Customer-centric strategies are critical drivers of long-term business success. They drive revenue, competitive advantage, innovation, and they future-proof the business. To become customer-centric, businesses need to understand the differences and connections among three key concepts: Customer experience (CX), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and customer success. 

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Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) as a Discrete Experience 

The last time you purchased something, you followed a process of visiting one or more physical or digital retail outlets, reviewing the options, and selecting the product or service that best met your needs. In the moment, you felt some degree of satisfaction with the website you used, the employee who helped you, or the packaging you handled. This is the scenario in which measuring CSAT is most applicable – your satisfaction with the specific touchpoints you encountered on that single occasion. 

Measuring customer satisfaction serves many purposes. It helps business leaders, marketers, and innovators identify pain points at specific points in the customer journey, issues with products and services requiring improvements, and gaps that can be filled by creating new products and services.  

The most common research technique for measuring CSAT is the ubiquitous survey. Airport security lines and shopping mall bathrooms present digital devices with red or a green buttons to their clientele. Restaurants offer QR codes to their customers by which they can answer a couple of questions about their server. And, at the end of customer support calls, companies invite customers to press a number to rate the person they interacted with.  

CSAT questions generally focus on understanding the experience immediately at hand: 

• Are you satisfied or unsatisfied with the customer support you just received? 

• How would you rate the quality of the service you received today? 

• How easy was it to use our website? 

• What could we have done better today? 

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CSAT can also be measured via qualitative coding and sentiment analysis of online reviews, social media comments, and customer support chats. With the help of AI, discrete qualitative comments can be quickly and easily coded into categories and themes to understand which areas drive customer satisfaction.

Customer Experience (CX) for Broad, Long-term Perceptions  

Rather than focusing on a single customer touchpoint, customer experience research focuses on broader, longer-term relationships. For example, companies like Apple, Amazon, Disney, and Starbucks have earned reputations for creating painless omnichannel customer journeys. Regardless of whether people interact in-person with their customer service team, digitally through their website or apps, or physically through stores and product packaging, generations of customers have enjoyed positive experiences over multiple touchpoints and display high levels of customer loyalty and retention. 

By measuring customer experience, brands can identify and resolve friction points throughout an omnichannel customer journey and improve the broader customer experience. Further, CSAT information can be used to prioritize the innovation of new products, tailor messaging for diverse target audiences, and make wise financial and strategic decisions about the business.  

Because customer experience includes such a broad domain, it is often measured using a variety of quantitative questionnaires as well as qualitative interviews, focus groups, bulletin-boards, and open-end survey responses analyzed with AI. Possible questions include: 

• On a scale from very satisfied to very unsatisfied, how would you rate your overall experience with us? 

• On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to others? (NPS) 

• Please describe your experience of working with our customer support team. 

• How easy was it to start using our product? 

• How intuitive is our product to use? 

• What words would you use to describe our company? 

• What would make you consider switching to another company? 

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Customer Success for Long-term Loyalty and Retention 

While understanding both customer satisfaction and customer experience is critical, businesses also need to proactively prioritize customer success. Thus, instead of focusing only on delivering positive interactions, brands should work to ensure their products or services help clients achieve their long-term goals. The end result is long-term partnerships, increased customer lifetime value, and opportunities to unlock shared growth. 

Because of this focus on shared growth, customer success is usually measured both quantitatively for tracking purposes and qualitatively to gather deep insights. In addition to incorporating customer satisfaction and customer experience questions, research into customer success may also include questions like: 

• How well do our services help you achieve your goals? 

• What kinds of tasks allow you to use our product to its full potential? 

• What types of measurable value have you seen from using our services? 

• How well does our customer support team provide you with the guidance you need? 

• Does our team proactively help you maximize your use of our product? 

• How effective was the training you received from our support team? 

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Integrating CX, CSAT, & Customer Success 

Focusing on customer satisfaction is a quick and easy way to identify isolated weaknesses requiring resolution. However, to drive sustainable, long-term business growth, companies need to transform ad hoc customer satisfaction research projects into more comprehensive and customer experience and success programs.  

With careful attention, this transformation can lead to the creation of research and activation feedback cycles that improve customer retention, cultivate brand advocates, and ultimately accelerate business growth.  

The Voxco team prides itself on creating superior customer experiences and helping our partners find greater customer success. If you’d like to build a tailored customer experience and success research program, please get in touch with one of our helpful customer experience experts today!