How do you know if your customers are going to stick around? Your first step should be to check your CSAT score. Customer satisfaction or, CSAT, is the top KPI for measuring customer service success.

What is CSAT?

Customer satisfaction is a measure of how well your customers feel valued, served, and supported by your support. Businesses collect this information through surveys, asking variations of “were you satisfied with your experience today?” Organizations then use this data along with other measures of success, like Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Customer Effort Scores (CES) to fine-tune their support strategies and examine channel-specific findings.

Benefits of high CSAT for customer service

High CSAT is a good indication that your customer service is working well - i.e. that your support system is easy to access, serves customers on their preferred channel, resolves problems quickly, and offers a seamless hand-off experience between agents/departments/other stakeholders.

High CSAT is linked to customer retention and loyalty, which in turn support up-sell opportunities and allow businesses to generate a steady stream of recurring revenue.

Dangers of low CSAT for customer service

Low CSAT is an indication that your customer service isn’t working well - this directly endangers your revenue. Organizations need to monitor CSAT and identify what scores will sound the alarms. If your business has a consistent low CSAT score, that’s a signal to make radical changes in order to keep your existing customers and support new ones.

Common causes for low CSAT are long wait times and multi-stage or fragmented support. Not only do these issues make it tougher for customers to resolve problems, but they also make customers feel like their time isn’t valued.

Low CSAT has been linked to a high churn rate, so finding out where your customers think your service needs help not only makes them feel valued, but it’s also good for your bottom line.

How customer service teams can measure CSAT

Measure CSAT through direct customer feedback, which you can collect by offering a customer satisfaction survey at the end of interactions.

Most CSAT surveys ask some variation of, “How would you rate your experience today?” Or “Are you satisfied with your experience using our product?”

To solicit responses, many businesses take a binary approach. Businesses ask customers to rate their satisfaction from within a number range, commonly 1-5 or 1-10.

Some businesses take a more visual approach, using emojis to prompt intuitive responses. In this approach, businesses ask customers to select one response out of frowning, smiling, or neutral emoticons.

When and where to implement a CSAT survey

Forward-thinking customer service platforms implementation easy and consistent across channels. Many platforms will automatically ask customers about their experience at the end of every interaction.

CSAT can vary across channels, which can skew your organization’s overall CSAT results.

Be sure to collect feedback across all your channels, then compare the results. This will help you identify issues and apply what’s working on one channel to improve others.

Using CSAT with NPS and CES to improve customer satisfaction

Now that we’ve highlighted the importance of tracking CSAT, and suggested a few best practices in terms of implementation, it’s time to focus on strategy. How can businesses analyze their CSAT in conjunction with other data to craft a winning CX strategy?

First, it helps to look at CSAT as just one piece of the CX puzzle.

While other measures of customer satisfaction, like Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Customer Effort Scores (CES) scores tend to follow the same structure, there’s no single benchmark for CSAT. A good rule of thumb is to measure all three KPIs regularly and compare your results over time. All three scores should be going up. If the scores are already high, then they should be staying there.

If your KPIs are dropping on any or all of these metrics, you need to quickly figure out where the problem lies and take steps to improve your customer experience. You can also compare the scores for each of these metrics across channels, products, and services to gain insight into what’s working and what’s not, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Your goal here is continuous improvement.

Together, these three metrics can help you take the temperature of your overall customer service experience and continually improve your customer relationships.

An easy way to boost all your CX KPI scores is by implementing personalized, self-service on your customer service channels. Chatbots, for example, make it easy for customers to find information or resolve issues quickly, with minimal effort, in a single, seamless interaction. Chatbots can also personalize interactions at scale, which drives customer satisfaction and loyalty while also helping you lower customer service costs. Plus, with a chatbot, you can easily add the customer surveys you need to collect feedback, measure these KPIs, and continually improve your CX. To find out how a chatbot could improve your CSAT, request a demo and an Ada team member will reach out shortly.

To learn more about the KPIs your business needs to track in order to deliver top-of-the-line CX, read the full article here.