CSAT: How to Measure and Improve the Customer Service Experience

How To Measure And Improve Customer Satisfaction

After any touchpoint, there are countless questions you could ask your customers to better understand their overall experience.

CSAT, or customer satisfaction, scores are measured to help businesses gauge customer sentiment after different interactions with your brand.

CSAT can be measured by many different stakeholders across various touch points, but customer service teams use CSAT specifically to gain insights into their quality of service.

Below, we’ll explore how customer experience teams can measure and improve CSAT to elevate the quality of service.

What is CSAT

CSAT is a measure of customer sentiment used to help organizations understand how customers are responding to their products and services.

After a transaction or interaction, customers are asked to answer a question rating their satisfaction level on a standard scale, typically ranging from very satisfied to not satisfied at all.

As a contact center leader, this measure helps you track service performance over time and identify areas for improvement.

Why Measure Agent-Level CSAT Matters

There are many points at which you can measure customer satisfaction, but for customer service leaders, the most valuable feedback comes immediately after every service interaction.

CSAT scores can help team leaders identify coaching opportunities to improve agent performance, give agents visibility into their individual performance to encourage self-correcting behavior, and provide a simple metric to share with executives.

These all work together to improve the customer experience and highlight your impact on the success of the business.

How to Improve CSAT

Improving your CSAT score not only means happier customers, but contributes to brand advocacy and increased purchases. As a result, improving customer satisfaction is an important initiative for every contact center. Consider these five strategies to help improve your CSAT score and drive customer retention:

1. Collect Comments

Feedback requests and surveys should be short and sweet––you don’t want to make customers do more work than necessary. However, you should always give customers the option to provide qualitative feedback. It’s a lot easier to troubleshoot negative feedback when a comment is left than a one-star rating with no notes. Not only do comments give your team a clear direction on next steps, it also shows the customer that their voice is valued.

2. Include a Follow-Up Question

Once you have a system in place for measuring CSAT, follow-up questions are a great way to bolster your feedback insights and dive deeper into a particular topic. For example, after a customer submits their CSAT rating, you may include a follow-up question that asks them to identify areas of agent excellence or opportunities for improvement. This gamifies the feedback and gives you specific insights into what your customers are looking for. For example, if an agent is flagged as lacking empathy, you can easily tailor your coaching for that specific skill.

Turning Negative Customer Feedback into a Learning Opportunity

3. Democratize the Data

Team leaders are often pulled in many different directions, so it’s crucial to empower agents to self-correct. However, they can only do this if they have direct visibility into customer feedback.

With access to individual dashboards and real-time feedback streams, agents can easily identify what’s working with their customers, and what’s not.

Agents will want to see their scores improve and can learn directly from every interaction. This saves the time and effort of constantly having to troubleshoot and provide intensive coaching after every interaction.

4. Provide Real-Time Coaching

Team leaders should set up alerts to flag opportunities for improvement and take immediate action to coach agents on how to better address issues in the future.

With modern customer feedback tools, you can easily set up alerts to flag negative feedback, leave comments or annotations within a ticket, and deliver in-the-moment coaching throughout the day.

When you let CSAT scores guide your coaching efforts, you’ll never miss another opportunity for improvement.

Coaching Highlight certain customer service interactions for QA reviews instead of full reviews

5. Act on Low Ratings Right Away

The best way to improve your CSAT score is to act immediately.

Implementing a service recovery strategy enables you to improve customer sentiment in real-time and salvage the relationship. Set up alerts to notify you of any negative customer feedback the instant it comes in, open a new ticket to rectify the issue, and send a new feedback request to measure the change in customer sentiment.

This process allows you to optimize CSAT after any negative interaction.

CSAT is a crucial metric for customer experience teams to understand not only how they are doing, but how they can do better. Even if you’re already measuring CSAT, use the steps above to establish processes that will take your scores to the next level.

Ready to ignite agent performance? Check out Medallia’s guide, 4 Steps to Supercharge Contact Center Agent Performance, to learn how leading contact centers are putting the right systems and processes in place to achieve success.

This post was originally published on October 2, 2019 and has since been updated.