CSAT - Metric to Measure Customer Satisfaction

--By Karan Sharma--

Customer Satisfaction is a well-known term across the globe for any brand to succeed. The customer always wants the best product and service. In turn, the service/product provider ensures that the customer is delighted with its offerings. However, customer experience management (CXM) plays a vital role in keeping this cycle smooth-running.

CX professionals are responsible for creating the best customer experience and ensuring a perfect mix of products and services to gauge the customer's discomfort. After all, as customer experience (CX) professionals, we ensure that our customers get the best-in-class experience. A customer interacts with the company at many stages, such as buying, using, and servicing, leading to an experience. Any valuable experience makes for positive brand imagery, whereas a negative one can negatively influence the same. Let us see how CSAT can play a vital role in improving the customer experience.

What is CSAT?

It is one of the most commonly-used CX measurement metrics to identify customer satisfaction levels. Most of us have experienced this during an interaction with the company representative, wherein the feedback is taken via SMS/IVR asking if we were satisfied. These are short surveys that primarily indicate customer satisfaction.

What matters is when to trigger the survey and in what mode. The most commonly used methods are SMS and IVR, wherein immediately post the interaction, either an SMS is forwarded, or the call is transferred to an IVR, encouraging the customer for feedback, on the interaction they had with the company representative. For example, if the customer had an enquiry and information was given at once, an immediate trigger is a right thing to do; however, in another case, where the turnaround time for the complaint is on the higher side, the same survey can be sent post the closure of the case.

The response rate is another important factor that many a time gets unnoticed. Any positive or negative response gets most of the attention and customers who have yet to respond get missed out. If the response rate is on the lower side, one must take the necessary steps to increase the same and capture these missed customers' feedback. Quite often, my calls went to the mobile network representative for some query. In the end, the agent used to tell me, 'you might get an SMS post this call asking for feedback on this interaction, do respond to it. And I never missed giving my feedback.

Why CSAT?

Why is there a need for a CX metric? Well, before we get into the 'why', let me share one of my experiences from one of my training sessions during the initial days of my career. I remember during one of these sessions, the famous quote of Peter Drucker was discussed, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it". This management rule comes so true almost in all aspects. It is of vital importance to know how the customer feels. A happy customer always gives a repeat business, plays an influencer's role, and promotes the services; however, an unhappy customer will not even think twice before moving on to the competition.

The do's:

● Get insights to make the services/product better

● Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend the brand

● An important KPI for the front-liners dealing with the customers

● Touches the customer emotionally

● Increased customer loyalty

The Application:

The CSAT can be a useful metric in almost every vertical of business, and these insights can help a product or service evolve a great deal. It helps create an ecosystem to manage the customer experience and build customer loyalty. It is no rocket science to implement a CSAT capturing mechanism and start managing it. But practicing this for efficient results is a must. If a set of customers are unhappy with your service/product, did you take enough measures to fix the issue and ensure better standards? Did you make your customer feel valued and that their feedback is crucial to the company's growth? And are you thankful for your customer's feedback?

Today social media has grown exponentially and is used by customers to raise complaints or voice their opinions. The point to note here is that unlike a call or an email, social media is not a one-on-one interaction but a public domain. Even one negative tweet can divert your probable customers to the competition, and a positive tweet can change the brand's perception entirely.

I have seen this happening often, where the brand's executives interacting with the customers keep writing similar responses that, in turn, are nothing but fuel to the fire. Instead, once the issue gets resolved, a close-loop call followed up with a CSAT survey is a sure-shot way to build a customer's trust in the brand.

A few points that I feel are necessary for managing an efficient CSAT are:

● Reach out to the dissatisfied customers

● Data in the form of VOC is a treasure; study it to get inferences & insights

● Identify the trends causing the low scores, fix the processes and products, and train your people

● Don't work in silos, instead involve all the relevant departments and share the insights

● VOC can fetch excellent TNI for our teams for capability building

● Be proactive in communicating with the customer

● Take feedback post the issue gets resolved

Conclusion

Every interaction matters. Therefore, it is vital to understand and measure the customer's feedback. CSAT is an exemplary metric system and can help any organization evolve its customer experience domain.