What Is Client Satisfaction?

It is the degree to which a company's products or services meet customer expectations.

What is customer satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction is the degree to which a company's products or services meet customer expectations. In other words, customer satisfaction refers to how satisfied customers are after transacting with a company. Customer satisfaction measures not only how satisfied customers are with their transactions with the company, but also their overall experience with the company.

How to measure customer satisfaction?
Here are a number of ways companies can measure customer satisfaction:

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
3. Customer satisfaction score

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT):

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is an important performance indicator for customer satisfaction. CSAT's goal is to determine the level of customer satisfaction with the service, merchandise, store or customer service team. Customers are asked about their level of satisfaction with one or more aspects of the transaction. The answers of a CSAT are expressed as a percentage and range from 0 to 100%. A higher percentage indicates greater satisfaction.

Questions asked about the Customer Satisfaction Score include:

• How would you rate your experience with our service staff?
• What is the training of the employees of the service?
• How satisfied are you with the product/service?

The CSAT scale typically includes:

• Not at all satisfied (0%)
• Not satisfied (20%)
• Neutral (60%)
• Satisfied (80%)
• Very satisfied (100%)

Net Promoter Score:

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the likelihood that a customer will act as a brand ambassador and promote your product/service/company. NPS divides customers into three categories: advertisers, detractors, and detractors.

• Promoters are customers who are enthusiastic about your product/service and are more likely to recommend it to friends and family.
• Negative people are people who are satisfied with the product/service but are less likely to recommend it to friends and family. Negative elements lack strong brand loyalty and are easily diverted by competitors.
• Detractors are customers who are unsatisfied with the products/services and may damage the company’s brand image and growth through bad word-of-mouth.

The net promoter score usually consists of one question:

• How likely are you to recommend this good/service to your friends and family members?

The NPS scale typically falls between 0 to 10, with:

• 9-10 being promoters
• 7-8 being passives
• 0-6 being detractors.

Customer Effort Score:

The Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much work a customer must do to buy from the company. In other words, the CES measures the effort exerted by a customer to attain a company’s goods or services. If customers have to go through a lot of work to purchase from a company, they may be likely to take their business elsewhere. On the other hand, if the customer is willing to go through some difficulty in order to purchase a company’s products, that may indicate that they have strong brand loyalty.

Questions asked on the customer effort score include:

• The company made my purchase easy. (True/False or a rating scale)
• The service representatives handled my issue in a timely manner.
• How easy was it to get the help you wanted?

The CES rating scale typically consists of:

• Strongly disagree
• Disagree
• Somewhat disagree
• Neutral
• Somewhat agree
• Agree
• Strongly agree

Example of Customer Satisfaction:

Jonathan is the marketing manager of a phone-producing company – Calling Friends Incorporated (CFI). The company recently launched a new product and hired Jonathan to create customer satisfaction reports. Jonathan created a customer satisfaction survey and collected information from 500 customer surveys.

The questions asked in the survey are:

• How satisfied are you with your product?
• How would you rate your experience with our sales representatives?
• The company made shopping easy (score at scale)
• How easy is it to solve product problems?
• How likely are you to recommend this product to others?

Additionally, Jonathan used a scale of 1 to 10 for each question. 1 indicates 'Very dissatisfied' and/or 'Strongly disagree, and 10 indicates 'Very satisfied' and/or 'Strongly agree'. Customer satisfaction surveys are summarized in the table below. Taking the average scores of responses from the CSAT, CES, and NPM question categories, the scores for this product are:

• CSAT score 88.61%
• CES score 45.06%
• NPM score 63.14%

Jonathan can confirm that the customer satisfaction scores with the products delivered and customer service are very high. However, the customer effort results are very low at 45.06%. This indicates that customers must go out of their way to purchase the product from the company. Therefore, customer loyalty may be quite low, as further indicated by our NPM score of 63.14%.

Customers are unlikely to recommend this product to friends. Although the product and services provided by the company are good, the effort that customers must exert to get the product is high, resulting in low CES and NPM scores. Jonathan concludes that the company should look for ways to make the purchase process easier.