Why Customer Satisfaction Scores Are Crucial To Boost Sales And Marketing

Customer service can be incredibly complex and stressful. Giving customers the best possible support experience entails knowing what customers want. Measuring pan-organizational performance and customer satisfaction metrics pave the way for you to deliver what’s best for your customers. This behavior is common to all types of organizations that have their customers' benefits at heart. How can organizations achieve this feat? Through support-driven growth.

A support-driven growth strategy means that your organization grows as your customers grow. And that's good because your brand and customers benefit from implementing this strategy. When you talk about how good your service quality is, you create a positive image for your brand. That's why customer service is integral to new-age marketing strategies.

However, today we discuss why customer satisfaction (C-Sat) scores are crucial to boosting sales and marketing. Is this similar to service marketing? Not really! Let us explain.

Listen to what customers have to say about you

We'll start with keeping our ears close to what customers say about your brand. Why is it important? As a brand, you must maintain your trust and reliability. How solid is your brand identity? What USP do customers see in your brand? The customer's perspective matters most — much more than what you advertise.

The bottom line is that if you want to improve customer happiness, you must listen to them. And guess what? Customers love it when brands listen to them. Creating customer-centric solutions establishes your company as a trustworthy customer-centric brand.

Gathering and working on customer data is imperative to provide customers with the products and experiences that suit their needs and help them successfully progress in their customer journey. And how do we measure how satisfied customers are partnering with your brand? The answer is through customer satisfaction scores.

What is customer satisfaction?

Contrary to popular opinion, customer satisfaction isn't limited to being just an emotion. Look carefully, and you will find that this metric determines how satisfied your customers are with your support experience or your company's service or product. Customer satisfaction scores and surveys give brands a clear perspective of what their customers think about them.

Customer satisfaction data provide crucial information to help businesses make informed decisions about the experiences, products, shopping channels, and journeys they offer. How so? When you ask your customers the right questions at an appropriate time, you get critical insights into the factors influencing their overall journey.

Always remember that the most workable insights are derived when brands conduct customer satisfaction surveys on their target audience at well-planned stages during their journey. 

As you gain more customers, more data flows in. Very soon, the consolidated data, when split into demographics, provides an insider's view into customers' minds.

Customer Satisfaction is an indicator of your business's health and clearly shows how well your product or service resonates with customers. C-Sat scores measure customer satisfaction when using your product, service, or brand experience.

Since customers are not always privy to your company's inside information, such as your roadmap, business processes, priorities, and other factors, customer satisfaction scores are not the perfect assessment of your brand. Despite this, its importance hasn’t waned one bit. Customer satisfaction scores help brands maintain a positive image and enable growth. 

Customer survey tool

To facilitate a five-star customer experience (CX) program for various business organizations, you need a tool that helps you evaluate customer satisfaction. And that is a powerful helpdesk software equipped with the CSAT Survey feature.

The outcome of a survey reflects specific customer pain points, assisting in constantly recreating good customer experiences. You can understand customer sentiment, gather feedback, and evaluate what they like or dislike. Assessing customer reactions and conducting a quantitative evaluation of customer satisfaction is possible with ThinkOwl.

Gain critical insights through customer satisfaction scores and surveys

When creating a customer satisfaction/feedback survey, remember that the information and insights you intend to acquire will manifest what your customers think about you. With surveys, you get a chance to understand your brand just as your customers do.

From your customers' vantage point, you get a chance to understand what differentiates your organization from those of your competitors. You also get an opportunity to learn what is working and what is not for your customers, besides getting a reality check concerning your brand's identity.

What should you ask in a survey?

When crafting a customer satisfaction survey, remember to frame your questions using easy-to-understand language. Maintain sincerity in your tone and try to sound cheerful. Use the checklist below as a reference before you embark on your survey.

Points to remember when drafting questions for a customer satisfaction survey:

1. Whether clients could solve their problems after using your product or service and whether the client's objective was met or not is a fundamental question. As a brand, when you seek answers to these questions from customers themselves, your brand is deemed customer-centric.
2. Whether your product or service delivered benefits as promised?
3. Do customers hesitate to choose you over other competitors before finally zeroing in on your brand? If yes, what were those concerns?
4. What features do customers enjoy the most about your product or service? Whether they are happy with it or do they desire modifications?
5. Do customers recommend your product or service to their family, friends, and colleagues? Additionally, ask respondents to give reasons for their answers.

A well-done customer survey can help a brand understand customer motives and find out why customers choose to engage or not, why new customer associations are formed, or why customer churn occurs. In addition, customers themselves encourage brands to inquire how they feel and love to share feedback.

Customer success teams ensure customer satisfaction

Nowadays, customer success managers and teams are common across many organizations. The chief responsibility of a customer success team is to support customers as they transition from sales prospects to active users of your products and services. These professionals focus on building close, long-term relationships with clients.

Roles and responsibilities of customer success professionals

Customer success professionals guarantee customer satisfaction by creating engagement strategies with clients and ensuring the customer gets the best service to enhance their experience. Customer success professionals are also tasked with:

• Growing revenue from existing customers through expansions and upsells.
• Driving revenue from new acquisitions through word-of-mouth.
• Distributing customer intel helps marketing, sales, and product teams improve their game.

How customer satisfaction scores are essential for sales and marketing

Customer satisfaction data provides vital information to help organizations make informed decisions about the kind of experiences, products, shopping channels, and journeys they offer.

Gathering and acting upon customer satisfaction survey data is crucial to provide consumers and stakeholders with the products and experiences that suit their needs and help them successfully progress in their journey/association with your brand.

Customer surveys often help businesses identify the best-performing products or services in an organization's portfolio. In addition, this data helps business leadership and Sales and Marketing teams develop strategies to make the product or service even more lucrative for potential customers.

Customer success teams aim at creating an environment for their customers that can be best described thus — neighbor's envy, owner's pride. That means that when the client utilizes your brand's product or service, the client enjoys the advantage your brand has to offer. This advantage inspires greater confidence in your products and services and helps the client be proud of its growth.

Your client's success is bound to invite curious and sometimes envious glances from competitors. Communicating customer success stories with the outside world as part of your sales and marketing activities immensely benefits your brand.

Five reasons why customer satisfaction is essential in sales & marketing

1. Helps you create better marketing campaigns to attract higher-value customers.
2. Enables you to increase your conversions by improving personalization.
3. Allows you to improve revenue and boost retention rates by understanding when and why customers are likely to churn.
4. Enhances customer communication at every touchpoint, including marketing, service, and in-store.
5. Helps you stay authentic and deliver on your brand promise.
   
   

Customer Satisfaction Scores/Surveys are a powerful resource for finding ways to improve and grow your brand. We recommend you follow this checklist to help create the perfect customer satisfaction survey:

• Clearly define your survey objectives.
• Identify the learning scope from the feedback.
• Frame your customer survey questions.
• Send your surveys to the appropriate channels. For example, SMS, email, website, or webpages.
• Include variety in your questions. Ask questions that touch on the significant aspects of your product or service.
• Follow up if the customer feedback is adverse. Find out how to improve the customer's experience (CX).
  
  

Businesses today are more customer-centric than profit-centric. A customer-centric company has a much higher chance of satisfying customers. A customer-centric organization will strive to maintain clear and effective communication between customers and its various internal teams. Example: sales, service, finance, insurance.

Also Read: Legacy Software Foments Trouble in Customer Service; Consider Replacing to Avoid Complications

Honest communication between customers and customer success teams helps businesses continuously adapt to consumers' growing needs. To facilitate a five-star customer experience (CX) program for various business organizations, ThinkOwl is equipped with the CSAT Survey feature. The survey feedback reflects specific pain points and assists in constantly recreating good customer experiences. As a result, drafting customer satisfaction surveys in ThinkOwl is super easy. In addition, ThinkOwl has multilingual support, meaning you can prepare a survey in multiple languages in minimal time.

Customer satisfaction creates value for sales and marketing teams

As human beings, we have an innate ability to elicit information from others simply through communication. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we are always curious about what’s happening around us and want to know what others think. Exchanging information and sharing experiences are more pronounced where monetary transactions are involved. 

Let’s look at the important points where customer satisfaction and feedback play a big role in advancing a brand’s sales and marketing efforts:

1. When you use customer feedback to prioritize top-of-the-line (high-end) service, your customers will likely gain positive referrals. Let’s say you want to improve your company’s response time to support tickets — incorporating AI, machine learning, and intelligent automation can help you with your customer response rates.
   Faster response rates = happier and satisfied customers. They will share their positive experiences with friends and family and keep the flow of information going. 
2. Customer Satisfaction metrics reflect your support team’s performance: Customer satisfaction benchmarks and metrics do not just help you gauge how happy your audience is—they also tell you how your support team is doing.
3. Customer Satisfaction scores also reveal vital organizational metrics like:
    (a) Your support team’s initial response time to customer issues. 
    (b) What is the time taken by your team to resolve a customer issue?
4. How frequently do your support agents transfer tickets or customer calls to find a resolution?
5. Satisfaction encourages repeat purchases by customers. A trends report by a major software vendor found that 57 percent of consumers say excellent customer service is a factor in their brand loyalty. They are also more likely to spend more money with your business.
6. Satisfaction increases the customer's lifetime value. While compiling a trends report, A SaaS vendor found that 75 percent of customers are willing to spend more to buy from companies that give them a good customer experience. Satisfied customers are more likely to remain loyal and less likely to churn.
7. Satisfaction drives new customer acquisition. When clients notice that you care about customer experience and come up with products and solutions that improve your client’s overall situation, they leave no stone unturned to ensure their partnership with you becomes long-term. If your company has a good reputation in this matter, imagine how much easier this will make the work of your sales team!
   
   

AI-powered digital communication makes creating better customer relationships easy. ThinkOwl sets itself apart from other helpdesk software because of its customer-friendly features. It is low-code and extremely easy to set up anywhere with minimum resources. ThinkOwl changes the way you communicate within your organization. It is designed to boost agent productivity and enables you and your team to communicate with customers across multiple channels easily.

Also Read: 8 Tips to Make Customer Service Process Economically Efficient Without Compromising on Quality

Take care of your business; switch to ThinkOwl today. When you use ThinkOwl, you can be sure of providing excellent service to your customers 24/7, all year round. Satisfied customers recommend good service providers to friends, family members, and co-workers. ThinkOwl bolsters your company's reputation for excellent service and ensures customer satisfaction. Transform the way your organization communicates with customers and employees. Choose AI-powered customer conversations to drive customer value and improve customer satisfaction.

If you wish to prioritize customer satisfaction within your organization and make a truly successful customer experience a reality, sign up for a 30-day free trial of ThinkOwl now.