A Customer Satisfaction Score Improvement Plan (That Actually Works)

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They say that happy customers make for a healthy bottom line.

But how do you really know if your customers are happy? Simple. Just ask them if they’re satisfied after they’ve had a meaningful interaction with your company.

Understanding and addressing your customers’ pain points may not sound like much fun at all but, if you’re ready to face the music, you can serve your customers better, improve your business and avoid a potential beatdown on social media.

If your company’s customer satisfaction score (CSAT) has seen better days, the following CSAT improvement action plan should get your company back on track to achieving your customer service improvement goals in next to no time at all.

1. Improve CSAT Scores By Reducing Customer Service Response Times

Even customers who have the patience of a saint have their limits. The longer they’re made to wait for a response to their query, the less likely they are to be satisfied (let alone thrilled) with their customer service experience.

According to Forrester, 73 percent of US adults online say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good customer service.

Machine learning tools enable your company to appropriately route (or escalate) customer queries, reducing the customer service response time by some margin.

Gladly’s Sidekick app gives customers the tools they need to help themselves, which typically resolves issues faster and frees up your customer service team to handle non-standard enquiries.

2. Minimize the Number of Customer Interactions

The biggest, boldest brand advocates don’t want to deal with their favorite companies all the time.

With customer expectations being at an all-time high, customers have neither the time nor the inclination to have seemingly never-ending back-and-forth interactions with customer service teams.

Reaching out for help can be a hassle in itself, so any problems customers experience on their journey should ideally be resolved in as few interactions as possible. According to a 2010 study published in the Harvard Business Review, “delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort – the work they must do to get their problem solved – does.”

Gladly can help your company in four ways. Firstly, its intelligent contact routing system ensures that the most qualified customer service agents are always allocated to your customers (so call transfers are less likely). Secondly, Gladly’s Answers provides a comprehensive set of answers to frequently asked questions (so agents who aren’t in the know about a particular topic can quickly access information about it). Thirdly, Gladly’s customer care task lists allow agents to collaborate with other agents inside and outside their teams (so agents have additional knowledge and experience bases to tap into other than their own). Lastly, Gladly’s Sidekick self-service app empowers your customers to resolve their issues using a DIY approach.

3. Improve Customer Satisfaction Scores With Centralized Information

“To help me assist you on this call today, can you explain the issue to me (again) please, madam?” As harmless as it sounds, this introductory question holds the potential to get any customer conversation off on the wrong foot.

To limit the number of times a customer has to explain their problem to your customer service team, consider storing all customer information in a single database. This way, your customer service team will instantly see a full record of all prior customer interactions along with any issues they may have experienced along the way – regardless of which channel customers use to connect with your company.

As part of your customer satisfaction score improvement plan, consider using Gladly holds lifelong customer conversations all in one place. With agents having access to this kind of comprehensive information, your customers can be assured that your customer service team will be able to help them quickly and effectively – most importantly, without customers having to repeat their previous conversations with agents or their colleagues.

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4. Personal Interactions Are Key For Every Customer Satisfaction Score Improvement Plan

What’s in a name?

In customer service circles, names mean everything. Customers prefer to be treated like people, not objects. So, it’s always a good idea for companies to focus on real-time personal interaction with customers. Customer service teams shouldn’t shy away from getting personal with customers. Conversations can transition from products and services into more personal topics like birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries and even pregnancies.

For starters, Gladly puts people at the heart of every interaction by providing your customer service team with a list of customer names (not cases or dreaded ticket numbers). Furthermore, for a high-touch personalized service for your most valued customers, Gladly can provide a dedicated hero – a customer service agent who is automatically allocated to them to exclusively handle all communications.

5. Implement Intelligent Call Routing

Being put through to the right customer service agent (especially the first time around) is by no means a given and being passed around from pillar to post is no fun.

Gladly’s skills-based intelligent routing system ensures that your customers are directed to the agent who is best equipped to satisfy their needs every time, on time.

6. Collect and Analyze Call Center Information to Improve Your CSAT Scores

Ordinarily, what happens in the call center stays in the call center but, for the purposes of implementing a CSAT improvement action plan, it’s important to monitor and track call center key performance indicators (KPIs).

Why? Because the quality of customer service can be affected by various factors including:

• The number of agents on staff at the time;
• The agents’ knowledge and proficiency level; and
• The level of operational service that your company offers.

These factors can be annexed to one or more KPIs such as first call resolution and overall service levels.

Gladly’s customer support analytics enable customer call center supervisors to access real-time dashboards and consider the performance of the call center at a glance via information relating to conversation trends, team capacity, the number of active conversations, key statistics on a per channel basis and the call center’s performance against any Service Level Agreement (SLA) that may be in force. By analyzing customer information using Gladly, your company can make customer service proactive rather than reactive.

7. Talk to Your Call Center Staff (Then Listen to Them)

What is a company without its employees? An empty shell.

This is all the more reason to adopt Richard Branson’s ethos: “If you look after your staff, they will look after your customers. It’s that simple.” Branson prides himself on having built Virgin from the ground up – a global umbrella brand that has differentiated itself from its competitors based on its customer experience.

With Branson’s advice in mind, it’s important to ask your call center staff about their day-to-day experience and make improvements to it where possible. If you’re stuck on what to ask your call center staff, one over-arching question is this: “Do you have all the tools, resources and processes in place to serve the customer the way they deserve to be treated?” If the answer is “no,” then work feverishly towards making it “yes” – preferably, sometime soon.

Final Thoughts: Customer Satisfaction Score Improvement Plan

By focusing on your call center staff, your customers and the quality of their experience, your company’s CSAT score will inevitably increase. A crucial part of supporting any call center staff is to ensure they have the right tools to do their jobs efficiently, and grow relationships with your customers. Does your current customer service platform achieve this?

About Gladly

Gladly is a customer service platform for digitally-focused B2C companies who want to maximize the lifetime value of their customers.   Unlike the legacy approach to customer service software, which is designed around a ticket or case to enable workflows, Gladly enables radically personal customer service centered around people to sustain customer loyalty and drive more revenue.

The world’s most innovative consumer companies like Godiva, JOANN, and TUMI use Gladly to create lasting customer relationships, not one-off experiences. 

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