To create long-term, positive relationships with your customers, you need to understand how and why they act the way they do. The best way to learn how and why customers do and don’t do certain things? Ask them!

While asking customers about their preferences and behaviors may seem relatively simple, many companies don’t know how to truly optimize the customer satisfaction reporting process to learn the most actionable information about their customers. Which metrics to collect, how to categorize them, and what to do with all that data — these are all important steps that some brands are not utilizing to the fullest extent of their power.

Let’s take a deep dive into how to create the best customer satisfaction surveys and reports and the most effective questions to ask your customers to improve your customer service.

Customer Satisfaction vs. CSAT

Measuring customer happiness and satisfaction throughout the entire customer experience is paramount to understanding what is working and what isn’t working in your customer journey and perfecting it to meet modern customer expectations. This includes knowing how your customers are feeling at each checkpoint from discovery to purchase, including individual interactions with customer support, and being able to apply those feelings in a tangible, measurable way

That’s where the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) comes in. CSAT is used to measure an individual customer’s feelings about a specific interaction with your support team. It is generally measured through a Likert scale question, such as, “On a scale of 1-5, how satisfied are you with your customer support experience today?” often accompanied by a comment box to allow customers to supplement their response with more context.

CSAT is an incredibly important piece of the larger customer satisfaction puzzle. Let’s break down the process piece by piece.

Key Components of a Customer Satisfaction Report

Every brand is different, with different customers and different needs. However, there are some elements of an effective customer satisfaction report that are consistent for companies in every industry and customers in every demographic.

Average Satisfaction Chart

Companies will want to be able to quickly identify the average levels of satisfaction, given a specific date range and channel. Channels should include any platforms through which customer communication takes place, such as email, chat, SMS, phone calls and different social media platforms.

Ratings Chart

A “ratings chart” should illustrate the number of times each specific rating, likely based on a 1-5 Likert scale, was chosen during a selected time range separated by channel. This visualization allows companies and CS representatives to drill down slightly to see how customers are using a simple scale to rate satisfaction given different channels and time periods.

CSAT Survey Sending Funnel

It’s essential to know what customer interactions are survey-eligible at any given moment so they can be acted upon. The CSAT sending funnel illustrates the most recent state of all survey-eligible conversations within the past 24 hours, ensuring that surveys are received and completed by customers while their customer support interactions are fresh in their minds, creating the most accurate representation of their experience.

Score Breakdown

Companies and representatives need to be able to visualize not only specific ratings but also aggregate scores and percentages, as well as any correlations between those scores and percentages. The score breakdown shows the aggregated responses by ratings across all surveyed channels, including the collected ratings and what percentage of customers who chose each rating responded to the customer satisfaction survey.

Top 10 Customer Satisfaction Report Metrics

While there is an immense number of possible metrics companies can use to measure customer satisfaction, we’ve broken down the 10 most important metrics to inform actionable decisions and improve happiness throughout every step of the customer journey. While helpful individually, it’s when each of these metrics is examined together and in coordination with each other that it creates the most comprehensive picture of your customer satisfaction reports.

1. Negative Responses: The total count of conversations that were rated Negative in the selected time range. These can be hard to swallow, but they are essential to make necessary improvements to the customer experience.
2. Positive Responses: The total count of conversations that were rated Positive in the selected time range. Use these to understand what’s working and decide how to double down on it.
3. Average Score: The number of surveys scored ‘Positive’ divided by the total number of surveys rated over the selected time frame, visualized as a percentage. These are a great way to quickly know where your company is standing with your customers at a high level.
4. Median Rating: Median satisfaction rating (again, with a simple Likert scale) in the selected time range. This helps CS agents and managers know what the majority of the ratings are looking like.
5. CSAT Surveys Sent: The total number of customer satisfaction surveys sent in the selected time range. It’s important to know how many customers you are currently surveying or attempting to survey to inform the larger reporting picture.
   
6. Unresponded CSAT Surveys: The number of survey recipients that did not provide a satisfaction rating or comment. This number, subtracted from the “surveys sent” number, can provide important data about the effectiveness of your survey communication, such as whether they are being opened or whether the in-survey messaging is compelling enough to complete.
   
7. Rated: The number of surveys for which a rating was selected by the recipient. This number also helps understand the effectiveness of your survey communication — a high-rated number emphasizes effective communication that encourages customers to complete the survey.
8. Commented: The number of surveys that received a response from the recipient in the secondary question, typically a comment box. Comments are essential to the satisfaction report process, as they often provide helpful information that the customer is not given the opportunity to offer through the rating.
9. Response Rate: The total number of surveys that received a rating divided by the number of surveys that were sent, expressed as a percentage. Think of this similarly the email open rate — the higher the percentage, the more crucial feedback you’re receiving from your customers.
10. Comment Rate: The total number of surveys that received a comment divided by the total number of surveys that were sent. This percentage can be very helpful to evaluate the effectiveness of the survey itself. If customers have a lot to say in their comments, it may be time to create a survey that caters more methodically to the information customers are trying to convey.

What Does a CSAT Survey Look Like?

Companies and customer service representatives typically set up customer satisfaction surveys in one of two ways, and each has its strengths and weaknesses.

This first is to send out an email with a survey after a ticket is closed.

• Pro: The customer has had time to either revel in a good experience or deescalate from a negative experience
• Con: They may be being contacted via their unpreferred platform, making them less likely to complete the survey or enjoy the survey experience

The second method is to use “instant CSAT ratings” to measure customer satisfaction immediately with reaction capabilities embedded directly in the conversation format.

• Pro: The truest feelings about the customer support experience are fresh in the customer’s mind, resulting in the most accurate representation of their level of satisfaction
• Con: Due to the nature and format of the instant rating, it can limit the comprehensiveness of the feedback collected, leaving little room for context or supplementary information the customer can provide

The survey itself can look many different ways, but the key is to keep it simple and quick for the customer, while still collecting helpful feedback for the company. The more options, the more detailed you can get with your ratings. However, get too complicated and you risk intimidating the customer and losing their survey participation altogether. Some common options for how to format your CSAT survey include:

• Two hands with thumbs pointing up or down
• Three faces with happy, neutral, and sad expressions
• Five or 10 stars

Regardless of the option you choose, your CSAT survey should always be accompanied by the all-important comment box for any context or supplementary detail the customer would like to provide.

Three Customer Feedback Scores to Measure

The larger goal of customer happiness throughout the entire customer journey requires a collection of a range of essential data points that form a bigger picture. It’s a conglomeration of information gathered through different touchpoints that help customer service agents and managers really connect with the customer and use their opinions to inform the improvement of the customer experience. There are three primary customer scores to collect and analyze:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score: CSAT, the primary measurement we’ve discussed here, is used to measure individual customers’ feelings about specific interactions with your support team.
  
  
  
• Net promoter score (NPS): Net promoter score is a calculation of the percentage of a company’s true advocates and one of a surprisingly versatile customer satisfaction level measurement.
• Customer effort score (CES): Customer effort score is a customer service metric that tracks the effort a customer puts into using your product or service; the more effort that is needed over time will likely erode their loyalty.

Do More With Your Customer Satisfaction Survey With the Right Solution

Having the right customer experience solution in place to survey, capture, visualize and analyze customer satisfaction data is essential to conducting the process in the most effective way.

Kustomer satisfaction surveys allow you to measure your customer’s happiness with your support team after a conversation is marked “done” across every channel. The Satisfaction report provides summary and survey specific data related to surveys executed through Kustomer’s Satisfaction feature.

To learn how Kustomer can help you get the most out of your customer satisfaction reports, request a demo today.