As a business, knowing how customers feel about your service is essential to your growth. With modern trends on growth drifting towards a new buzzword every other week, it's important to prioritize what matters the most for success — customer satisfaction.
This secret recipe is often mentioned in passing but never fully explored. To put this in practical terms, the best way to know a customer's needs is by getting direct feedback from them.
But let's say you've already implemented a system that collects feedback on a customer's experience — what then? In that case, it's time to stop treating that feature like an afterthought and elevate it into a top priority.
What is CSAT?
A Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is the primary metric used to learn how your target audience feels about the service/product you provide.
It's one of the main CX metrics and is incredible important for companies to track to keep an eye on the health of their business.
Every type of business can benefit from having this metric measured, but it's particularly relevant in SaaS, which is highly dependent on customer retention. A lot of seemingly confusing trends can be understood once you have a solid grasp of how customer satisfaction relates to customer retention and how essential CSAT is to retention.
How to measure CSAT
Confused about how to measure customer satisfaction? We've got you covered.
Before you start this process, we'd recommend taking a step back and thinking a little about strategy. Consider the following:
- Setting a clear goal: Start by asking yourself why you're measuring CSAT and why you've chosen that specific point in the experience to ask the question.
- Create a plan: Get granular with this. Once you have your CSAT score, how do you plan to incorporate what it reveals to make positive changes?
- Think about the bigger picture: Examining how CSAT fits into your larger CX data strategy can ensure that you actually make actionable changes to improve your score.
Once you've done that legwork, you can move on to practical steps involved in calculating your CSAT score.
Because a CSAT score is an aggregate measurement about how customers feel about an interaction, feature or service, the first step when you set out to calculate CSAT is to send out CSAT surveys and collect responses.
CSAT surveys are often short and feature one or more questions along the lines of 'How was your overall satisfaction with your experience today?'
We've gone into more detail about CSAT surveys before, including a bunch of example questions and different kinds of rating scales, so make sure you read that article for more information if you're designing a survey.
Once you've sent those surveys out and collected the responses, here is do the follow these steps:
- You'll need to add up all the 4 and 5 responses you got to your survey.
- You'll need to add up the total number of responses across all scores.
- You'll then need to divide the total number of 4 and 5 responses by the total number of responses.
- Finally, you'll have to multiply that by 100 to arrive at the percentage.
We've explained it all in the video below.
Why CSAT is important
Luckily, creating an elevated customer experience is not rocket science. Once you've got your customer satisfaction score, you can use it to create superior customer experiences.
Keeping track of CSAT by interaction or feature, for example, can really help you narrow down where exactly your customer support workflows and product needs to be refined.
It is really worth it to take CSAT seriously and endeavor all you can to make sure your customers are enjoying their experiences with your company and product. Fun fact: acquiring new customers is a much more expensive endeavor than retaining existing ones. Trying to convince someone to try something new is just fundamentally harder that convincing someone who has already expressed an interest to stick around. An existing customer doesn't have that mental barrier to diving into the unknown, so it's important to convince them to stick around. Existing users, if treated well, can even be an invaluable source of referral traffic.
Top CSAT benefits
Here are some solid reasons you should take into account when assessing the benefits of increased customer satisfaction to your brand:
- It opens up communication with your users so you can make informed decisions about product improvements.
- It increases customer loyalty by helping you stand out amongst your competitors.
- It increases customer retention because good customer support reduces friction and pain points.
- It decreases customer churn by making sure your product's value proposition stays relevant to your users or is changed accordingly.
- It helps improve brand awareness because satisfied customers are more likely to refer you to friends and family.
How to improve CSAT scores
There are a few things you can do if you're trying to improve your CSAT score. Placing your customers at the center of everything you do is a good start — after all, you're here to cater to their needs.
Create a customer-centric environment
One of the best ways to increase customer satisfaction is ensuring that your agents put the customer first at every point in their interactions. Every aspect of your business model should be deliberately designed to focus on the needs of your customers. Your company's core value should reflect the attribute of "putting the customer first".
With the customer at the heart of everything you do, the quality of your service will naturally receive better feedback. To improve your CSAT scores, your company should analyze the customer's journey and consider what strategies invoke certain emotions from customers.
When the whole team works together to figure out how to meet the needs and expectations of customers, your CSAT score will naturally increase, along with sales and other benefits for your organization.
Introduce faster support channels
Over 90% of companies now offer digital support, so if your company only uses calls or email for customer support, it's best to introduce more modern digital channels.
Communication channels for customers have changed a lot over the years. Avenues like email, phone contacts, live chat, contact forms, cobrowsing and social media will prove helpful in making you more accessible to your customers. Taking advantage of any of these is a good idea, but state of-the-art customer support technology, like in-app calls and cobrowsing, is especially beneficial. It also helps you stand apart from your competitors since so few companies leverage it.
Digital channels also make it easier for your customer support agents to provide faster and more consistent customer support, which is one of the most critical factors when it comes to influencing your CSAT score.
Create a personalized experience
Each customer has their own personal preferences and queries. As a business, you should have the ability to engage multiple customers in their preferred method of communication. Some people view text messaging as a comfortable, safe and enjoyable form of communication. Others prefer the real-time support that cobrowsing and video calling provides.
Therefore, companies have the opportunity to significantly improve customer satisfaction scores when implementing a solid, comprehensive customer support flow that gives every customer what they want. You can really influence customer retention positively by paying special attention to this.
Cobrowsing and in-app calls are especially significant because they can be personalized to fit in with the type of business you're operating. Not only that, but by providing immediate support, they avoid the most dreaded problem in SaaS: frustrated, demotivated users.
With features that allow customers to speak to agents instantly and cobrowse within the app they're working in, your agents will be better equipped to provide a solution for even the most unique problems faced by customers.
Create a blueprint for your customer support
Blueprints are essential for formalizing and standardizing procedures and workflows so everyone is on the same page. Whether that relates to ticket escalation strategies or follow up with users, putting things down on paper is always a helpful exercise.
Using a blueprint also allows you to iron out any internal issues that might cause friction with the proper delivery of your company's services. It also means empowering your team to create a fully streamlined customer satisfaction process.
Collect and act on customer feedback
After you've sent our surveys, measured responses and calculated your CSAT, it's essential to act on the feedback you're receiving from your users. Your CSAT score will need to be evaluated and improved on an ongoing basis, and there's really no other way to do it: you have to listen to and implement what your customers are telling you.
Customer feedback is essential because it helps your business identify gaps between what your customer expects from you and what they're actually being given. Customer retention is only attainable when customers feel like their voices are heard. And customers feel like their contribution is valued when they see that their feedback has resulted in some perceivable change. This could include adding accessibility features for certain types of customers, for example, or adding additional features and services, provided they are in line with your business goals.
By listening to and implementing customer feedback, you'll be rewarded with loyal customers that will increase their lifetime value as they continue to use your service. The customers who go through a positive experience will always be the best possible advocates for your business in the long run.
CSAT Improvement plan
If you want to fully audit your processes with the goal of improving CSAT, this is what your roadmap could look like.
- Review the channels you are using to distribute CSAT. Can you collect more answers in other ways?
- Review the timing of your surveys: do they take place after specific interactions? Are you surveying users that didn't submit support requests too?
- Look at statistical significance: is the data set big enough?
- Are you collecting qualitative feedback in your surveys (with an open question, for example)?
- Document actions taken from the analysis of your last CSAT survey.
- Analyze the effort required by customers when solving a request.
- Analyze time to resolution, can it be improved?
- Review your knowledge center: are customers submitting tickets they could find an answer for there?
- Compare CSAT trends with changes in your workflows or team structure.
- Review how tickets are being escalated to higher tiers or engineering teams.
- Review the time spent on non-customer interactions (working in your support software, searching for answers, escalating tickets, etc.)
- Interview specific customers from any rating (both satisfied and unsatisfied) to better understand their feedback.
Customer support software to improve your CSAT
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As a SaaS company that lives, breathes and dreams in customer support experiences, we know that great customer support is essential to the success of every company in every industry, but especially in SaaS. But providing excellent customer support can be expensive and time-consuming. You need to staff up with extra customer service reps, and then you have to train them and manage their work. There's also the ever-present danger of creating silos and hurdles between customer-facing and product teams, which means that all the valuable feedback that you've worked hard to collect never results in measurable improvements to your product.
CSAT is more than just a number. Improving your score is a small piece of the puzzle in a well-crafted CX strategy. It doesn't stop with talking to your users or asking them which of five emoticons best describes their experience on any given day. It's so much more than that:
- It's about collecting all that data with surveys, cobrowsing and calls
- It's about merging it with a look under the hood with session replays and console logs
- And then it's about bringing both customer-facing and product teams onto the same page so they are delivering outstanding customer experiences.
Customer support can make or break your product, so it's worth it to invest in it early and scale as you go.
With Fullview, you can achieve all that in one go, on one platform. Sign up to give it a go yourself.
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