What Is Customer Satisfaction? Definition & Ways to Boost It Through a Mobile App

Have you ever found yourself on hold by a customer support representative when you needed to access a service urgently? We’ve all been there. Here’s the thing: if a user struggles to navigate your mobile app or asks for support and their case is ignored, they may uninstall the application after leaving a bad review.

This is why most businesses establish smooth app experiences and support services to ensure customer satisfaction (CSAT), user retention, and seamless customer acquisition. Without these measures, 96% of shoppers will leave for competitors that value them.

So, how exactly do you show your mobile app users you value them? This article highlights the importance of customer satisfaction, best practices for mitigating the customer service challenges you may be facing, and effective ways to boost CSAT through mobile apps. Let’s get started!

What Is Customer Satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction measures buyers' happiness with your mobile app, product, services, and brand. Over the years, this has been a major drive for business success because 69% of customers prefer to shop frequently at establishments with consistent customer service.

It goes without saying that poor customer experience translates to dissatisfaction and fuels buyers' decisions to avoid the same situation again. Hence, improving customer satisfaction will foster lots of benefits and increase your market share.

Why Customer Satisfaction Is Important

Many hidden possibilities exist for startups and other enterprises with happy clients. Only satisfied customers will give positive feedback and refer their friends, family, and colleagues to your brand. That said, here are other benefits of customer satisfaction:

Customer Retention: The average customer acquisition cost ranges from $187 to $1,143, depending on the industry. No company will love to spend so much to get customers only to lose them due to avoidable service delivery issues. Customer satisfaction helps you reduce churn rate, giving you optimum value for every dollar spent on lead generation.
Customer Advocacy: Customer advocacy refers to nurturing your customers to the point where they can offer free word-of-mouth marketing for your brand. This is so important because 92% of buyers trust brands their family and friends recommended.
Increased Revenue Generation: One way to increase your revenue is to leverage opportunities that improve your customers’ long-term value. Studies have shown that 86% of existing customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.
Problem Identification: Knowing how best to improve customer satisfaction starts with discovering the underlying cause of dissatisfaction. Customer satisfaction information, including surveys, complaints, and metrics like net promoter score (NPS), can help you identify problems and determine the best way to improve or change your products and services.
Boosts Customer Loyalty: When you meet customer needs, they are more likely to make a repeat subscription or purchase. But, besides increasing loyalty through great services, you can use loyalty programs to reward users for engaging actively. This will make them remain in business with your brand for as long as they need your product.

Main Customer Satisfaction Challenges in 2023

Ensuring your customers are satisfied is easier said than done. Many businesses fail to offer great customer experience for various reasons, and here is a breakdown of the main customer satisfaction challenges businesses to face in 2023:

Understanding Customer Expectations

One of the biggest problems startups and enterprises face is not knowing what their customers want exactly. This may sound absurd, but it’s regrettably true. According to HubSpot, only 29% of brands know their potential customer’s pain points and core challenges, while only 42% know their target audience’s basic demographic information. Not knowing these things puts startups and companies in a blind spot, making it increasingly difficult to satisfy their customers.

Choosing the Right Channels and Tools

Did you know that US businesses lose up to $1.2 trillion annually due to poor communication? The reason is that communication causes a spiral effect that influences organizational efficiency and buyers' decisions. As such, you need to go the extra mile to determine the best channels for disseminating information to your customers.

For instance, many customers prefer email communications, while some prefer face-to-face and other social media platforms. If you’re keen to increase customer satisfaction, then you should conduct proper trials and add relevant omnichannel support tools to achieve your goals. Find out what works for your audience, research where they are most active, and leverage the information to ensure quick responses to users' needs and concerns.

Dealing With Service Outage Crisis

On October 4th, 2021, Meta’s social media platforms—Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram—unexpectedly shut down and remained inaccessible for over five hours. The incident led to untold losses for businesses that rely on the social media giants for their daily operations. In fact, one business lost 70% of its revenue as a result of the downtime.

You can rest assured that Meta’s customer satisfaction meter hit a negative that period. The same goes for you. When you realize that your product or service is a livewire for your customers, it will impress a responsibility on you to do better. Service interruptions, especially during an upgrade or bug fix in your system, are leading causes of customer frustration and dissatisfaction. Addressing them in the best possible manner will save your brand’s face in such hurtful situations.

Hiring and Training Service Professionals

Your company's productivity is directly proportional to the strengths and weaknesses of your team. Most companies invest heavily in customer service but rake in poor results because they’ve got the wrong set of people manning those responsibilities. Bad hires can cost you as much as 34% of your team’s productivity and, in turn, loss of revenue.

To avoid these losses, you need to build a team of skilled, empathetic professionals who value customer feedback and needs. You can start by finding the right individuals, say using a web based recruitment software, providing comprehensive training, and infusing a customer-centric mindset into your company culture.

Constant Communication With Customers

Maintaining regular communication helps build strong customer relationships, but when done wrongly, it can be a mess. Check this out: The global internet community shares about 347.3 billion emails daily. This includes support emails, new offers, discounts, and other newsletters from businesses—some of which are irrelevant and often annoying to the customers.

More so, customers get bombarded with inappropriate pop-ups and irrelevant ads on their mobile apps and social media feeds. This misplaced marketing effort can ruin the digital customer experience and your brand's perception.

The question is, how do you strike a balance between proactive outreach and not overwhelming customers with too many messages? To do this, only share relevant updates and ensure personalization is key in your interactions. Also, give your users the power to determine what communication medium suits them the most.

What Are the Different Types of In-app Surveys for Measuring Customer Satisfaction?

Certain methods measure different aspects of customer satisfaction effectively, starting from the onboarding process down to the advocacy phase. Some of these in-app surveys include:

Welcome Surveys

These are surveys that customers complete during the app onboarding process to enable the platform to offer them personalized service.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys

The NPS surveys are completed by customers after a purchase. It is carried out to predict whether they will repurchase from a platform or refer others.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Surveys

These customer satisfaction metrics surveys indicate customers' satisfaction with a brand's products or services.

Customer Effort Score (CES) Surveys

They measure how effortless or challenging interacting with your brand is. The survey can include questions like how much time they spent making a purchase or how easy it was to have an issue fixed.

Product-Market Fit (PMF) Surveys

The PMF survey asks one question: How would you feel if you could no longer use our product or tool?

Churn Surveys

A churn survey or customer loss, cancellation, or exit survey finds out why customers stopped using your product. This is usually done when the customer cancels their subscription before deleting their account.

How to Measure Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Measuring customer satisfaction is easy with proper planning and implementation. Here's a detailed overview of how to measure CSAT accurately:

1. Define Your Objective

The mistake most brands make when measuring customer satisfaction is to jump to the survey stage without clearly outlining their goals. A well-defined objective is like a compass that directs every other step you take, including the survey type, question, and trigger. It also determines whether you will proceed with customer satisfaction metrics or other in-app surveys.

2. Create Your CSAT Questions

Design questions that gather feedback about the customer's satisfaction with your mobile app, service, or experience. Ask questions like:

How satisfied are you with your recent experience?
On a scale of 1 to 5, how well did our product/service meet your needs?
Did our team address your issue to your satisfaction?
How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?
How easy was it to navigate our platform?
Rate your overall satisfaction with our support/service.

Note: Always keep your survey questions specific and relevant to customer expectations.

3. Determine the Rating Scale

Choose a scale the respondents can use to rate their satisfaction with a particular product or your brand entity. The common option used is the 1-5 measurement scale, which makes it easier to calculate customer satisfaction scores and quantify their sentiment level. Here is what each number represents:

1 = Very dissatisfied
2 = Dissatisfied
3 = Neutral
4 = Satisfied
5 = Very Satisfied

4. Determine the Survey Trigger

Timing is essential for every customer satisfaction survey, so determining the best moment to send the CSAT survey is necessary. It could be after a customer support interaction, a purchase, or any significant touchpoint in the buyers' journey.

5. Collect Responses

Distribute the customer satisfaction survey to your customers using email, in-app notifications, or other communication channels or tools. Always ensure ease of response to encourage participation.

6. Calculate CSAT Score

You can calculate your brand score in a customer satisfaction survey using the 1-5 rating in simple steps.

Divide the total number of positive responses (rated 4 or 5) by 100.
Multiply your answer by 100 to get your CSAT score.
Suppose you have 100 respondents, 75 gave positive responses, and 25 rated you below 4. Divide 75 (positive rating) by 100.
Now, multiply your answer (0.75) by 100, and your CSAT score will be 75. Remember that higher scores indicate higher satisfaction levels and vice versa.

7. Analyze and Interpret the Results

Look for trends and patterns from the results you collected. Identify areas that need change or improvement based on lower scores and highlight strengths from higher scores. Also, ensure you use a data-driven approach to make adjustments on areas customers are unsatisfied with.

8 Ways to Improve Customer Satisfaction on Mobile Apps

Many factors affect customer satisfaction, including complex onboarding processes, bad UI design, slow load speed, and frequent downtime. Here are eight proven ways to improve CSAT on your mobile app.

Efficient Onboarding

It may surprise you that despite how amazing your app may be, you may lose up to 40 – 60% of your customers if they consider the onboarding process poor and strenuous. Here is the catch: your onboarding process is the first impression a user gets in the product journey, and you’ve got to do all you can to ensure it’s as seamless as possible.

Fast Load Time

Ignoring your app or mobile site's load speed can cost you a 7% decrease in conversion for each one-second delay. In another research, Akamai revealed how expectations are rising for mobile applications, as 61% of users expect apps to load in four seconds, while 49% of respondents expect two seconds. Meeting the customers' expectations in load speed will help satisfy them while raking in the ensuing benefits.

Personalization

Another way to improve customer satisfaction is to invest in personalized deliveries. A study by Epsilon showed that 80% of users are more likely to purchase if offered personalized experiences. This proves that customizing your app to suit customers' needs will increase engagement and conversion rates.

Use In-app Support Tools

Self-service options have become one of the most prevalent support tools for millennials and Gen Zs. According to Zendesk, 67% of users prefer self-service options within in-app, like FAQs and chatbots, to talking to a customer service representative. Explore more self-service options, as they can increase customer satisfaction and reduce support costs.

Regular Update

Regular updates enhance the user experience, increasing convenience and higher user retention rates. One way to improve customer satisfaction is to ensure your updates include new features or functions that provide a smoother and more seamless user experience. Additionally, you need to be on the lookout for bugs and fix them early.

Use Push Notifications Wisely

Provide Offline Access

Mobile apps with offline capabilities tend to positively influence user behavior as they can use your service with or without the internet. Additionally, offline access eliminates the possibility of having low load speed while reducing the risk of data breaches.

How to Increase Customer Satisfaction With Reteno

Reteno is a full-service solution designed to increase user engagement, customer loyalty, and overall customer satisfaction. With Reteno, you can access eight effective communication tools, including timely in-app and mobile push notifications, personalization, omnichannel support, and relevant surveys.

Reteno ensures a seamless onboarding and overall app experience for new and existing customers. Depending on your business needs, you can choose one or all eight offerings to give your users the best experience while minimizing cost and banking a high ROI. You can get started now and position your brand for a competitive advantage.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, it’s your responsibility to boost your customer satisfaction score and grow your business. Whether you’re a small business or an enterprise brand, the rules apply to all—offer your mobile app users the best experience, and they will most likely become loyal customers with long-term value.

What Is Customer Satisfaction? Definition & Ways to Boost It Through a Mobile App

What Is Customer Satisfaction? Definition & Ways to Boost It Through a Mobile App