Guest Blog: 10 Surefire Ways to Improve CSAT Score

This week we feature an article by Prasad Reddy who shares 10 ways to improve CSAT scores by enhancing customer satisfaction. – Shep Hyken

Customer satisfaction is at the core of your business health and growth. In this age of social media, unhappy customers can cause extensive damage to your brand. Happy and satisfied customers, on the other hand, enhance loyalty and revenue. Businesses always look to implement new and unconventional ideas to improve customer satisfaction, which enhances the CSAT score.

CSAT score is a metric to identify customers satisfaction levels while they are interacting with your brand. A higher CSAT score indicates better customer service. Every year, businesses in the United States lose $83 billion due to a lack of good customer service. Across the globe, businesses lose about $338.5 billion a year for the same reason.

In this piece, we will dig deep into 10 sure-fire ways to improve CSAT scores by enhancing customer satisfaction.

1. Respond quickly

Nobody likes to wait long when they need support. Customers always look for a fast resolution to their queries or at least a quick response. Plan an appropriate solution for each query, estimate the time and respond.

You can track ticket response times to maintain insights into how quickly your team is resolving issues. Accordingly, you can set targets and aim to continually beat them and lower the response times to boost customer satisfaction.

2. Honor promises

Your trust and relationship with the customer are built upon your ability to keep promises and meet their expectations. Make promises which you can keep and focus on addressing the issue until it is resolved. Customers won’t be satisfied with customer service agents who fail to keep their promises and don’t meet expectations.

You can use service level agreements to clearly set expectations for both customers and support agents. They provide a formal contract that stipulates what kind of service you commit to deliver and provide peace of mind to customers.

3. Make it easy for customers to reach you

Customers want simple and easy methods to reach you for support. Implement multiple support channels such as email, live chat, phone etc. for customer service.

Offering a wide variety of options enables customers to choose what’s most convenient for them. Execute customer support channels according to the customer’s choice in order to offer the best assistance possible.

4. Implement multimedia

Customers need images, videos and graphics to understand the resolution to their problems. It is better to offer more visual content to customers, as long technical text can be confusing to some of them. Adding visual content improves interactivity, which helps to improve engagement.

5. Set proper goals for support agents

The performance of your support agents is extremely important when it comes to achieving customer satisfaction. To maintain insight into the big picture, it is best to set specific goals for every support executive and inform them about them. Then, monitor their performance against those goals.

Additionally, make the agent realize the importance of their role and responsibility in order to improve the collective productivity of the support department.

6. Track customers’ ticket history

Customers hate to repeat themselves over and over about the same problem. Making them do that consistently harms the entire support experience and negatively impacts customer satisfaction. To overcome this problem, maintain a history of customer problems and make sure they don’t have to repeat themselves when they’ve already informed you of an issue.

This tactic proves more useful with your power users, who contact you more often to resolve their problems. Maintaining their ticket history helps agents resolve issues faster and helps to improve your CSAT score.

7.  Keep your agents happy

Only happy agents can maintain happy customers. It is crucial to keep every agent satisfied in the workplace so they can provide the best possible service to customers. Employee satisfaction depends on an array of variables, such as good income, incentives, work culture, future opportunities and more.

Appreciating your agents’ performance encourages them to work harder. Introduce appraisals and gamify the work culture to keep your agents happy and satisfied.

8. Personalize customer service

For enhanced customer satisfaction, it’s important that you make your customers feel valued and respected. Greet customers with their names, and wish them well on special occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries.

Showing concern and care for their problems and making the interaction more personalized helps in improving customer satisfaction.

9. Ensure agent’s product knowledge

It is crucial that support agents have complete, end-to-end knowledge about the product before offering support to customers. Customers don’t like to be interacting with support agents who do not fully understand the company’s products or services.

10. Follow up to check in

This is the most crucial step when it comes to customer service. Businesses often fail to follow up on closed tickets to ensure the resolution is working and no further problems exist.

Send follow-up emails to the customer after a week to ensure that no further problems have appeared and everything is running smoothly. This will show them that you are genuinely invested in their success.

Bonus – Implement  better service automation

A good service automation software solution helps you streamline service-related tasks. Implement a high-quality service automation tool for your business to make tasks easier and improve efficiency. Doing so makes it simple and quick to retrieve customer interaction history, which in turn helps in providing a better customer experience.

How is a CSAT score measured?

CSAT is measured by the responses received to the questions asked in a customer feedback survey. People can rate their experience by letting you know how satisfied they were with the experience. They rate that experience based on the following five-star scale:

• Very satisfied – 5 Stars
• Satisfied – 4 Stars
• Neutral – 3 Stars
• Unsatisfied – 2 Stars
• Very unsatisfied – 1 Star

To calculate your overall CSAT score, simply add up all the scores you receive and divide that by the number of people who rated your service. Generally, the score is expressed as a percentage. A score of 100% would indicate absolute customer satisfaction, while a score of 0% would indicate total customer dissatisfaction.

Conclusion

Customer satisfaction is at the core of every business and an improved CSAT score shows that customers are pleased with the service you are providing. Making a customer feel valued and respected is the key behind any customer satisfaction strategy.

Years ago, customer satisfaction was not the main area of focus for businesses, but the shifting and increasingly competitive business landscape has now made customer satisfaction a key concern for every business. It’s important to apply best practices to keep your customers happy.

It is also necessary to create an environment where management can understand what customers expect, which will be helpful in decision making.

However, it should be noted that there is no universal resolution to improve customer satisfaction. The key is to collectively follow best practices to increase satisfaction levels of unique customer base based on their unique needs.

Prasad Reddy is a Marketing Analyst at Agile CRM, an All-in-One CRM with Sales, Marketing and Service automation in a single platform. 

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: Ten Customer Service/Customer Experience Predictions for 2019