Continuously measuring customer satisfaction, why and how?

Research by Blauw shows that only 19% of organizations in the Netherlands succeed in continuously converting customer insight into improvement actions. Fortunately, more and more organizations are switching to continuous customer feedback measurements. Because: how can you continuously focus on the customer if you only receive some general customer feedback once in a while?

We are happy to explain why it benefits organizations so much to continuously measure customer satisfaction and how to take the first step.

Benefits of continuously measuring customer experience:

• As an organization, you get a real-time stream of customer insight, with concrete areas for improvement that you can work on throughout the year.
• You measure customer satisfaction closer to a relevant time for a customer. You check almost immediately what their experience is with your organization. That makes more sense to the customer. And besides: the feedback shortly after the moment itself is more detailed and useful than if you measure at a later time (more generally).
• Moreover, because you measure close to the customer experience, you can respond quickly to it in order to further improve the customer experience (closing the loop). For example: a customer is dissatisfied with an invoice that is not correct again. Your colleague from the finance department can pick this up immediately and solve it for the customer. And it also works the other way around: you 'reward' a satisfied customer by thanking him or her for his positive appreciation. That makes the customer even happier.
• Employees feel much more responsibility, because they can no longer avoid the feedback. After all, the customer feedback is about their own recent work within the organization. This makes it much clearer to everyone where the points of improvement and strengths are for customers.
• With continuous customer feedback, you lay the foundation for a customer-driven mindset within your organization. Because how, for example, could much-vaunted role model Coolblue live up to their slogan "Every day a little better" without continuous insight into the customer experience?

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How do you begin continuous measurement?

So plenty of benefits, but what is the first step to good continuous measurement? One of the first steps is: choosing an appropriate metric (KPI). The right customer experience metric depends entirely on when you measure and who your customers are. But above all: what suits your organization and fits your vision on customer experience.

The three most commonly used metrics in the Netherlands are:

• 46%: Customer Satisfaction (KTV): This good old metric is about customers' overall impression: "How satisfied are you with an experience with organization X?"
• 27% Net Promoter Score (NPS): This much-discussed metric is about customer recommendation intent: "Would you recommend organization X to family/friends/acquaintances?"
• 17% Customer Effort Score (CES): This relatively young metric is about effort that a process takes: "How much effort did you have to put in by yourself to get your question or problem solved?"

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Do you also want to improve your customer experience, through continuous measurement?

We are happy to help you choose the right metric, but most importantly: the best fitting methods and tools to continuously understand what drives customers and how to improve the customer experience step by step.

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