Part 2: What is a Customer Satisfaction Score and How Should CSMs Use It?
As any customer success professional knows, metrics and data keep customer relationships running smoothly. With historical data, CSMs can make strategic decisions and identify critical areas that need attention. CSMs can focus on quick, game-time updates that address immediate customer needs with real-time data. The Customer Satisfaction Score is a metric that addresses both strategic data uses.
In Part 1, we discussed the Customer Effort Score. In Part 2, we’ll focus on the Customer Satisfaction score and uncover the different data points that go into a Customer Satisfaction Score, ways CSMs can use this score, and why a Customer Satisfaction Score is so important in the world of customer success.
What is a Customer Satisfaction Score
A Customer Satisfaction Score is the combination of multiple customer success metrics that form an aggregate score that can help customer success teams and other key stakeholders understand if a customer is satisfied with a product and the service they are receiving. A Customer Satisfaction Score operates as an at-a-glance way to see where a customer is on a satisfaction level quickly.
How to calculate a Customer Satisfaction Score
So what goes into a Customer Satisfaction Score? Depending on your organization, product, and team, you can pull as many or as few data points into this score. Although no two Customer Satisfaction Scores are the same, it also allows your organization to personalize your scoring methods to your customers.
Some sample metrics that could help inform a Customer Satisfaction Score include:
- NPS, or Net Promotor Score, to help inform how willing a customer is to refer your product to a colleague.
- Product Usage Score, to understand how much time users spend inside your product.
- General satisfaction and responsiveness during check-in meetings
- Billing issues or delinquency problems
When to use a Customer Satisfaction Score
Because a Customer Satisfaction Score is so broad and versatile, it can be used at many different points in a customer lifecycle. CSMs should turn to this score before regularly scheduled customer check-ins to ensure there were no significant changes from the last conversation. Department leaders and executives can also use this metric to understand how one or multiple customer accounts are doing.
This is what makes the Customer Success Score so important – it is a widespread, easy-to-understand metric that boils down to multiple customer success data points in one easily accessible number. From CSMs to managers to executives (and even additional departments), anyone who wants to can access this score and immediately know how a customer is doing and how satisfied they are with a product or organization.
Learn more by checking out these related ClientSuccess resources: