2 Recent Thinks About Customer Satisfaction

This post was originally published on the FCR Blog on March 24, 2016. Click here to read the original.

I’ve been thinking a lot about customer satisfaction (CSAT) of late, routinely diving into their results to help our clients sort through the data and take action toward improvement. It’s ongoing and tedious at times but there are few better, richer ways to hear what customers are saying about our companies — and trust me, it could be good or bad, but they are definitely saying stuff.

Anyway, so in the last couple weeks I’ve learned a couple new things that I thought I’d share.

Eyes On It Daily

Customer satisfaction is something that should be monitored on a daily basis, especially if you have a significant response rate. Here are some things we’ve started looking at on a daily basis:

• Overall CSAT – Show the overall CSAT percentage and accompany that with a bar chart of the positive and negative response counts. This allows you to see where the peaks and valleys are and try to explain them.

• Dissatisfaction Drivers – Create a breakdown of the top drivers of customer dissatisfaction. It’s helpful to assign some general categories but also have the ability to drill down and really tell the story as to what’s causing customers to be dissatisfied. In most cases, you will need to roll up your sleeves and read the customer comments and review their interaction with customer service to determine the root cause of the dissatisfaction.

• Quality Review – While you are reading through the comments and reviewing the cases, think about how the customer experience could be improved for that particular issue. Was a canned response used that was off putting for the customer? Does the agent that worked with the customer need to be coached on some aspect of the interaction? Do we have a process in place that is causing unnecessary delays for customers?
• Follow Up – How many surveys have you taken where you voiced your dissatisfaction and heard absolutely nothing back? The best practice with dissatisfied surveys it to reach out to the customer, thank them for their feedback, and let them know what you’re doing with that feedback. If they have already canceled their service, chances are that you won’t hear from them. But if the customer experienced a service failure, you might just have the opportunity win them over with a great service recovery.

Following this process on a daily basis has helped us wrap our minds around how to improve this metric which is a KPI for many of our clients. This also enables us to easily step back monthly and quarterly to see how customer satisfaction is performing.

31 Flavors Of CSAT

When it comes to customer satisfaction, there are probably more than 31 flavors. I’ve previously written that depending on the customer service tools you use, your CSAT survey might involve a scale from 1 to 10, a simple good/bad or satisfied/unsatisfied, or a range of happy and sad faces to choose from. In those cases, we ultimately take the percentage of the satisfied and call that customer satisfaction.

Thanks to one of our clients, I learned that there is a standard that’s been set by COPC. Their recommended survey is on a five point scale, asking how satisfied you are with customer service. The scale features two positive options, one neutral, and two negative. Here’s how to interpret the results.

• Promoters – To gauge just the promoters of your company, take the percentage of the “top box” or the fives.
• Customer Satisfaction – This is the percentage of the “top two boxes” or the responses with fours and fives.
• Bottom Box – The percentage of the ones or “bottom box” is also tracked.

In this case, not only did our client track customer satisfaction as a KPI, but they also tracked the bottom box percentage and want to work to actively work to get that somewhere in a 2-5% range.

Those are my two learning experiences lately. As an outsourcer, this came out of discussions with our clients that helped us understand their unique needs and goals. By evolving with them as they work to achieve their business goals, we also learn a few things along the way.

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