5 customer satisfaction goals to improve loyalty and reduce churn

In this article, we show you how to set and measure effective customer satisfaction goals to draw on user insights and improve their product experience (PX).

5 effective customer satisfaction objectives you should set

Customer satisfaction is the backbone of a successful business. Setting clear objectives allows you to check and track your customers' experiences with your brand and product and improve their overall journey.

We’ve chosen the top five customer satisfaction goals any online business should be tracking. To prioritize the right goals for you as you go through the list, consider which of these strategies will help you build stronger relationships with your customers and meet your unique organizational KPIs. 

Goal 1: improve customer loyalty 

Building loyalty with your existing customers drives long-term business growth. Tracking customer loyalty also shows you how well your company is providing its core services.

Customer loyalty is important because:

• 65% of a company’s revenue comes from repeat business, and even a small increase in customer retention results in a significant profit increase

• Retaining existing customers is less expensive than pursuing new leads 

• Marketing to existing customers is easier because they’re already interested in your brand and the products or services you offer

How to set and measure customer loyalty goals

To set customer loyalty goals, be clear on what you want to achieve and set clear targets to measure your success. Here’s how:

1. Use OKRs

Objectives and key results (OKRs) is a collaborative goal-setting methodology that breaks goals into two steps: the objective (what we want to achieve) and the key results (how we know if we’re getting there). OKRs give your team a clear direction and actionable steps to achieve customer loyalty.

For example, a customer loyalty OKR could be: 

Objective: retain a bigger proportion of existing customers.

Key result 1: increase customer retention by 10% in the next quarter.

Key result 2: write and send out an email to lapsed customers. 

Key result 3: conduct 100 surveys with lapsed customers each month.

2. Focus on improving retention rates 

Set specific, time-bound goals to get key retention statistics. You can measure retention rates by calculating:

• Customer retention rate (CRR) to measure the number of customers who stay with your business during a specific time frame

• Annual churn rate (ACC) to find out the percentage loss of customers—or revenue—per year

• Cohort churn rate using A/B testing to find out which groups of customers are more likely to churn compared to other groups

3. Decrease churn 

Customer churn happens when your customers no longer purchase or interact with your business. Setting goals for reducing churn is essential as keeping your customers for longer will increase revenue.

To better understand your churn rates, compare Hotjar (👋) Session Recordings of loyal customers and customers who’ve churned.  This helps you identify specific issues or blockers that a customer may have experienced with your product—like a non-intuitive user interface (UI), a product tour that fails to engage users, or bugs and features that don’t work.

You can also place Hotjar churn surveys on pages where users unsubscribe to get voice-of-the-customer (VoC) feedback about the product experience (PX).

How to improve customer loyalty goals 

Existing customers often feel like they’re a low priority and they don’t get access to the best offers—like when a TV streaming service tempts new users with a discount for the first year, this can leave the older, loyal client base wondering why they stay. To improve customer loyalty, your existing customers should know you care about their experience and see that you’re constantly finding ways to improve it.

The best way to create a loyal customer base is to listen to your customers and make sure your existing users are delighted with their product and post-purchase experience. 

Start with these tips:

• Follow-up after purchases: use customer retention emails to create a great post-purchase experience. Send a pre-delivery email to highlight brand values and get users ready for your product or service. Then, send a post-delivery email asking ‘How did we do?’ to collect Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT), which measure short-term customer satisfaction with a product or service.

• Customer loyalty programs: send discount codes to customers after they make a purchase on your e-commerce site—or as part of a periodic email campaign—to show you value them and to encourage repeat business 

• Let existing customers have their voices heard: use feedback surveys to get your customers' opinions on your product to make them feel valued and show you're interested in their views

Goal 2: increase customer service satisfaction rates 

When your customers contact your help desk or customer support team it’s usually because something has gone wrong with your product or service. 

But a positive customer service experience that resolves user issues can turn a dissatisfied customer into a loyal one. 

How to set and measure customer service goals 

Set customer service goals that relate to your user's experience with your help center. You can also set objectives for evaluating how effectively your customers can self-serve.

Here are some ideas for goals you can set to increase customer service satisfaction: 

1. Reduce customer support tickets 

Comparing your customer support ticket rates month on month helps you evaluate whether your customers are getting the help they need and/or are able to resolve issues themselves. 

To understand what’s causing your customers to request help in the first place, give users a range of query types to choose from when they contact your help service. Then, review and analyze the types of issues that generate tickets. 

2. Increase help center satisfaction rates

Find out what your customers think of their customer service experience by asking them to complete an on-site survey after using your help center. You can also read through a selection of conversations between users and help center staff to identify if there are issues with the tone of voice or product solutions offered. 

3. Make your FAQs more effective

Watch Hotjar Session Recordings or view Heatmaps of your users interacting with FAQ pages to see how much time they spend there and which questions and answers they read. Apply filters to see Recordings and Heatmaps for customers who’ve submitted a support ticket, and compare their journey with that of other users. Then, use the insights you gather to make sure your FAQs help customers find the information they need.

How to increase customer service satisfaction rates

Showing your customers you want to answer their questions, resolve their issues, and give them the support they need will go a long way to achieving better customer service satisfaction.

Use these techniques to meet your goals and delight your customers in their customer service interactions: 

• Let customers choose their preferred means of communication: offer users a range of communication options, from live chat to email, so they can use the channel they’re most comfortable with

• Maintain up-to-date help resources: keep up-to-date and searchable FAQs and help center resources so customers can find the answers they need and fix issues themselves 

• Create a smooth customer service journey: let customers know exactly where they are in the customer service process through a clear navigation hierarchy, including numbered pages

• Give users real-time customer support: using AI chatbots that transition to a real-life help desk team member will give your customers immediate support. Hotjar also lets you include a Feedback button on your website that sits at the edge of a page to get in-the-moment feedback where users let you know what they like and dislike about their customer experience (CX).

Goal 3: increase product advocacy 

Up to 55% of people rely on word-of-mouth recommendations and customer references for purchase decisions, so increasing product advocacy is a great way to win new customers without increasing your advertising spend.

How to set and measure product advocacy goals

While many product advocacy goals tie in with overall customer satisfaction objectives, you can also set specific goals to increase customer referral rates or manage reviews about your product and user experience on public sites.

1. Increase customer referrals

Find out how likely your customers are to refer your product or service to other customers with Net Promoter Score® (NPS) surveys. Also, track events like call-to-action (CTA) button clicks for users who come through referral programs from social media links or email campaigns.

2. Improve customer feedback and public reviews

Track the percentage of positive reviews you’re getting, and seek to increase it by using customer feedback to make product or website improvements. Monitor reviews platforms and social media groups and reply to negative reviews to turn a negative situation into a positive one. You can set key results in terms of the number of reviews you respond to and compare negative feedback rates monthly.

How to increase product advocacy

First and foremost, increased product advocacy comes from delighting customers in general. You can also design product advocacy campaigns to encourage customer recommendations and raise awareness of your brand on social media. Here's how:

• Create referral programs: incentivize referrals by offering customers a free gift or discount on their next purchase

• Engage with customers on social media: create and maintain a social media presence, follow users that follow you, like and share their content, and shout out social media users who contribute positively to your posts

Goal 4: improve product usability 

A clunky website that makes it difficult for customers to find what they need wastes users’ time and energy and is bad for business.

Improving your product’s usability allows you to create a streamlined customer experience that helps users get the most out of your site and turns them into loyal, returning customers.

How to set and measure product usability goals 

Base your overall product usability goals on the big picture of how users experience your site as a whole. You should also set objectives for smaller, more concrete aspects of the user journey—like the percentage of users who ‘rage click’ or ‘u turn’—to uncover obstacles that are getting in the way of a positive user experience (UX). 

Below are some ideas for product usability goals you can set:

1. Improve user feedback on usability

Use an on-page Feedback widget to collect instant feedback when a user runs into an issue—or spots a feature that really works for them. On your Hotjar Dashboard, you can filter users’ positive and negative feedback to monitor how well you’re meeting your usability goals. 

2. Improve user satisfaction with new features before launching

Measure the success of new features by running A/B testing to check user responses before releasing them to all customers. As well as measuring which options early users prefer, get a more granular understanding of how product updates affect usability by viewing Session Recordings and Heatmaps. For example, 7-8% of the population are colorblind and will struggle to use a site with certain color combinations. Testing your new color scheme before launch will save you from rolling out an update that could be unusable for part of your customer base.

How to achieve better product usability

So how can you nail your product usability goals?

• Combine usability testing with direct user feedback: use Feedback tools in your usability testing to hear how customers experience your site, product, or features, and let users point out any blockers or bugs. Customer feedback adds another dimension to usability research, helping you uncover issues that won’t necessarily emerge from testing statistics.

• Watch your users interact with your site: use Session Recordings to see how users engage with your site across a full session. You’ll be able to notice areas of confusion and reveal opportunities to improve the overall user experience. 

• Continually test and develop new products: constantly update your site based on user needs to take advantage of the latest research in usability and deliver an increasingly streamlined product experience

• Get product feedback: use feedback widgets to find out about issues or blockers that users encounter in your product. Add the Hotjar Feedback widget to different pages along the user journey to collect feedback and hear how your product makes customers feel, in their own words.

Goal 5: drive successful cross-team collaboration

When teams and individuals are connected through cross-functional collaboration and communication, it becomes easier to set and achieve customer satisfaction goals as everyone is aligned on what needs to be done to delight users.

How to set and measure goals for cross-team collaboration 

Though internal collaboration goals are a little more difficult to track, it’s important to know what your objectives are to drive cross-team collaboration. Here are some ideas: 

1. Increase information-sharing across the business

Sharing PX insights across teams will help you prioritize the product experience and create user-centric products that put your customers first. Set goals for a certain number of cross-team meetings or updates per month.

2. Increase employee satisfaction with your collaboration culture

Ask your team members how they feel about your efforts to create a collaborative culture with surveys and interviews, and aim to improve their satisfaction ratings.

How to achieve better cross-team collaboration

Overcome organizational silos with these actions: 

• Set up dedicated cross-team collaboration channels: use communication tools—like Hotjar’s Slack integration—to share customer and product insights across teams. For example, you could set up a channel to share Hotjar Highlights, which allows you to capture snippets of your Recordings and Heatmaps, to help all teams spot new customer opportunities and get buy-in from stakeholders.

• Align goals: creating company-wide key performance indicators (KPIs) helps different departments focus on business-oriented goals. For example, you might want to achieve a 10% reduction in customer churn next quarter. By making your goal visible to all teams, you can all work together to achieve it.

• Set up cross-team projects: have your product, development, and marketing teams collaborate on a new feature for your site. Use Hotjar’s Google Optimize integration to design and test hypotheses about a new feature and work together to get buy-in from stakeholders.

Use customer satisfaction goals to power up your business

Developing a loyal base of satisfied customers is crucial for the future growth of your business, and setting clear customer satisfaction goals will help you focus on what you want to achieve and how to get there. By defining clear objectives for customer service, product experience, and user loyalty, you can measure your success and make effective, data-informed decisions. 

To meet your customer satisfaction objectives, you’ll need to go beyond quantitative data and seek to deeply understand your users through surveys, interviews, and product experience insights.