A quick, no-hassle way for customers to provide feedback is with a customer satisfaction survey. Zendesk takes a simple and effective approach for measuring customer support: ask if the interaction was good or bad. They also have the option to add a comment about their customer experience if they want to give you more feedback.

After you’ve gathered satisfaction (CSAT) ratings, there’s a lot a customer support team can do with this data. In fact, it’s a metric you can look at from many angles. For example, you can track and measure the following:

• A customer’s CSAT rating over time
• CSAT ratings, by customer types
• CSAT ratings, by channel
• CSAT ratings, by product or service
• Average CSAT ratings for agents and teams

Tracking these customer support metrics can shed light on the customer experience, which can inform everything from how your customer service team operates to the product roadmap your business uses to guide future development.

Other companies might use metrics called “Customer Effort Score” (CES). Companies that use the CES typically use it instead of CSAT ratings. Some companies move to CES after having used CSAT, feeling that they gathered all the useful customer service feedback they could from that survey. Either way, it’s vital to gather a customer satisfaction score from as many customers as possible.

Whether you use CES or CSAT, the message is clear: focusing on effort reduction should be one of your team’s primary goals to improve the customer experience and overall customer satisfaction, as a result.

To get to the bigger customer relationship story, beyond single support interactions, there’s also Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS). The net promoter survey helps companies gauge customer loyalty, the likelihood of repeat business, and whether the level of service has led customers to become advocates for the brand to others. A promoter score asks how likely customers are to recommend a business to someone else.

Social Media Metrics
Using social media-monitoring tools, companies can easily collect and analyze feedback for their customer service. Using these kinds of support metrics help to determine the following:

• How many comments appear to be written in a time of frustration, perhaps after a poor customer support experience in person or online?
• How many are technical or account-specific questions?
• How many comments provide feedback, positive or negative?
• How many questions can be answered using links to existing help content in your knowledge base?
• How many times would a brand mention benefit from a response?
• What time of day are your customers most active on social media?

Churn Metrics
Another excellent way to collect feedback (especially for subscription-based business) is to prompt customers to say why they’re canceling their account. This will help your business measure its churn rate, and from this metric, you can create a report of your churn activity over time. The response rate will be much higher if this survey is embedded in the user interface.