What’s Really Behind Your CSAT Scores? Diving Deeper

Customer satisfaction scores have been a popular metric for measuring customer experience (CX) for a long time. It’s easy to calculate and understand, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. 

Your CSAT scores only measure how happy customers are with their current interaction with your company. It doesn’t consider whether they’ll come back, recommend your product, or keep spending. You also miss customer feedback from the vast majority who don’t submit a customer satisfaction survey. 

To get the full picture of the customer's relationship with your business and increase satisfaction, you need more than a CSAT score. Analyze the numbers behind your CSAT rating to see what’s positively and negatively impacting your customer experience. 

Improving Your CSAT Score Means Using Key Insights to Inform Your CX Strategy

Understanding what’s impacting customer satisfaction can be difficult. There are plenty of factors to consider, and it’s easy to get lost in the data. You can segment your customer base by product, location, or other business-related criteria to see your most satisfied customers. You can also compare your CSAT data to your customer effort data, quality data, or conversational analytics to see which metrics correlate most closely to high CSAT scores.

See where agents excel at delivering high customer satisfaction and turn those learnings into best practices and training materials. Pull specific examples from your QA data to share with your team and help them better understand what great agent performance looks like.

How Customer Dissatisfaction (DSAT) Tickets Can Help Improve CSAT Scores

Understanding what’s negatively impacting customer satisfaction is crucial. Digging into your DSAT tickets isn’t the most fun exercise, but learning why customers are unhappy pays dividends in the long run when it comes to improving CSAT scores. 

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There are three main DSAT categories that often come up: dissatisfaction with customer support, with the product or service, or with company policies. A series of Quality Assurance (QA) audits gives additional context to DSAT tickets, namely ones that involve customer support processes.

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With a deeper root cause analysis, you make sure to address the underlying problem rather than get stuck on the symptoms. A well-known method that helps you look beyond surface-level issues is the 5 Whys Method. For each reason, dig into the sub-reason that can be surfaced from your customer support data.

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Fill CX Gaps to Help Improve Your CSAT Score 

To provide the best possible customer experience and improve your CSAT score, you need to understand your customer's journey. You can use data from customer surveys, customer service tickets, social media interactions, and more to generate a complete picture of the customer experience. 

Pull in sentiment analysis and conversational analytics to help pinpoint key events affecting your customer experience and fill gaps in your understanding of the customer experience to determine which areas to focus your resources on.

With MaestroQA Screen Capture, you can collect data from your support interactions and use it to generate insights that will help you improve and inform your CX strategy. 

Connecting Good CX and CSAT Scores 

Customers are looking for efficiency and ease. They don’t want to chat with support agents all day, but they also want their issues resolved with minimal effort on their part. There are several ways a customer support team can provide a better experience and improve customer satisfaction. Happy Customers = Better CSAT Scores!

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Minimize Your Customer Effort

Difficult customer service experiences erode loyalty and hurt overall customer satisfaction. One main driver behind excessive customer effort is reaching out to a company multiple times to fix a problem. It’s important to value your customers’ time, but sometimes agents can place too much focus on quickly resolving tickets when resolving a ticket the first time a customer reaches out is even more important. 

81% of customers will return if their issue is resolved on the first contact. But that number drops to just 13% if the problem isn't resolved until the customer's fifth contact.

Another driver of higher customer effort is asking customers for information that’s already available in the agent’s CRM. Make sure your agents have easy access to quickly grab any necessary information from your CRM to save your customers’ time.

Deliver with a Positive Attitude

Beyond having an efficient interaction, you also need to ensure your customers have a positive connection with your team. Authenticity, a friendly tone, and empathy are the three soft skills with the biggest impact on customer satisfaction.

Demonstrate that you care about your customers by acknowledging their concerns and doing your best to put them at ease. Use positive language to let customers know what you can do for them instead of what you can’t.

Move from Scripts to Conversations

Step away from boilerplate responses and empower your agents to personalize their responses and tailor their solutions to the specific situation.  

Make sure your agents actively listen to your customers, so they can more effectively resolve their problems. When customers share their concerns, paraphrasing what they've shared back to them ensures your agents understand the issue. Asking the right follow-up questions is also key to getting at the core of the problem and helping your customer feel heard.

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How to Take Action to Improve Your CSAT Scores 

Some of the key factors in great customer experience include agent performance, the ease of resolving an issue, as well as non-service-related aspects such as product experience or policies.

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Reduce Your Customer Effort Score (CES)

Make it easy for a customer to resolve an issue or find the information they need. Start by giving them multiple options for finding the answers they need. With a consistently updated Frequently Asked Questions section on your product, service, or policies, you can get ahead of common issues your customers face. 

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Similarly, an Internal Knowledge Base (IKB) can help agents quickly find and share information about policies, procedures, and best practices, so they can resolve customer issues faster. 

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When you share information in a variety of formats, you create a more effective self-service model for your customers. For example, monday.com’s support hub offers quick answers via a knowledge base, video tutorials, a community forum, webinars, and more. Then, if customers need personalized support, they have 24/7 support available.

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Better Trained Agents Can Help Improve CSAT Scores

When agents know what customers are looking for and how they can deliver on those expectations, they’re more likely to provide a great customer experience. Give them the skills and the data they need to better manage support interactions and delight your customer base.

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One major area where you can help agents become more effective is in identifying the root cause of a problem rather than addressing symptoms. Pull specific examples from tickets graded by the QA team and share guidance on possible follow-up questions they could use. 

How we can help:

With MaestroQA, you can implement personalized, structured, and data-driven coaching to help agents improve their skills, learn from mistakes, and fill in knowledge gaps relating to the company’s products and services. 

Within the coaching module, track 1:1 sessions with agents to discuss performance over a particular week, month, or quarter. Review an agent’s tickets or their recent KPIs using Coaching Points to discuss areas of strength and opportunities for growth. Standardize continuous learning for agents by assigning learning modules and tasks with To-Dos that link to learning modules or list follow-up tasks aligned to development goals. 

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Using QA Audits for Continuous Improvement and Better CSAT Scores

Your quality assurance (QA) audits can deliver a wealth of CX insights. The best customer support agent could receive a low customer satisfaction score if there’s a broader product issue or policy frustrations. But building a smooth QA audit process to track and surface these insights can be difficult and time-consuming. 

A custom QA scorecard allows you to tag and manage customer experience data that falls outside the influence of the customer support agent. You can also create separate tracking to pull more detailed insights around new initiatives like a product launch. Capture the voice of the customer data from your support interactions that you can share with your product team.

How we can help:

With MaestroQA, your organization gains deeper insights into how your customers think and feel straight from your support team. You can automate repetitive QA tasks, like ticket assignments, to ensure every negative CSAT score is always triggered and routed to the right people to review.

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Ready to Take the Next Step to Improve your CSAT scores? 

Get in touch today to see MaestroQA's modern customer experience platform in action and learn how you can uncover actionable insights from your entire customer experience and start moving the needle on customer satisfaction. 

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