You’ve purchased a great set of earphones on Jumia (or any other e-commerce site). They arrive, you eagerly try them on, but oh no, one earphone’s audio sounds distorted, no matter how much you twist it around.

What do you do next?

Contact customer care, of course.

But your seller doesn’t seem very enthusiastic to take it back, so now you’re struggling to call, email, and fill out numerous forms asking “what was wrong with this product?” just so you can get a refund or return. It’s a lot of effort, and it’s 80% likely that you won’t be buying from that website or seller again.

Companies today look to increase customer loyalty (= customer happiness). After all, it’s your client’s satisfaction, and not the price, which determines the produce or service’s success. As a brand, the focus is now on offering more client-focused, timely and easy-to-understand services and products. This involves fixing service failures, and offer what clients really need at different stages of the process.

In today’s article, we’ve explored how you can measure your clients’ satisfaction in five easy ways, and use it to your brand’s advantage.

Set Defined Goals

This may seem evident, but it’s important for your team to outline what they plan to do after information is gathered and analyzed. Some questions you can consider asking are:

“What medium will we use to collect this feedback?”

“What questions will we ask our clients?” and

“What will we do with this information?”

Never add questions which don’t add value to your analyses, as you’ll be wasting not only your time, but your clients’ as well. Once you’ve established a game plan, the next step is to set measurable goals. Creating an action plan can help keep you and your team focused on your target goal even with unexpected setbacks or the occasional negative feedback.

Choose From Customer Support Metrics

• Measure Customer Effort Score (CES) – Here, a client is asked how much effort they had to put in to resolve their issues with your company (like with your brand-new earphones from Jumia). CES questions are either asking about the personal effort put in by the client, or if the organization made it easy for the client to interact with them. In the former, the lower you score on a scale of 1-10/1-5, the better. In the latter, the client either agrees or disagrees. This famous article tells us that instead of putting effort into delighting our customers, we should make customer experience and problem resolution as easy as possible. You can also ask “How can we improve in the future?”. Open-ended questions allow clients to express their grievances freely, and show that you really are interested in helping them.

• Use Customer Satisfaction Scoring (CSAT) – “How would you rate your experience with our so-and-so department?” is the most common question in this metric. The scale ranges from:
  • Very satisfactory
  • Satisfactory
  • Neutral
  • Unsatisfactory
  • Very unsatisfactory

The more clients give positive responses (not including “neutral”), the higher you score. CSAT is useful to track short-term changes in customer approval before and after an initiative or change, but isn’t a predictor of customer behaviour, or account for your company’s potential for growth.

• Track Net Promoter Score (NPS®) – This metric makes up for CSAT’s lack of predictive powers in customer loyalty. NPS is the result you get when you ask the “Would you recommend-” question. It’s straightforward and easy to answer, but unhappy customers tend to respond more than happy ones. Regardless, this metric helps you to zero in on improvement areas, and make a good impression on a dissatisfied customer. The chart below illustrates how to calculate your NPS.

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Find Out Where Things Went Wrong

The standard way to find out where things are going wrong is through complaint sections in client surveys. Are they saying the product or service is less than advertised? Are employees making promises that can’t be met?

These kinds of questions become important to ask, because if your service fails, people will automatically and easily switch to another brand in the market.

Providing basic services and essential information in a timely and easy-to-understand manner will go a long way in preventing unnecessary client irritation.

Monitor Your Social Media

Today, customers are more vocal than ever online. When before, a product/service experience would be shared with family and friends, now people can share their thoughts on a brand with thousands of other people on social media, from friends to influencers. It’s immediacy allows you to interact with your clients in a proximate and personal way. They can contact your business easily and spontaneously, and you can use tools to keep a track of changes in your followers, shares, and likes to give you a better idea of client loyalty and overall satisfaction.

Understand Your Competition

A daunting task, but one of the most important ways for you to assess what is (and isn’t) working for your brand, and why clients may consider some other brands over yours. You can do this via surveys to compare and contrast your product/services and look at what you aren’t offering, but can.

Your aim? To create captive loyalty. This means clients won’t care about alternate brands or find it too much effort to switch – such clients aren’t likely to change to other brands even when those might be more convenient.

To create genuine loyalty with good service/products, it’s important to identify the main needs in a client’s journey through your brand, and make sure to fulfill them through trial, error, and finally success. The Tribe of Brands team can help you stay on top of trends to effectively navigate the complex waters of the internet. Our marketing agency can help you with further ideas of how to design world-class websites, seamless user journeys and digital marketing campaigns.