What are the factors that affect CSAT and how to Improve it

Generally, CSAT is used to measure how a customer feels about an interaction, product or service. For example, when a customer purchased a newly released product and you want to learn how satisfied they are with it. Using the CSAT survey, you can determine the level of their satisfaction with your newly released item. CSAT usually asks straightforward questions in order to immediately evaluate a customer’s specific experience. The higher the score is, the more satisfied the customer feels with the service.

When measuring customer experience, people sometimes misunderstand the difference between CSAT and NPS (Net promoter score). These surveys are both helpful, but they really do different jobs. NPS has a unique way to measure customer satisfaction. It has a trademark question in its survey question, which is very helpful to use when measuring customer loyalty for a long haul. While CSAT is more on a general concept and directly measures the level of customer satisfaction. Its survey questions are very fluid, which companies can customize depending on the product/service they want to analyze. However, in order for you to determine the best survey to use, you may first want to consider answering the question “what do you want to measure and why?”

Here are key points for you to remember:

• If your priority is to understand how your customers feel about your specific product/service or to measure the impact of your new product and service, it will be better to use CSAT.

“Overall, how satisfied are you with our service?”

• If you want to measure customer loyalty based on a customers’ discernment of their experience, it is more helpful to use NPS.

“How likely is it that you would recommend us to someone you know?”

The CSAT score is the simplest way to measure customer satisfaction. To calculate the CSAT score, the contact center will directly ask their customers to evaluate their service experience in a form of surveys. Mostly, the contact center will provide this survey form through email, phone, or any other form of communication.

The CSAT survey forms normally contain a set of questions and their accepted response. Here are some of the most commonly used questions:

It is important to learn and understand your customers’ feelings towards your products or services. In this way, you can understand why they are dissatisfied and discover different ways to improve it. Here are the 3 main factors that affect CSAT:

One way to improve CSAT is to enhance your company’s response time to customer queries. No matter how patient a customer might be, the longer they have to wait for a response, the less likely they will feel happy with their experience.

Every customer wants convenience. This is one of the main reasons why most of them contacted a customer service center through email or phone instead of inquiring physically to a store’s customer service center. Resolving a query in as a few interactions as possible leads to happier and more loyal customers.

Your customers are expecting you to solve their concern. Using a random survey doesn’t give you an answer why your customers are unhappy with your service. Depending on the subject matter of their query, you need to identify what makes them (un)happy. 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?

It is necessary to get your customer feedbacks and learn from them. Fortunately, in the realm of customer service, it is easier to know the areas where your contact center needs improvement with the help of customers feedbacks. This way, agents learn from mistakes and ensure that customers do not face a similar issue in the future.

There are several ways that could help you improve CSAT from collecting customer feedbacks. Here are the best practices you can do to improve the customer satisfaction score:

Try to eliminate or reduce the call wait time as much as possible and provide customers an option of requesting a callback instead of waiting in the queue.

This is one of the most important aspects of customer service. It sounds very basic, and yet it plays as a huge factor that directly affects your customer experience. You can’t gain customer satisfaction when your agents are not knowledgeable enough to handle customer’s problem. In this case, you can offer more training for your agents to increase their knowledge and skills in resolving customer concerns.

Showing care and concern like using customers’ name while interacting can make them feel more valued and respected, which enhances the overall service experience.

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) plays well with the net promoter score (NPS) or even with the customer effort score (CES). There’s no reason to limit yourself in using only one of these measures. In fact, using a variety of surveys can help you understand more about your business’ performance.

Exceeding customer expectation might be one of the biggest challenges for every contact center. You can know how (un)happy your customers are by making use of CSAT, and measuring the data to get valuable information. You’ll be able to improve your product or services and help to provide a quick resolution for every customer concern, by understanding the functions behind CSAT.

After all, the bottom line is to keep your customers happy. Happy customers tend to share their experience, resulting in a cost-effective and positive promotion of your product. Understand CSAT, take advantage of it, and expand the chain of happiness your product provides.