Wouldn’t you rather have a friend tell you they’re unhappy with you than see them rant on social media? Criticism can be hard to take—especially when it’s on display for all to see—but what if your friend has a point? Maybe you could improve on a thing or two.
The same goes for your business. Wouldn’t you want to know if your customers are unhappy, and if so, why? Understanding a customer’s pain points can help you improve your business, better serve your customers, and save you from a potential bashing on social media.
To determine if your customers are happy or not, you have to get to know them. Measuring customer satisfaction (CSAT) is as simple as surveying your customers after they interact with your company. Customer feedback is an important way to check if you’re meeting customer expectations, and if you aren’t, it’s a good indicator of where to innovate and improve.
In a recent study by Ovum, the independent research and advisory firm found that “predicting customer satisfaction helps prevent churn.”
3 factors that impact CSAT and ways you can improve customer satisfaction:
1. Response time
No matter how patient a customer might be, the longer they have to wait for a response, the less likely they are to feel satisfied with their experience. One way to improve CSAT is to improve your company’s response time to customer queries.
With tools like machine learning, your customer service team can route or escalate customer queries accordingly, diminishing the amount of time it takes to reply. Tools like automatic answers give customers the resources they need to self-help, which can help solve questions faster and reduce your team’s efforts on frequently asked questions.
2. The number of back and forth interactions
A customer could love your company, but that doesn’t mean they want to be in constant communication with you. If a customer needs an issue resolved, odds are they want it solved in as few interactions as possible. For a customer to have to reach out in the first place is an extra effort—they don’t want to have to call you for support.
According to Harvard Business Review research, “delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does.” Resolving a query in as few interactions as possible leads to happier, more loyal customers.
3. The subject matter
It might sound silly, but it’s not enough to simply survey your customers—you have to investigate why they might be unhappy. This is the less enticing work, the hard work of providing excellent customer service. Are your customers unhappy with the knowledge of your support agents? Are they unhappy because they’re getting passed from agent to agent and have to keep explaining their problem?
Depending on the subject matter of their query, you might be able to solve future issues in the same area. Need more knowledgeable support agents? Offer more trainings. Want to limit the amount of times a customer has to explain their problem? Store all customer information in one place so no matter what channel they reach out on, you’ll be able to see their previous interactions with your business, as well as what issues they are having.
Measuring CSAT and learning from valuable feedback are some of the best ways your company can improve. Customers are a treasure trove of information—it’s simply a matter of what you do with that information.
Interested in improving CSAT? Learn how Zendesk can lend a helping hand