Measuring customer satisfaction used to be a tall order. In fact, beyond the most basic things, such as surveys and focus groups, there really was no way to get any solid, hard metrics on this for the longest time. Popular opinion from polling was all there was, and so, people did what they could with this information.
This was before the modern internet provided a morally acceptable window into the psyche of the people at large through blogs, discussion forums, social networks and true anonymous polling. So, when measuring customer satisfaction in modern times, we find ourselves mercifully more equipped to tackle the problem than we once were.
However, it’s not enough to just know these tools are here, we also have to know how to harness them, and how to take what we get from them and properly convert it into real data you can use. That’s a little more involved, but it is, as they say, truly not rocket science.
Join me then, if you will, on a brief look at how to harness the modern information age to determine and/or improve the quality of customer experience your company provides. We all know that blundering this is a fatal problem.
So, one of the things to first focus on is the biggest source of data for this you can get, without the Heisenberg effect that comes with surveys and polls. That will be social networks, especially Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook. On these networks, people are compelled by human-on-internet nature to voice opinions on things they like or dislike, and while this voicing isn’t usually for the deliberate purpose of being overheard by companies, the public is aware of this fact, and unperturbed by it.
Now, tracking these manually is possible, and was in fact the only way to do it for a time. However, there exist competitive intelligence suites in SaaS form designed specifically to track this information on a number of social networks. It does this by tracking mentions, trends and can be programmed to track specific accounts and word combinations as well.
With this information, you can easily get a good handle on the opinion of customers, how they regard your product, interactions and customer service in a very candid way. Along with this, using similar software to track Google searches and traffic, to see where people are searching for resolutions or like-minded opinions can give a good look at how satisfied customers are or are not.
Finally, a little more traditional but still valid, you can always listen in on some of those recorded voice conversations and chat logs that are taken from customer service interactions, and get a good idea of how well customer service is going, and how frequent first contact resolutions are being achieved, as well as how customers are left feeling on their way out.
Measuring customer satisfaction isn’t nearly as logistically impossible as people may have once believed, especially thanks to the insight into the public psyche the internet provides, and with the cutting edge software made to take advantage of this exposed information. Not taking advantage of this capacity to really gage your customer experience quality would be foolhardy.