All businesses need to know if they’re on the right track or not. The best way to know this, of course, is to measure customer satisfaction. This helps you get a good insight into your customers’ level of happiness and satisfaction with the experience and services you offer.

To measure customer satisfaction, you can ask your customers to share their feedback at various touchpoints of their experience with you and your business, like post a meal, post-purchase at a store, after delivery, after their appointment and similar. The Customer Feedback you measure can be a good mix of open-ended and close-ended questions to ensure that customers can share their opinions in their own words, while also keeping your feedback form short and crisp, which ensures a better response rate.

While companies employ different ways to measure customer satisfaction, there are top three proven customer feedback metrics that are hugely popular in the industry, which we also recommend all companies should use. Let’s explore them together.

3 Best Customer Feedback Metrics

1. Net Promoter Score – to measure customer loyalty
2. Customer Effort Score – to measure customer effort
3. Customer Satisfaction Score – to measure customer satisfaction

Together, these three metrics are great to get a very in-depth understanding of your customers’ experience and feedback. They can all be used together or at different touchpoints based on relevance.

Why use Customer Feedback Metrics?

The Customer Feedback Metrics (NPS, CES, and CSAT) are great to use in your surveys and feedback forms as they’re very well-researched, extensively used throughout all industries and help you benchmark your scores amongst others in your industry to know how well you’re doing in comparison to other businesses.

1. Well-researched metrics – NPS, CSAT, and CES are well-researched metrics that are developed by the leading companies like Bain & Co (for NPS), CEB – now Gartner (for CES) and have been in use since 2003.
2. Easy data analysis – As standard scores and metrics, all three have a defined way of measurement and evaluating results. This makes data analysis very straightforward, scientific and easy for layman.
3. User-Friendly – Because they’re so popular, most customers have also come across these questions multiple times (mostly without knowing the exact names of the metrics). This makes them user-friendly for customers. For companies, due to a defined procedure and structure, they become easy to implement.

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an industry-recognized metric that was incorporated by the leading management-consulting firm Bain & Company. NPS is being widely used to determine the customers’ loyalty. You can easily measure Net Promoter Score using Net Promoter Score Software to track the willingness of customers to recommend your product and service or your brand. This helps you to benchmark the loyalty level of your customers.

The Net Promoter Score comes from the simple question “How likely would you be to recommend our products and services to a friend?”. NPS ranges from -100 to 100 and customers range their willingness of recommendation on the scale of 0-10. Based on their responses, customers will be segregated into three categories.

• Promoters – 9-10 Score – They are likely recommend your brand to their friends and family.
• Detractors – 0-6 Score – They are unlikely to recommend your brand to their friends and family.
• Passives – 7-8 Score –  They may or may not recommend your brand to their friends and family.

Net Promoter Score Formula

To calculate the Net Promoter Score, we use a simple NPS formula where we subtract the total percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction is another perspective that plays a crucial role in making your product or service, a good brand. Being a business owner, it is important for you to gauge the satisfaction level of your customers. So, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) metric helps you to track how satisfied customers are with your organization’s products or services.

CSAT is simply calculated from the simple question – “How satisfied were you with your experience?” Customers range their satisfaction level either on the scale ranges 1 – 3, 1 – 5, or 1 – 10 or on the scale of agree/disagree scales, stars or smileys.

CSAT isn’t as defined and laid out as Net Promoter Score or Customer Effort Score so questions and scales to measure the same can be different. The top benefit is definitely the flexibility in its implementation.

3. Customer Efforts Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score is another commonly used key performance indicator that helps you to track the levels of effort your customers have to put into a certain interaction with you to achieve their goals. It isn’t as popular as the NPS (which has gained a lot of popularity) or as frequently used as CSAT, but has garnered a lot of attention now.

Why you need Customer Effort Score Metric

According to the research by Harvard Business Review, approximately 94% of customers who reported they experienced “low effort” in interactions with a business said they would buy again from it. If you think about it, isn’t effort a very big motivator for all of us while making a purchase or dealing with any business? That’s what CES aims to measure and help companies reduce – the effort and ease of doing business. The Customer Effort Score question is far more actionable and specific than the other metrics. It quickly informs you if there are areas where the customer is making more effort than expected and using this data you can streamline your processes and improve customer experience.

Customer Effort Score can be measure on the basis of simple question “To what extent do you agree with the following statement: The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.” Here respondents are provided with the scale ranges from 1-7 to rate their effort experience.  

1 = Strongly Disagree

2 = Disagree

3 = Somewhat Disagree

4 = Undecided 

5 = Somewhat Agree 

6 = Agree 

7 = Strongly Agree 

Here in this scale range, a 1-3 segment (Strongly Disagree to Somewhat Disagree) will be associated with negative results, whereas the 5-7 segment (Somewhat Agree to Strongly Agree) represents positive results.

Leveraging Customer Feedback Metrics for Happier Customers 

It’s a no-brainer that if you want to keep customers happy (and keep your business growing), you will need to constantly focus on reducing customer effort and improving customer satisfaction. This will ensure that your customers be loyalists and your best brand ambassadors. Using these three customer feedback metrics – the Net Promoter Score, the Customer Effort Score and the Customer Satisfaction Score – you can measure all these areas with ease. But of course, the work isn’t done just by measuring these scores. You should use a solid method or a Customer Feedback Software to effectively measure, analyse and make improvements based on customer feedback. That’s what the winners do!