Online CSAT Data Collection Tips

Online business is changing the meaning of customer satisfaction. The customer experience when they choose your business online is completely different than the customer experience when they do business offline, and it’s important that you understand their satisfaction just as you would study satisfaction at a storefront.

But researching online customers is very different. You need to figure out how to come up with the right questions, how to know what data is meaningful, and how to use that data to make decisions. Collecting this data is a process.

Here are several tips for collecting data about your online customers. Online Satisfaction Data Collection Remember Survey Research Principles First and foremost, it’s important to remember that standard research practice and techniques still apply. You need to make sure you use the right types of samples, analyze the research correctly, ask questions with good wording – there are many factors that lead to good research, and while your customers may be online, your research methods and best practices shouldn’t change.

Studying Non-Customer Visitors Like with offline businesses, you can learn a lot from both the customers that don’t make a purchase and the ones that have left your company to do business elsewhere. Trying to get them into a sample (or doing other research separately) should be important as well, because you learn just as much from the people not doing business with your company as you do from the ones that are. Parcel Out Mixed Mode Customers If you have customers that use your business offline and you have customers that use your business online, you need to be able to account for that in the research.

Those that experience your storefront business are going to look at your company very differently, even if they also do business with your company online.

The key is to look at your online business like it’s a storefront, at least in terms of how you research. You’ll need to ask different questions (user experience questions, for example, are going to be very different from in person customer experiences), but you want the research to identify the good areas of your company, where there are weaknesses, and how you can improve satisfaction in order to increase purchases. The companies that are willing to invest more into this type of research are going to have the upper hand on their competitors.