Customer Satisfaction: Why It’s Important in 2024

‍What is customer satisfaction?

In simple words, customer satisfaction is a measurement that determines how well company’s products or services meet customer needs and expectations. It’s one of the most important indicators of purchase intentions and customer loyalty. As such, it helps predict business growth and revenue.

While the definition above looks pretty straightforward, in reality, it’s not that easy to define what “customer happiness” really means for your company.

If you’re tempted to say, "I’ve got a lot of purchases and a steady number of recurring customers, so I think I’m good,” think twice. Maybe some of your clients simply forgot to cancel their subscriptions. Maybe they procrastinate switching to your competitors. Or perhaps they’re too shy to complain and seek reimbursement. None of these reasons mean they’re satisfied, and none will be known to you unless you ask.

This is where specific customer satisfaction metrics, like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), come into play. They let you determine what exactly influences the satisfaction—or lack of it—among your customers. 

And it pays off to keep your customers happy. A high customer satisfaction level guarantees long-term clients and makes you stand out from the competition. It also lets you avoid the dire consequences of bad customer experience: churning customers and negative word of mouth.

The equation here is simple. If you don’t care about your customers, don’t expect them to care about you.

Why is customer satisfaction important?

What is the purpose of customer satisfaction? Here’s a short answer: if you want to run a customer-centric business, you need to care about customer success.

But there are more tangible reasons for the importance of customer satisfaction or the benefits of taking care of it. Let’s go through a few of them.

And for a quick visual summary, check out our infographic on the importance of customer satisfaction or click on the preview below.

1. Satisfied and loyal customers are a major growth lever

Research shows that it’s six to seven times more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to keep the existing ones.

And you can’t have loyal customers if they’re not satisfied!

Have you ever wondered why banks or mobile providers are always ready to go the extra mile to keep you around? It’s because they know the actual cost of doing otherwise.

Always try to keep your clients satisfied to prevent them from churning. Meet their needs, solve their problems, and nurture them. This doesn’t only concern your customer service: your clients need positive interactions with your product, website, store, and anything else you provide.

2. Dissatisfied customers churn in a heartbeat

Unhappy customers won’t hesitate to leave you for your competition.

There are many reasons for brand switching. The main culprit is usually the prize—but poor customer experience is climbing up the rankings.

With more than one in three consumers (38%) saying they will buy from a brand they’ve had a good experience with again, even if there are better options, investing in creating positive interactions is a no-brainer.

Customers value ease above everything else. This is why avoiding friction is more important than going out of your way to delight your audience.

And when mistakes (inevitably) happen, you have to make up for them.

Take a look at an email from a local vintage shop that didn’t take down a sold-out product from their store on time. Even a small business with limited capacity understands it’s better to smooth things out with a customer than lose them.

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3. Customer satisfaction drives business and product decisions

If you prioritize customer success, you’ll have easier time sorting out your tasks and goals.

Whether it’s product development, marketing campaigns, customer service improvements, or any other area of business—before you chase market trends or introduce novelties, you should make sure your actions resonate with your customers. 

For example, if your customers keep complaining about a certain flaw in your product, it’s better to fix it before you start expanding your offer to catch new customers. Chances are, your old clients will get annoyed and leave, and the new ones will find the very same feature annoying.

Plus, through feedback, loyal customers can help you come up with new ideas for products and services.

At Survicate, we pepper in an open-ended question that asks customers for their next big idea.

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This is also why you receive these “sorry to see you go, tell us why” emails from brands that know they can’t keep you from leaving. Maybe at least you'll tell them how they can improve for their other customers! 

Check out this lost customer survey template

If we find particularly good or repeating requests, we bring them to life!

Of course, being customer-friendly is not an end-all, be-all of business success. You still need to offer a solid product or service and have a good market fit. But as Don Peppers put it,

Customers are the link between the profit you make today and the profit you are likely to make tomorrow. The customer relationship directly connects today's profits and costs to your company's overall shareholder value.

4. It helps you stand out from the crowd

Let’s face it: it’s unlikely your product is one of a kind. And even if it is right now, you’re bound to have a few imitators soon.

The only thing you can do to differentiate yourself is to deliver exceptional customer service and satisfy your clients.

Research shows that companies that focus on customer experience have an 80 percent increase in revenue.

Consider the example of a Polish online store with specialty coffee, CoffeeDesk. It’s locally famous for its exceptional customer experience. One of their signature moves is sticking funny drawings to their packages, usually of a cat. Unless you ask for something else—they will draw whatever you want!

This simple yet effective move differentiated CoffeeDesk from a crowd of competitors. Combined with fast delivery times and excellent customer service, the store enjoys a fine reputation. It maintains a strong position in the Polish coffee market—despite many purveyors with similar product choices (and even lower prices).

Other companies in your niche are waiting for you to make the wrong move. It’s common to look at competitors’ negative reviews and solve their customers’ problems for them.

Be it customer service or the product itself, every crack in customer satisfaction is a chance for your competition to strike. Keep the happiness levels high to eliminate any uncertainty about your services!

5. Satisfied customers attract new customers

Loyal customers don’t only contribute to high CLV (Customer Lifetime Value). They are also your company’s biggest promoters that draw new customers in with recommendations.

To recommend a company, they first have to be satisfied with your services.

Any positive review or social media comment is beneficial for your business. And every review can be turned into a case study, success story, or a social proof section on your website.

How to measure customer satisfaction?

To track customer satisfaction, you need to set up a CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) survey that asks the clients to rate their experiences with your company, usually on a 1-to-5 scale.

However, there is also a 7-point-scale customer satisfaction survey that can help you get an even clearer picture of how your customers feel:

You can measure your client’s general satisfaction with your services or monitor specific touchpoints—like making a purchase, contacting customer support, using a particular product feature, etc.

It’s also a good idea to include open-ended customer satisfaction survey questions after your clients rate you. It allows them to explain their choice and gives you concrete feedback.

But CSAT is not the only customer experience metric out there. There are others that will help gauge your customers’ loyalty and happiness with your company. 

One of them is the popular NPS (Net Promoter Score) that monitors how likely your customers are to recommend you to their friends and colleagues. 

You can also use CES (Customer Effort Score) to gauge how easy it is for your customers to interact with your company.

If you don’t know how to choose the right one for you, check out our guide to the five most popular customer satisfaction metrics.

Measuring and analyzing customer satisfaction should become a permanent addition to your business—not just something you do from time to time or to deal with a reputation crisis. As McKinsey & Company put it, the three C’s of customer satisfaction are consistency, consistency, and consistency.

Customer survey software can help you set up recurring surveys, collect your answers, and analyze them in one place. This will let you create a sustainable customer satisfaction measurement process.

In addition to surveys, leveraging customer insights tools can significantly enhance your understanding of customer satisfaction.

These tools collect and analyze data from various sources, such as social media, customer reviews, in-app interactions and support tickets, providing a comprehensive view of customer sentiment and preferences. By integrating these insights, you can tailor your services and products more effectively to meet customer needs and expectations.

Just like Survicate with Insights Hub that automatically analyzes open-text feedback and extracts insights in seconds, no matter the connected source. 😉

How to improve customer satisfaction?

Every brand should keep working to improve its customer satisfaction levels. But it’s not always that easy. It requires steady processes, defined company goals, and, most importantly, continuous effort from every team member.

So: how do you achieve customer satisfaction? 

Let’s go through a few surefire ways to direct your customer experience program in the right direction and score some quick wins. And if you want to dig deeper into the topic, make sure to check out our guide on how to improve customer satisfaction in 8 steps.

1. Collect customer feedback & always be available

Your customers need a place to voice their opinions—both positive and negative.

Positive customer feedback will ensure that your product roadmap and customer support efforts are heading in the right direction. Happy clients might also share their ideas on improving your product and services, which will help you build a truly customer-centric business.

And an outlet for customers’ negative opinions lets them voice their frustration before turning to online communities.

Your customers should always be able to find a place where they can talk to you. To achieve it, combine the power of easily accessible customer service with the power of surveys. 

And sure, not every company can afford 24/7 phone support—but solutions like chatbots and live chats make it easy to be available for your clients at all times.

They’ll let you catch your customers’ ad hoc requests, suggestions, and complaints. Just make sure there’s always a human out there ready to address problems a chatbot can’t fix. 

It's also important to measure how helpful your support agents or helpdesk are when it comes to dealing with customer queries. You can do so easily with this simple survey:

You may also try: customer support survey template

On the other hand, surveys will help you gather general opinions about your brand and monitor the overall state of your customer experience.

If you haven't run surveys before and think it might take too much of your time or that it's too complex to start with, think again. Tools such as Survicate come with AI-powered surveys that allow you to start collecting feedback in minutes and help you with analyzing the feedback you receive, too!

And, with proven customer satisfaction surveys like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) or NPS (Net Promoter Score), you’ll gather numerical customer satisfaction data to monitor and benchmark.

💡Like Fortive, a diversified industrial technology company that grew their CSAT by 20%, collecting over 50 thousand responses with Survicate. To create a comprehensive view of their customers’ experience, they used Survicate’s surveys and connected the results with Google Analytics and Full Story.

When drawing conclusions based on Survicate data, the sample size is usually in the thousands, which gives us confidence in the positive impact these changes will have on our customers.

Glen Hamilton
Senior Director of Digital Growth at Fortive

You can also give your customers room to voice their opinions by including open-ended questions (e.g., “Is there anything we could improve in our product to make it better for you?”)

Just take a look at the interactive NPS survey below. After the respondent assigns you a score, they can explain why they evaluated you the way they did and leave their suggestions. Satisfied customers also receive a request to leave an online review.

Go for this NPS survey template

‍After collecting customer feedback, calculate your general NPS score (to turn it into a benchmark and improve in the future) and check out the response breakdown! If you use Survicate, your NPS report will generate automatically.

And don’t forget to look for valuable suggestions in the open-ended responses!

All in all, surveys are the best way to improve customer satisfaction and remove the guesswork from business decisions.

As one of our clients, Katja Lindqvist of Via Esca, told us, 

Survicate surveys have given us a pretty good idea about why people decide to use our service, and why they stop using it. We are able to validate our ideas and theories against the actual reasons that people tell us about.

2. Stay proactive and react in real-time

Okay, so you brought suggestion number one to life, and your customers can always reach you.

Now, you have to make sure their feedback doesn’t disappear in a black hole—especially when it’s negative.

Ignoring customer complaints might have some severe side effects:

• You create an army of dissatisfied clients who are likely to churn, and that’s not the kind of audience you want.
• Dissatisfied customers are much more likely to share their opinions than happy ones, and a bunch of negative online reviews can seriously stain your reputation.
• Modern customers expect effortless interactions, so you don’t want to be recognized as a company that keeps inconveniencing its clients.
  

Whenever possible, address negative customer feedback in real time—or at least as soon as possible. Try to make things up for your unhappy customers, either by compensating them or bringing their suggestions to life. You might avoid negative word-of-mouth and get valuable ideas on how to improve your business.

Reacting in real-time doesn’t only concern live chats or phone calls but also surveys. With best survey tools such as Survicate, you can set up email or Slack notifications and get a heads-up whenever someone shares their feedback.

Sometimes it’s possible to predict a potential complaint and address it before it happens. Do you already know your web app will be under maintenance, and your users won’t be able to access it? Or maybe your store is swamped with orders, and you’re expecting shipping delays? 

Stay transparent and let your customers know beforehand. Here’s an example of an email from the H&M online store:

While customer complaints are often more time-sensitive than positive feedback, don’t ignore your satisfied clients, either. Always remember that they’re one of your most valuable assets.

💡 Like Looka, an AI-powered logo maker SaaS company that drives a continuous flow of customer stories thanks to Survicate. After a user subscribes to a logo or brand kit, they receive a product feedback survey to complete. In addition to the usual questions about customer satisfaction, Looka included an extra one that invites them to collaborate on a case study based on their experience.

Try to:

• Keep track of your biggest fans;
• Turn their ideas into reality;
• Ask them for reviews or recommendations;
• Offer special deals;
• Turn them into brand ambassadors (with the help of referral programs or incentives).

The sky’s the limit.

3. Keep things personal

Personalization became the norm. Zendesk found that 59 percent of consumers believe businesses should use the data they collect about them to personalize their experiences.

It’s hardly surprising that personalization works so well since it makes the customers feel important and “at home.” After all, we’re all happy when we receive that free Starbucks coffee on our birthday, aren’t we? 

From the company’s point of view, personalized targeting means tailoring content production, services, and offers to the customers' expectations. A customer who gets exactly what they want is much more likely to feel satisfied—as opposed to a customer who gets spammed with irrelevant emails and still hasn’t understood how your product can help them.

A perfect example of effective personalization is the meditation app, Headspace. During signup, it asks the users a few simple questions about their preferences, such as experience level, the main reason for using the app, or their preferred meditation time. 

Based on the customer’s choices, they can tailor the product and communication to users’ needs. The night owls will receive notifications later in the day when they’re the most engaged. Inactive users who want to sleep better will get content about improving their sleeping schedules. The people who installed the app to relieve anxiety won’t see sport-focused features, etc.

Hard to be dissatisfied when the product is exactly what you need it to be!

Make sure you apply personalization to all communication that comes from your brand, including surveys. For example, don’t just blindly show general user satisfaction surveys to everyone who visits your page—they might not even be your customers yet.

Instead, try triggering your survey based on an event, like completing a purchase or visiting a specific page. You can easily do it when setting up mobile or website surveys with Survicate.

💡 Just like Medscape, a leading online global destination for physicians and healthcare professionals that uses Survicate to recruit users for interviews, specifically to compliment their Continuous Discovery framework.

‍The reason we have implemented Survicate is the ability to get user feedback in a given context. So, as opposed to the more standard way of fielding surveys, sending an email to invite users to answer several questions, Survicate allows us to get feedback on the particular experience of the site or the app as the user is experiencing it, which makes the answers much more contextual and accurate.

Sandrine Veillet
VP of Global Product at Medscape

4. Measure customer satisfaction regularly

You can’t improve customer satisfaction if you don’t know what you’re improving.

Measuring customer satisfaction with surveys will let you obtain concrete numerical scores and turn them into KPIs. You’ll also be able to look for patterns in open-ended questions and fix the most pressing problems.

And another customer satisfaction survey template

Here’s an example. Let’s say you recently ran a CSAT survey that revealed you have a lot of dissatisfied users. Their answers suggest they’re unhappy with the response time of your customer service.

You should try fixing the problem and then re-run the survey to see if your Customer Satisfaction Score improves. If it does—keep up the good work. If it doesn’t—investigate further. Maybe your audience didn’t reveal the actual source of their frustration, and you have to work on building a healthy communication flow?

💡Take a look at ParkBee—a company that works with private property owners and commercial car park operators to open up parking spaces for public use. They sent out CSAT surveys to users each time they use ParkBee's parking solution. This survey is designed to cover the entire parking experience, from the ease of finding a space to the user's opinion of the location.

After analyzing survey results, ParkBee saw a room for improvement in terms of how easy it is for its users to find a parking space. Once the issue has been spotted and fixed by adding more information on finding the free spots, the team saw a 20% decrease in contact rate about this specific problem.

We collect all the data, gather it, and then act upon it. If we see a trend at a specific location, we forward it to the asset managers, and if needed, they can make some improvements at those locations.

Louise Alberg
Customer Service Manager at ParkBee

So, measure, tweak, and then measure again! You will:

• test your assumptions,
• motivate yourself to take action,
• and have interesting customer satisfaction data to show to the rest of your company. 
  

If you run surveys with Survicate, you can always access a report section that will show you your scores and answer breakdown:

There are many customer satisfaction metrics methods to distribute your surveys to choose from. Pick the ones that fit your business goals and your clients’ preferred channels!

5. Communicate across departments

Imagine you’re a marketer who’s just run a customer satisfaction survey.

You got a pretty decent Customer Satisfaction Score, but you’ve received a few complaints from your least happy customers. You notice that most of them concern a particular bug in your app.

How do you think this situation should play out?

1. The feedback stays in the marketing team and continues to create friction until the dev team notices the bug and fixes it one day;
2. The feedback is shared with the dev team, who takes it seriously and fixes it at the earliest opportunity.
   

Obviously, the correct answer is 2. Customer satisfaction requires input and effort from the whole company. Every department should take customer feedback seriously and realize the outcomes of ignoring it.

If you use Survicate, take advantage of the available in this customer satisfaction tool team seats and invite at least one person from each team to collaborate. They’ll have access to all the surveys and reports.

And if you integrate Survicate with Slack, you can set up notifications and simply tag the right people whenever feedback comes. Whatever fits the communication model in your company.

💡Another great example of working with Survicate data across departments is by taking advantages of its many integrations. Just like WeSki does with the HubSpot integration, letting their team easily identify any low customer satisfaction scores directly in HubSpot.

Survicate is our most reliable source of direct customer feedback for the good and the bad. It's the space that allows our customers to express their needs, challenges, and accomplishments with WeSki. It’s one of our most powerful tools that allows WeSki to improve yearly.

Dan Benavi
Head of Customer Success at WeSki

Improve your customer satisfaction with surveys

Customer centricity is an indispensable element of every successful business. This is why you should focus on continuously improving customer satisfaction.

High customer satisfaction levels help with:

• Keeping existing customers around;
• Attracting new ones;
• Increasing customer loyalty;
• Standing out from the crowd of competitions;
• Making smart product decisions.
  

Measuring customer satisfaction is essential for monitoring the state of your customer success and customer experience programs. It’s best to do it with the help of customer satisfaction surveys, such CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), NPS (Net Promoter Score), or CES (Customer Effort Score) surveys.

And let's remember that customer satisfaction depends on so many different things, even, no joke, the weather.

“You need to start somewhere and then see the baseline. Our business depends on the weather, so our users are probably less satisfied on rainy days. It’s quite the opposite when it’s sunny. We can see this in the surveys, but we needed a year or two to establish a baseline. User satisfaction went up in summer and down a bit in winter. Now we know it’s a normal trend.”

Falco Kübler
Senior Product Owner at wetter.com

So unless you ask, the feedback from customers and crucial patterns may go unnoticed.

With customer satisfaction software such as Survicate, you’ll have your customer satisfaction surveys up and running in just a few clicks (with zero coding). Just choose one of our customer satisfaction survey templates, customize it if you’d like, and watch the responses flow in.

The combination of real-time response collection and data analytics means that you can thoroughly monitor your customer satisfaction.

Sign up for a 10-day free trial and put customer voices at the heart of your business starting today.