After any point of contact, numerous questions can be asked to customers to understand their overall experience a little better. Customer satisfaction scores or CSAT scores are calculated and measured to help companies and agents get a clear picture of customer sentiments at various points of interaction with the company. CSAT helps various customer service teams to gain insights into their quality of service across various touch-points.
What exactly is CSAT?
CSAT is a measure of customer sentiment that is used in organizations to enable them to understand how customers respond to their services and products. It is one of the most intuitive of the customer satisfaction surveys that analyzes the ‘here and now’ aspect of a customer’s contact with the business. It primarily calculates a customer’s overall satisfaction with an encounter, purchase, or business.
A CSAT survey is essentially quick and easy to implement as it gathers information about the customer’s experience. After an interaction, customers are asked to rate their level of satisfaction, on a standard scale with numerical metrics or metrics ranging from ‘very satisfied’ to ‘not satisfied at all’. The range and metrics options are up to the company to decide how they want to calculate their analysis. To sum it up, CSAT is the ideal way to capture feedback at the height of customer engagement and interaction.
Why is CSAT important?
CSAT scores help leaders to spot opportunities to improve agent performance and to promote self-correcting behaviour among agents through this simple metric system. Customer feedback insights provide the business with exactly what it needs to offer exceptional service. CSAT is the quickest and easiest way to capture what people have to say about their customer journey soon after engaging with the brand. Here are some ways in which CSAT adds value to not just customer support but also the growth of the business or the company in the long run.
- Customer Interaction
Companies that regularly communicate and interact with customers have a leg up when compared to their competitors. Conducting surveys is a good way to engage with customers as it goes to show that the company cares about what its customers have to say. Measuring CSAT allows the brand to understand consumer preferences and keep up with the evolving and ever-changing needs of the customers.
- Smart and effective investment
By learning and understanding customer needs and preferences through such a close-knit survey, the company learns where to spend and what to provide. This allows the company to make informed decisions to a point where business investments prove to be fruitful. Unclear decisions rarely work and the trial-and-error method costs more than the returns the company earns back. Therefore, measuring customer satisfaction across every touchpoint gives organizations the chance to make the right decisions in the lifecycle of the business.
- Measure agent performance
CSAT helps companies in agent and employee retention. With the help of CSAT, team leaders can identify and help agents improve their performance and also gives them the freedom to self-correct which goes a long way in generating happy customers. Once agents have a clear understanding of their performance and their areas of improvement, they will be able to navigate the customers better and provide them with better customer service.
- Improved brand image
Agents retained with the help of CSAT will continue doing business with you enhancing the customer journey. These agents with experience and knowledge will double up as promoters reducing customer churn and improving the resolution rate. A consistent practice of this enhances the brand image and is effective in attracting new clients.
- Rise in profits
CSAT provides companies with metrics and data that are directly from the customers in relation to their experience with the company. This metric has the power to improve market conditions and will have existing customers, retained and new customers, easily acquired through word of mouth and with limited expenditure and lesser resource allocation.
All these factors work together to improve customer experience to eventually make an impact on the success of the business.
How is CSAT calculated?
Since customer satisfaction is the important factor that needs to be measured against customer expectation, it is key to identify the economic value here. Loss of revenue can be up to twice as much as the positive results of over-delivery when experience fails to meet the expectations.
Calculating CSAT can be used to determine how a customer or a consumer feels about the overall experience, customer journey, or the company’s products and services. This question can be presented on a scale ranging from ‘extremely dissatisfied to very satisfied’ or can be presented using a 1-5 scale, where 1 is very dissatisfied and 5 is very satisfied.
To calculate the company’s CSAT score, take the number of satisfied customers (those who selected the top 2 choices on the scale i.e. satisfied and very satisfied; or 4 and 5) and divide that by the total number of responses. After which, multiply it by 100 to see the percentage of satisfied customers.
For example:
The reason why the two highest values from CSAT are taken is that it is the more accurate percentile predictor of customer retention over other overall averages.
After conducting satisfaction surveys at various stages of the customer lifecycle, it is essential to analyze the results of the survey. This next part of the process is pivotal for the company to use its resources effectively, learn from prior errors and maintain customer satisfaction.