How to Boost Customer Satisfaction with Free Customer Satisfaction Templates

"At the heart of a successful business strategy is a customer experience that is elegantly simple and positive, where consumers are likely to come away satisfied – and return." — Andres Angelani (CEO, Softvision).

Ask any successful business owner about the importance of customer satisfaction (CSAT) and they wouldn't pass up the chance to discuss its benefits or regale you with real-life stories of how CSAT positively impacted their organizations.

Customer satisfaction is important to the growth and success of any business — irrespective of how many years you've been in the market, the level of innovation your product possesses or how competitive your pricing is. Frankly, if your customers are unhappy, they’re not going to stick around and you might eventually need to close up shop.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise to see 45.9 percent of businesses surveyed in 2020 claim customer experience as their number one priority over the next five years.

This can only mean one thing: To label customer satisfaction as "just important" would be a gross understatement.

After all, in the words of Chip R. Bell (American author and consultant in customer loyalty and service innovation):

“Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.”

In this article, we'll be exploring what customer satisfaction is, its importance, the meaning and benefits of customer satisfaction templates, how to use a customer satisfaction template (made with Scribe😉), plus tips on how to use customer satisfaction feedback (and the data) to make informed decisions.

Dig in!

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What is customer satisfaction?

The American Society for Quality (ASQ) defines customer satisfaction (CSAT) as "a measurement that determines how happy customers are with a company’s products, services, and capabilities. Customer satisfaction information, including surveys and ratings, can help a company determine how to improve or change its products and services."

"An organization’s main focus must be to satisfy its customers. This applies to industrial firms, retail and wholesale businesses, government bodies, service companies, nonprofit organizations, and every subgroup within an organization," ASQ adds.

Image credit: The American Society for Quality

Wikipedia breaks it down further...

"CSAT is a term frequently used in marketing. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectations. 
Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number of customers, or percentage of total customers, whose reported experience with a firm, its products, or its services (ratings) exceeds specified satisfaction goals.
Customers play an important role and are essential in keeping a product or service relevant; it is, therefore, in the best interest of the business to ensure customer satisfaction and build customer loyalty."

Let's backtrack a bit because I discovered something interesting.

According to ASQ, any organization looking to measure customer satisfaction must identify the two most important elements that make up the customer satisfaction model.

1. Identify who your customers are.
2. Identify what it takes to satisfy them.

Your customers can be anyone the organization supplies with products or services. 

With this in mind, the next step is identifying methods for customer satisfaction — simply known as, "how do I satisfy my customers?"

Some businesses assume that they know what the customers want. Big mistake!

Rather, understand the voice of your customers via tools like customer surveys, focus groups, and polling. These tools provide detailed insights into what your customers want and help you better tailor your products and services to meet or exceed customer expectations.

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Roy H. Williams, bestselling author & founder of the Wizard Academy Institute, perfectly summarizes this section with his quote. According to him, “The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.” 

Next stop? Let's explore the benefits of customer satisfaction.

5 Benefits of customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction positively impacts any organization's pipeline, retention, bottom line, customer acquisition costs and even churn.

Satisfied customers will always buy from you, trust your company, recommend you to their friends, and offer positive and constructive feedback to ensure your continuous success.

Still not convinced, or thinking you can wing it as you go? Below are five additional benefits of increasing and maintaining customer satisfaction.

1. Customer satisfaction boosts loyalty

“There is a big difference between a satisfied customer and a loyal customer. Never settle for ‘satisfied’.” — Shep Hyken,  Customer Service Expert, Author, Blogger, and Speaker.

Shep couldn't have said it any better. A PwC report reveals that 59 percent of U.S. consumers who love a product or brand would ditch it after several poor experiences. As if that isn't enough, almost one in five would do so after a single bad experience.

Bad experiences will keep driving customers away — faster than you think — irrespective of whether you're a popular/beloved brand OR not.

Additionally, considering that 79 percent of people in the United States use social media, sharing negative reviews about a customer experience is easier than ever before. Therefore, if a customer has a bad experience with your company, they can easily share it with millions of people globally.

On the other hand, if you prioritize customer satisfaction and make changes based on positive (and even negative) feedback, not only will it generate positive reviews for your company, but it will also help you land more paying and loyal customers.

2. Customer satisfaction encourages repeat purchases

Zendesk's Customer Experience Trends 2022 Report showed that 61 percent of customers would switch to a competing brand after just one bad customer experience. This is why businesses must identify and understand what it takes to understand their customers.

However, in the course of doing so, research such as Zendesk's shows that there may be a disconnect between what businesses think satisfies a customer and what actually does. 

According to the CX report, 60 percent of companies surveyed gave themselves high marks for service. However, 68 percent of customers noted room for improvement, and 54 percent mentioned that customer service feels like an afterthought for most of the companies they buy from.

Concerning, right?

Here's how to flip the script and ensure your customer service is encouraging repeat purchases:

• Organize CSAT polls to measure buyers’ excitement and likeliness to tell others about your products and services.
• Gauge customer behavior by tracking repeat purchases, reading reviews, and monitoring platforms/mediums for customer referrals.

These two methods help you gain insights directly from your target market — and also determine how their words compare to their actions. 

3. Customer satisfaction is important for business and product decisions

Whether you're launching a new product, introducing marketing campaigns to your audience, offering new customer service improvements, or any other area of your business— it's important to ensure that your actions resonate with your customers.

Here's an example: If your customers keep complaining about a certain error or flaw in your product, it’s better to fix it before you introduce new offers or expand them.

Here's why: If you don't, there's a huge possibility of your existing customers getting angry and leaving. To them, it means you don't listen to them and won't make their customer experience with your brand stress-free and seamless. 

As for the new customers you're looking to attract? They would either not buy because of negative reviews or word of mouth from your old customers OR they will also find the very same feature annoying and leave.

Additionally, feedback also allows loyal customers to help you come up with new ideas for your products and services. Win-win for all parties. 

4. Customer satisfaction reduces customer churn

Contrary to popular belief, pricing isn't the major reason for customer churn. Yup, you guessed right — it’s customer service!

There are tons of brands selling expensive products with a huge customer base. Poor customer service quality will hurt your business and cost you customers in the long run. Teach your customer service reps to leverage product education — as a means for continuously communicating the values and benefits of your product that extends far beyond just creating user manuals or standard operating procedures (SOPs). 

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5. Customer satisfaction is a competitive differentiator

In this fiercely competitive world, customer satisfaction must be at the core of your customer strategy. No amount of marketing campaigns and promotions will help you if your customers are not satisfied. Two scenarios will always play out:

1. Brands with low customer satisfaction levels are likely to pack up in the future.
2. Brands with advocates are far more likely to succeed exponentially than those without.

Which one would you rather be?

What is a customer satisfaction template?

If you want your business to grow, you must keep your existing customers happy. This can only happen when you measure and understand customer satisfaction.

You might be wondering: "How do I measure and understand customer satisfaction?" While we've got lots of tips to help you achieve that here, plus customer satisfaction metrics to look out for, you still need a tool — better known as a customer satisfaction template.

A customer satisfaction survey template is a pre-existing designed survey that can be customized (to your company's and customers' needs) to collect customer feedback about their products, services, and overall experience with your business.

Also, a client satisfaction survey template helps you gather information on consumer behavior and product purchases and measures overall satisfaction with sales, online shopping experience, and customer service representatives.

Simply put, templates for customer satisfaction helps businesses collect customer feedback and improve their customer service.

With Scribe's customer satisfaction template, you can gain feedback from your clients in just a few clicks. Not requiring any coding, you can:

• Upload images and logos.
• Include your branding.
• Tweak your questions or use pre-existing ones.

After you’re done customizing, easily share your form and responses will be received instantly and stored in your secure Scribe dashboard.

Why is a customer satisfaction template important?

Using a customer satisfaction template can be beneficial to businesses for the following reasons:

1. Consistency: Using a customer satisfaction template ensures that businesses can ask the same questions — hence, achieving consistent data and more accessible analysis.
2. Benchmarking: A customer satisfaction template allows businesses to benchmark their performance against their competitors or even industry standards.
3. Increased response rates: Customers are more likely to complete a survey if it is easy to understand and takes a short time to complete. A well-designed customer satisfaction template (designed with Scribe👌🏾) can help companies achieve higher response rates and accurate data.
4. Efficiency: Creating a customer satisfaction survey from scratch can be time-consuming and stressful. A pre-designed template is a great alternative for saving time and effort.

Check out this free customer satisfaction template

Are you looking for a way to measure customer satisfaction and improve your business?

Our customer satisfaction survey template is a simple and effective tool for gathering feedback from your customers.

With this template, you can:

• Measure overall customer satisfaction with your products or services.
• Identify specific areas of your business that may need improvement.
• Gather feedback on customer service interactions and product quality.
• Gauge customer loyalty and identify potential brand advocates.
• Use customer feedback to make targeted improvements to your business.

Our template is easy to modify and can be customized to fit the needs of your business. Whether you're a small startup or a large corporation, our customer satisfaction survey template can help you gather the insights you need to improve your business and better serve your customers.

Check out the rest of our Scribe Page templates, available in our Template Gallery for free!

Browse through the templates to find another customer satisfaction template to support your processes, like this Help Desk Feedback Follow-Up template.

Once you find the template you like, just click 'Duplicate Page' in the righthand corner of your screen. Then click 'Duplicate'

And voilà! Your customer satisfaction feedback template is ready. Select it on your dashboard and edit it as you deem fit.

Scribe is the new way to share how-to — in seconds, you can turn any process into a step-by-step guide. Here it is in action.

And with Pagesm you can build and share templates as needed, easily adding edits and customization like annotations, texts and custom branding to help your feedback template stand out!

Sharing your customer satisfaction feedback survey with your customers shouldn't be a hassle. Scribe allows you to share your survey with one click.

Then you can collect and analyze feedback and share it with your customer support team and other stakeholders involved.

How to analyze customer satisfaction feedback

Customer satisfaction feedback is the information, insights and inputs your business receives directly from customers telling you about their experience and satisfaction with your company, products and services. 

Customer feedback is highly beneficial to customer service teams, product managers, client-facing consultants, customer experience professionals, and pretty much anybody in your organization looking to improve their customer satisfaction scores.

However, this HubSpot study discovered that 42 percent of companies don’t survey their customers or collect feedback.

Collecting and analyzing customer feedback is important for:

• Improving the customer experience.
• Boosting recurring business.
• Helping customers feel engaged with your company.
• Acquiring social proof.
• Future product development.
• Reducing churn.
• Identifying if your customer journey map is optimized to lead the prospects into the sales funnel.
• Identifying where you stand with your competitors in the market.
• Understanding if your onboarding process adds to your customer’s experience.

Furthermore, the proper analysis provides your business with a clearer view of what needs to change and improve — to ultimately increase customer loyalty and reduce customer support cases.

In lieu of this, your next question should be...

How do you use customer satisfaction feedback data to make informed decisions?

Below are some ways to ensure that your customer feedback becomes meaningful.

1. Share the data and insights gathered

We all know how powerful customer feedback can be. However, the strength of its power can only be fully utilized if  it's shared with the right stakeholders:

• Customer support
• Sales
• Product
• Marketing

Scribe top tip: When sharing feedback from customers, ensure it's circulated company-wide and not accessed only by management or those at higher levels.

2. Identify areas of improvement and turn them into opportunities

Customer satisfaction feedback not only shows you your strengths but also helps you identify areas of improvement regarding your products or services. Customer feedback can also spot emerging customer needs or innovative opportunities — thereby increasing your revenue pipeline and establishing long-term business opportunities.

It can also help you:

• Drive sales by focusing on product improvement and innovation.
• Improve brand reputation by showing that you care about your customers’ wants and needs. This, in turn,  strengthens customer loyalty.
• Discover new ways to improve your products or services and reveal flaws in your customer support activities.

3. Identify relationships to nurture

Gathering customer satisfaction feedback shouldn't revolve around fixing problems only — as it can help identify the target market best suited for your products or services. This means customer feedback can help you discover who your happiest customers are and identify future advocates.

Therefore, don't just collect data to know what challenges to solve. Rather, nurture relationships with customers who have become ambassadors or advocates for your brand. You can identify them by using the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Conclusion

Understanding your clients and meeting their expectations is a game changer and will always ensure your business stands out. Additionally, it will help you offer better products and services to keep clients happy.

If you want to truly know what your customers think about your offerings (plus their accompanying values) and whether they'd recommend you to someone else, our customer satisfaction template can help you answer these questions and ensure that you're consistently delivering a top-notch experience.

You can easily add edits and customization and share your CSAT survey with any customer, anywhere — all done in a few clicks! 

Ready to create your next survey for customer satisfaction? Sign up on Scribe for free and start using any of our templates!