Aaron Rodriguez provides the metrics for understanding customer satisfaction

Satisfaction metrics are always an important topic for customer experience professionals, and also for managers in organizations who like to keep track of numbers. The most frequently asked questions are always, “What is the best metric to use?” or “What metric should we use?” Aaron Rodriguez, a business optimization expert, will address the metrics needed to understand how satisfied customers are with your services.

You can’t answer these questions in broad strokes. You have to consider a few things like, what are you trying to measure? What are you trying to understand? What are the business objectives, e.g., referrals, repeat purchases, etc.? What are the desired outcomes?

Keep in mind that these are not internal metrics about the results you see as a result of the experience. These are metrics that detail how customers rate the experience with your brand.

The first to consider is customer satisfaction. This reflects how satisfied a customer is with a certain aspect of the overall experience or the brand. “I like to defend the equation based on Expectations - Performance = Satisfaction. Customers have expectations, and the degree to which they are met leads to a certain level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction,” Rodriguez says.

Then there is the customer effort score. This is used to measure the amount of effort a customer thinks was expended in the course of interacting with the brand. It is typically used in the contact center to identify the level of effort the customer expended to resolve a problem or receive an answer to a question.

Ease of Doing Business (EODB) should also be analyzed. Most commonly used by B2B companies, it is intended to determine how difficult or easy it is to interact with a brand in general. It is a more global metric, whereas CES is specific to a particular interaction, specifically with customer service.

“Net Promoter Score is one of my favorites,” Rodriguez points out. “This metric reflects the likelihood that a customer will recommend your brand, product, or service to someone else. If your business lives and dies by recommendations, this is your metric. If not, there are other satisfaction metrics you can use.”

Star ratings, meanwhile, are synonymous with online reviews. While there isn’t a metric based on a specific question, customers rate the experience from one to five stars. It’s an effective way to get customer feedback on your service or product.

Usability is about an ease-of-use or ease-of-task metric, but it’s important to capture and track it to make sure customers can use the product or service the way they need to. Whereas task completion is responsible for measuring whether customers are able to successfully complete what they wanted to do.

“All of these are customer-reported ratings or measures, not your internal satisfaction metrics,” Rodriguez explains. “To some extent, they all give us an idea of whether the customer is satisfied with the experience or not. However, these satisfaction metrics can be linked to a company’s internal metrics to ensure that the customer and their experience are linked to business outcomes, e.g., renewals, referrals, CLV and more.”

Focusing on what it takes to move metrics can be detrimental and lead to inappropriate behaviors, gaming, and other undesirables that detract from the purpose of listening to customers. When you focus on metrics, you do things differently than when you focus on improving the customer experience.

A metric is just a way to measure your progress. And while it’s good to measure your performance, the movement of the metric details the outcome on the line. So here’s when you should use satisfaction metrics: to improve the experience. Focus on the experience first, and the numbers will then come.

About Aaron Rodriguez

Aaron Rodriguez is an expert eCommerce consultant in Latin America. He helps businesses throughout the region optimize all of their eCommerce operations to increase sales and retain customers, and also has extensive experience in the development of strategic and external alliances to promote departmental and organizational objectives. He has traveled extensively throughout Latin America to assist a number of companies and, when he’s not traveling, he dedicates all of his available time to his wife and children.

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Aaron Rodriguez

Latin America eCommerce Consultant

Aaron Rodriguez

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