According to Luis Hernandez, VP of Customer Success at Geckoboard, “Conducting customer satisfaction research, such as CSAT surveys, can provide your company the insight to make informed decisions related to the retention and expansion of your customer base.”
For a company to improve customer satisfaction, it has to take an unbiased and realistic look at its processes and protocols. Companies need to ask the hard questions and value and act upon what their customers feel like to grow their business model making it more adaptable to the needs of customers. Companies that follow this won’t end up losing touch with their client base and will eventually not lose their business to competitors.
CSAT surveys are:
- Easy to execute
CSAT surveys are the quickest and shortest way to close the loop on customer engagement and interaction, capturing their reviews and feedback on how the process went right from the ticket initiation to its resolution.
- Trackable with time
CSAT surveys reveal evolving customer satisfaction trends that are administered at several points during the lifecycle of the customer journey.
- Benchmarking made simple
CSAT is a metric that can be benchmarked against other peers within the industry. By comparing the CSAT scores of a company with the others belonging to the same field, the company will be able to gauge and get a larger picture of how it’s performing against client expectations.
Due to their frequency and close association with individual interactions, these surveys provide the necessary information, insight, and feedback required to prevent the deterioration of customer relationships.
When to use CSAT surveys:
Getting the data to measure CSAT is all about the right timing. Gauging or prompting customers for ratings at various touch-points of the customer lifecycle can help companies comprehend the pattern of how their CSAT scores have progressed over time. Moreover surveying customers at the right point of time during their interaction with customer service, is proved to result in the most accurate feedback.
- Post-purchase
- Onboarding
- Offboarding
- After event feedback
- Post encounter or interaction with the support team
What do CSAT analytics tell you:
Once the CSAT scores have been analyzed and calculated, it is essential to delve deeper into different aspects of the surveys to see common trends that occur or take place at pivotal points of the product’s or service’s lifecycle. The survey is also used to show what kind of policies and practices customers are drawn to and are actively responding to. This combination of information is crucial in budget allocation and strategic planning. These surveys should become an active part of a business’ release process and precede any changes made to the company’s offerings.
How to improve CSAT:
Improving your CSAT score not only means happier and more satisfied customers but also contributes to growing purchases and brand advocacy. Improving the CSAT scores of any organization must be considered an important initiative. The following are four strategies or ways to improve the CSAT score of your business.
1. Be Omnipresent
With newer communication and interactive channels like social media, web-chat, email, mobile, etc taking precedence; companies must build an omnichannel approach to their customer service to interact and stay in touch with customers. By being omnipresent, the company is showing that they are available for their customers anywhere and at any time. This is a boost in their satisfaction as they don’t have to make an extra effort trying to intact with the company on channels they are not familiar with or comfortable using. Keeping customers happy by having a multichannel approach with smart integrations across various platforms is a sure way of getting those CSAT scores growing.
2 . Empower Agents
At VOIZ, we believe that agent satisfaction is the key to better customer support service. Having motivated agents is essential so that they can deliver their best even while handling an unhappy customer well enough to convert their bad experience into a great one. Encourage agents to take ownership of customer issues which will help them to learn and gain exposure to various customer behaviours. This gives agents a sense of independence and reduces the chance of escalating or passing over the issue, resulting in exceptional customer service.
3. Reduce Waiting Time
If all your agents are engaged and the wait time is high, then your customers will not think twice about finding similar services in the open and waiting arms of your competitors. A company’s customer support must devise a strategy to eliminate or avoid customer wait time by onboarding more agents, breaking down their processes etc. Customer-friendly processes need to replace bureaucratic processes so that customers are rewarded with seamless service.
4. Offer personalized and self-services
Personalizing services and experiences usually yield high satisfaction. The trick is to make the customer feel like he/she is the only one that matters. Minor personalizations like using the customer’s name, referring to some personal information, etc can really make a difference in their customer journey. Because the company considers customer preferences, chances are that customers will start associating their loyalty towards this particular company. This makes getting CSAT scores easier because feedback collected in real-time allows the agents and the company to get access to the customer’s thought process. This way, tracking customer behaviour helps to deliver individualized services automatically.
CSAT is an impactful metric to track in addition to the NPS or Net Promoter Score. Since NPS is tracked infrequently i.e. once in three months or six months, CSAT gives enterprises a daily pulse on the customer journey and experience. Companies that take the time to peruse and understand their CSAT score and further tailor their surveys to learn and procure valuable information about their business are more likely to have higher customer retention and satisfaction rates in the long run.
From the get-go, keeping tabs on the CSAT scores of an organization is an effective way to identify loyal customers and predict when unhappy or dissatisfied customers are going to leave. More importantly, CSAT helps in elevating the organization’s customer experience management system along with improving its service, customer base, and sales numbers.