Customer satisfaction is very important for any business that wants to work its way up to the top. Without a brand of loyal customers who are satisfied with your products and services, your business would never get a positive vibe around it that would entice other people to check out your products and services as well. You can market your services all you like but without a band of excited consumers who would go out of their way to promote your business on their own without any rewards, your business would never be able to attract a lot of people. Measuring customer satisfaction is also important as you would like to know if your customers are dissatisfied with your services or not. Knowledge of unhappy customers is very important as these consumers can start spreading negative word of mouth about the business if you don’t do enough to end their dissatisfaction. And you won’t be able to take any steps to do so if you don’t know that some people are dissatisfied with your business in the first place.
There are two very good ways to understand the levels of customer satisfaction amongst your consumer base. One is the calculation of the NPS score and the other is the use of retail mystery shopping. Both are intuitive and interesting ways and offer great insight into the levels of satisfaction your business enjoys amongst your customer base. Both offer reliable results but it must be said that mystery shopping can prove helpful as you would be able to identify reasons for why your customers are satisfied or dissatisfied with your services. Such knowledge can prove vital in drafting of strategies for your business.
The NPS or Net Promoter Score is an important and intuitive tool that helps you in calculating the customer satisfaction found amongst your consumers. The test is easy to conduct and all you need to do is to ask your client base the simple question, ‘What are the odds that you will recommend our business to your friends and family, on a scale of 1-10?’ To calculate your score, you would need to subtract the percentage of people who responded with a 6 or less from the percentage of individuals out of the total people asked who responded with a 9 or 10. The higher the NPS, the better the level of customer satisfaction your business enjoys.
Mystery shopping is another way to know about whether your customers are satisfied with your business or not. In mystery shopping, a secret shopper would come to your shop or store everyday and interact with your regular clients like a normal shopper. The secret shopper would also act normally in front of your front-line employees and observe their correspondences with the clients and consumers as well. Afterwards, the secret shopper would deliver you a report that would show you the kind of candid responses the customers provided to the secret shopper and the correspondences he observed of your customers with your front-line staff. Secret shoppers won’t just tell you their observations, but would also identify aspects where your business seems to be excelling and where your business isn’t being satisfying as far as customer experience is concerned.
Founded in 2000, The Realise Group are an Australian company whose aim is provide other Australian companies with reputable and qualified research data. Focusing on customer experience evaluations and mystery shopping, they believe in integrity, fun, a user-friendly experience, quality and continuous improvement, and telling it like it is.