CSAT And The Art Of Keeping Customers Happy CSAT or Customer Satisfaction is a method to evaluate the satisfaction quotient of a customer after every transaction.

The typical work life of customer service professionals in a company is one that is hectic and frenzied with several things on their plate simultaneously, ranging from managing people to achieving targets to administration to operations and a lot more. How does one juggle all this while ensuring their customers remain happy?

A clichéd yet simple approach is to put simple processes in place that help monitor and measure a customer's satisfaction quotient regularly. This needs to be implemented as a practice for every interaction with the customer, in an effort to better understand what makes them tick.

Customer service managers often receive generic reports that suggest that their customers are satisfied and happy with their products and services or even receive reports from a Net Promoter Score (NPS) that indicate a measure of brand loyalty. What this article however goes to prove is that in the absence of a transparent customer-satisfaction review on routine transactions, you are in reality losing out on valuable information that can provide valuable insights into running your business.

Customer Satisfaction or CSAT

This is a method to evaluate the satisfaction quotient of a customer after every transaction. This can be in the form of a brief survey that can be sent out to a customer after a transaction has been closed or an issue resolved. The questions however need to be brief, to the point and should assure the customer that the company is doing this out of genuine concern for him/her. The mechanism should also assuage any fears of customer for his/her decision and tell him/her that there is always an open line for communication to improve upon.

Which Of Our Channels Work?

If you operate on multi-channel support to your customers, how will you evaluate which channels work? Also precious money spent on marketing and advertising will deliver mixed results, but how can you evaluate what is working and what isn't? CSAT monitoring is an effective way to monitor this phenomena and to course correct periodically as the situation demands.

Customer ratings are likely to give you an overall perspective of the customer- support outreach but is not likely to give you insights on how each of the individual channels are working. According to a recent Zendesk-commissioned study on multi-channel customer care, the results show the varied outcomes provided by respective support channels for a business. Hence, without data on the CSAT performance of each individual channel, it is virtually impossible to gauge its progress.

Different Strokes For Different Folks

This is probably a routine scenario, where the support function receives an uneven number of requests often with a flood of easy-to-solve problems. Password problems, shipping problems, operations hours are all easily solvable problems by macros or other processes. If the customer gets a prompt response from the company, he/she is then likely to give a positive feedback in the CSAT survey. While these are not complex problems that can cause irreparable damage, but these tiny elements add up to the whole in building positive brand equity for the brand.

While challenges such as software issues or bugs are more complex in nature and are likely to be less frequent, it is extremely crucial to tackle the smaller ones, which are more frequent and have the potential to be more damaging in the long run.

How exactly are you managing the larger problems? There is no way to be aware of this until and unless you monitor it consistently. But if you tag your tickets by the problem then it becomes possible to measure the CSAT of the tickets in dealing with these issues. Now, you will know exactly how well you have been solving these problems.

CSAT can also be monitored through the functions of support tiers or even individual agents. While these levels may be considered frills in some organizations, their role is paramount as they are also brand ambassadors of a company in reality. Hence monitoring the CSAT of such roles also becomes critical.

Another area often ignored is the seasonal quality of support provided by a company. How is the support provided during a busy holiday season as opposed to a lean period, or what is the support provided on a weekend as opposed to a weekday, measuring the CSAT of such trends will also provide a benchmark for the success of an organization.

Hence, CSAT is a crucial element for all customer facing organizations to factor in effective monitoring and measurement mechanism to stay on top of trends.