Measuring Customer Satisfaction: The Highlights

Article by: Sheryl Lynn Baas

Last update: March 1, 2024

Whether you deal with customers at work, or use products and services as a customer yourself, you know from experience that customer satisfaction is of great importance. But how do you measure such a crucial metric? It’s one thing to rate your own satisfaction, but to get an accurate picture of someone else’s, can be a bit more challenging.

Customer satisfaction is usually determined through feedback, such as questionnaires and reviews. The degree to which a customer is satisfied depends on a number of factors, including the quality of the product, price, customer service, brand reputation or the way in which a product is delivered. Do you know how satisfied your customers are?

A popular tool to measure customer satisfaction

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the best-known tools for measuring customer satisfaction. Answered on a scale of 0 – 10, this metric is based on a single question:

How likely would you recommend this company, product or service to a friend or colleague?

The goal of NPS is to measure customer loyalty, providing an alternative and easier way to measuring customer satisfaction. Asking one simple question is enough to make clear what customers think of your company, product or service. There is some criticism on NPS as well, which is important to consider. You can read about it in our article.

Customer satisfaction versus continuous improvement

The conventional approach to customer satisfaction is that of continuous improvement. But is this the only way? Marketing guru Sampson Lee believes it’s not all that important to completely remove negative customer experiences. His motto is ‘pain is good’ (PIG), which implies that it is okay for customers to have negative experiences from time to time.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman states that people only remember two experiences; the peak and the end of the experience. Lee’s Pain Pleasure Curve works precisely on this basis. By using ‘pleasure’ at the start, middle and end, customers will forget any moments of ‘pain’. And those troughs of pain are necessary to provide contrast to the peaks of pleasure.

Final thoughts on customer satisfaction

A final tip to help you navigate customer satisfaction, is the marketing tool by Noriaki Kano, called the Kano Model of Customer Satisfaction. The Kano model distinguishes three types of customer needs and five categories of customer preferences, which can overlap. The model offers insight into the product attributes that are important to a customer.

The marketing tools linked above, should give you a good idea on what to consider when it comes to customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Should you want to explore these topics further, you can navigate our marketing category or have a look at the selected resources below.

Interesting resources to dive deeper:

Customer Experience: Brand Promise & Customer Loyalty – Course + Certification.
The Ultimate Customer Experience Course – Course + Certification.
Building an Unstoppable Brand – Masterclass by Jeffrey Perlman
Scale your business to $1 million – Masterclass by Verne Harnish

How to cite this article:
Baas, S. L. (2024). Measuring Customer Satisfaction: The Highlights. Retrieved [insert date] from Toolshero: https://www.toolshero.com/blog/measuring-customer-satisfaction/

Original publication date: 01/12/2024 | Last update: 03/01/2024

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Article by:

Sheryl Lynn Baas

Sheryl Lynn Baas is our Communications Manager at Toolshero and you might recognize her from our learning videos. Sheryl’s academic background is in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology and she is the founder of the Sheryl Lynn Foundation, a non-profit for children and education in the Philippines. She’s a jack-of-all-trades and furthermore shares her gifts as a spiritual coach, presenter and DJ. Fun fact: she is former Miss Netherlands 2006.