How to measure customers’ satisfaction without asking them those boring questions

Let’s imagine you want to understand how happy your customers are with your product. According to the marketers there are several methods to do that, like NPS or Temper, but all of them require interaction with the customer.

Let’s be honest, most of the time people don’t want to answer stupid questions like “How do you feel about our new interface” and “Do you like our new red color?” and let’s be honest again and confess that no more than 10% of the users will answer those questions.

Of course you can use the data to create a magnificent dashboard and to convince the  management that your product rocks, but they can ask you some hard questions. “Then why are we losing money?” and “Why the Churn rate is so strange?” are just a couple of examples.

You don’t know.

Let’s take a step back and see what is important in this case. Let’s imagine we have a website where you offer content (video lessons, for example) and you are billing month by month.

 

Define your Groups and their Happiness KPIs

 

Let’s imagine that you have 2 main user groups (2 personas):

First Group – Constant Learners

Group of people interested in constant learning but not sure what they want to learn about (first).  These people will browse your content until they find something interesting and will spend time doing it.

What drives them?

• They want to discover new topics.
• They want to know a lot about everything.
• They are interested in trending topics (no one will browse – How to create a chart in Excel)
• They are thirsty about new knowledge.

Happiness KPIs (some of them):

• Number of topics discovered
  • Minutes spent on each topic
• Questions asked (onsite, outside)
• Number of logins
• Number of login patterns (do they log in every week or everyday at noon)
• Number of points/certificates achieved (if you have such things)
• Account lifetime

Second Group – Focused Learners

Group of people that are coming to your website to learn something specific – like python, because they need some tricks in their current work. They will find what they need and they will stick to it.

What drives them?

• They want to learn something on a specific topic
• They want something meaningful out of the topic fast
• They want hands-on experience.

Happiness KPIs (some of them):

• Finished % of  a topic.
• Exercises completed (if any).
• Questions asked.
• Number of Video pauses (try to watch and code at the same time).

 

Ok. What’s next.

It’s obvious –

• Define your own KPIs – you can use those above as an example.
• Then try to put a “label” to any a small group of users. Is this user a [focused] learner or a [constant] learner. In the case above, get all users that have browsed more than 3 topics in the past month and assign them into the “constant” bucket and for the “focused” one, get all that have completed only 1 topic within the last month and have asked at least one question.
• Track them to prove your claim – see if their behavior will remain the same – if it doesn’t – modify it.
• The create a simple dashboard to visualize the data for the two groups – and create a marketing strategy around that – how to engage both groups and push them gently on the success path.

This is how you can measure customer happiness without asking your visitors boring questions and to give them the opportunity to lie, because most probably at the end of the month you will see most of your “We like this new red button”- type of users leaving your service forever.