Imagine hiring some highly experienced employees, and then paying them a hefty salary to sit around doing nothing. No company on the planet would consciously set out to do this. Why? Because it would be an enormous waste of resources. Not only would the business in question effectively be throwing away the money spent on these employees, but it would also miss out on the benefits they could have brought the company, such as finding new ways to resolve ongoing issues.
But while this behavior isn’t, for good reason, commonplace, there’s no doubt that many businesses do leave a whole lot of money on the table by failing to take advantage of one of the most powerful tools available to them: Customer data. This minimally expensive data (gathering it is generally straightforward) can be used in all kinds of ways to improve the way that businesses are run.
One great way of gleaning feedback from customers is through a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT Score), which gathers customer responses to their retail or other user experience with a company. Properly harnessed, this information can then be utilized as a valuable tool to enhance the offerings of a particular business.
How do you ensure that CSAT is used to maximum effect? Here are four methods:
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Use it uncover pain points
Whether you’re a business that’s selling functional widgets or a luxury brand that’s all about experiential shopping, every company is ultimately trying to do the same thing: To make its interaction with customers as seamless as possible. Even if some businesses are all about the one-click shop (a concept pioneered by Amazon), while others encourage customers to spend time asking questions and maybe enjoying a free glass of champagne with their purchase, all businesses want to find – and eradicate – unnecessary pain points.
These are the stages in a retail experience, however tiny, that annoy buyers and risk losing their custom. Identifying pain points can be difficult if you stick with a single survey that doesn’t delve into enough detail. However, by using CSAT measurement at various touch points during the customer’s journey, it’s possible to isolate specific moments of dissatisfaction with the process. This can then be used to streamline the sales process.
Better train staff
Your customer-facing employees are the representatives for how your business is perceived. Businesses should always be on the lookout for ways to help them to improve – or, conversely, to spot when they’re doing a great job and pass on the necessary thanks. CSAT can help to uncover opportunities for extra coaching for employees; enabling them to hone their skills with hyper-precise feedback dealing with very specific scenarios. In short, this measure can help teams to learn the points in the customer journey where satisfaction is at its highest and lowest levels.
This information isn’t coming from some detached manager high up in the organization, who hasn’t been on the physical or virtual customer floor for decades, either: It’s genuine insights provided by recent customers – thereby making it particularly helpful when it comes to employees upskilling.
Enable you to take things personal
Lots of the time, the idea of taking things personally is viewed as a negative. If your CV is passed over for a job interview, instantly assuming that it is a personal slight can be bad for your mental health. That’s not what we’re talking about here, though. While customer data, when taken as a whole, can be used to draw large scale patterns, it’s certainly possible to react individually to pieces of feedback.
For example, if you’re the recipient of a complaint about service or a product that a customer has received, you can “close the loop” by quickly responding to resolve the issue. In some cases, this will be a retrospective move on your part – after the issue in question has occurred. However, increasingly, it’s possible to use real-time AI analytics tools to analyze the customer journey as it happens, and make interventions accordingly.
Understand customer expectations
Incorporate CSAT customer analysis tools correctly and you’re not just working out whether the customer left happy, you’re also drilling down on valuable metrics that can tell you whether your product development and marketing initiatives are working. While it might therefore seem a relatively straightforward metric, by finding the right ways to analyze these data points you can tell things not just about the current state of your business – but also the kind of details that will help you to better make decisions about the future of the business as well.
After all, all of this is about predicting what it is that customers want and what their expectations are when coming to your business. You’ve just got to find ways to follow those digital breadcrumbs to spell out exactly what people want from your business.
