinking about their customers. CSAT surveys allow you to know what your customers think about your products and learn about their actual experiences with your company.
This means that you have a more well-rounded image of who your customers are. In particular, this will allow you to develop a better customer experience, ultimately improving customer retention and sales levels.
Image sourced from marketingcharts.com
Improve your services
The final product is not the only part of your customer’s experience that matters. Instead, you should think about customer satisfaction across the entirety of their interaction with your company.
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score metrics can help you to identify which parts of this interaction can be improved. For instance, you could ask customers about their satisfaction when purchasing a product if you want to improve sales.
Alternatively, you may want to focus on customer services and the customer experience after their initial purchase. Tailoring your CSAT surveys to the specific services offered by your company means that you can know which ones to develop.
Focus your investment
Running any business can be an expensive and risky venture. Therefore, you want any decisions that you make to be as informed as possible.
CSAT scores will help you to identify which parts of the customer experience need the most investment, allowing you to focus your funds on the issues that really matter and see the biggest returns on investment.
For example, you might choose to invest in team task management software if you detect low levels of customer satisfaction with your team’s speed when dealing with tasks.
How can you measure CSAT at your company?
As we have seen, CSAT can bring many benefits to your business, especially as a customer retention tool. But knowing how CSAT surveys can help to drive growth is different from knowing how to effectively measure CSAT.
Luckily, CSAT is a relatively simple way of assessing customer experience. This means that there are just a few straightforward steps to take in order to measure CSAT.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
Find your best contact method
Before you find out what your customers think, you need to know how to talk to your customers. The best way to do this varies from company to company and industry to industry.
You could conduct surveys through follow-up calls. This might suit companies that do a lot of their business through phone calls, such as B2B sales enterprises.
Follow-up calls allow you to ask more detailed questions – they can be attached at the end of a normal sales call, or you can schedule calls throughout the lifecycle of a product.
This method also gives you an opportunity to build a more personal relationship with your customers.
Alternatively, if you operate through a website or app, consider building a survey into your online infrastructure. This can include a pop-up AI chat box or a link to a survey on an external website and is especially useful if you only want to conduct short surveys.
You may also want to use your brand’s social media to engage with customers and ask survey questions.
Finally, you can use email surveys. Emails are a widespread way of contacting customers, so this is an option open to most if not all companies. However, they tend to have a lower return rate than more immediate or personal methods like follow-up calls.
Create your survey
As we said earlier, CSAT surveys can be used to assess customer experience across your company. However, you should design surveys one at a time. This will ensure that each survey is as effective as possible.
Surveying customer satisfaction works best when you follow some basic guidelines. Keep the questions short and simple. You don’t want your surveys to seem like a chore for your customers—if it’s too difficult, they simply won’t respond.
Similarly, the overall survey should be no more than a few questions. This means that you’ll have to focus on the issues that really matter to you.
If, for example, you want to test customer experiences of your free signature capture software, you might include three questions on ease of use, efficiency, and comparison to other software.
Your survey should include a uniform scale across all questions. This will make it simpler when calculating the CSAT score. Always try to include a neutral option on the scale—many customers won’t feel strongly either way about some of your questions.
Screenshot taken from surveylegend.com
Calculate CSAT score
Once you have created your survey and asked your customers for their feedback, the time has come to analyze your results. You can also export Instagram analytics to analyze this data too.
To calculate the CSAT score, find out the total amount of positive scores. For instance, this would be 4 and 5 on a scale going 1-5, where 3 is neutral.
Then, divide this number by the total amount of responses and multiply by 100. This should produce a percentage—your CSAT score.
Integrate your CSAT metrics and continue surveying
A single CSAT score is useful, but only to an extent. To enjoy the real benefits of using CSAT measurements, you need to integrate it into a wider feedback strategy.
The main upside of using CSAT metrics is the ease of comparison across different surveys due to their expression in a percentage.
As well as this, you should continue to measure CSAT; perhaps include it in a customer lifecycle marketing strategy. This will provide you with information on customer experience across various touchpoints in their interactions with your company, and you can compare changes over time.
To get the most out of CSAT scores, use them to measure the efficiency of any changes that you make. This means that you should see it as a continuous process that will become an integral part of your company’s development.
Why does CSAT matter for your social media campaign?
So, measuring CSAT is a simple method to understand more about your customers, with a range of benefits for all businesses.
However, CSAT scores can also be really useful as you grow your business using social media—one of the most important parts of any modern company. Let’s have a look at some of the reason why below.
Learn about what matters to your customers
A growing part of modern business is being socially aware, with 53% of small businesses standing by a social mission. For many companies, this is made most explicit on social media, where sharing issues and information about a chosen social issue can have the biggest impact.
If you want your company to get in on the act, you can use CSAT scores to find out what social issues your consumers want businesses to care about. This will help your company to build a better bond with customers, while it can also help your social media presence to grow.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
Use social media to help customers
Social media can be a simple way of achieving digital transformation for customer experience. If your CSAT scores indicate a common issue with a product, you can use your social media campaign to spread awareness about solutions.
Everyone knows the challenges of a social media storm. By recognizing potential issues for customers and countering them through social media, you are unlikely to be trending for all the wrong reasons.
This can also help you to increase followers, especially if new customers are encouraged to find your social media channels for product updates.
Shape your social media strategy going forward
A well-designed CSAT strategy will mean that you have a clear understanding of your customer’s image of your company, as well as their needs and wishes when looking for a product.
While CSAT has traditionally been seen as a crucial eCommerce metric, it is also vital for product marketing—and your social media strategy is an increasingly important part of product marketing.
By knowing more about your customers, you can create a social media strategy that is perfectly suited to its target audience. For instance, if your CSAT scores indicate that your customers heard about a product on Twitter, you might want to focus on developing your presence on Facebook or Instagram.
Similarly, if you learn that customers would recommend your company to family or friends, you might want to design social media posts that encourage sharing with followers, such as competitions that customers can enter by sharing or by using referral programs.
CSAT—the way to develop a smart business and social media strategy
Measuring CSAT is one of the easiest ways of finding out about customer experience. By following a simple formula, you can create a metric that is easily comparable and that all your employees can understand.
In this way, you can identify problems, improve your services, and know your customers. As well as this, measuring CSAT can help you to develop an intelligent social media strategy by tailoring your output to the needs and habits of your customers.
CSAT measurement is a straightforward way to ensure that your business decisions and investments are made while knowing all the relevant information.