4 Ways To Improve Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT, NPS, And CES) With Digital Customer Service
The success of any business lies in the ability to improve experience at every step of the customer journey. Measuring customer satisfaction helps brands to identify if they are aligned with the ongoing efforts of the organisation to continue delivering value to customers. This also provides valuable insights about the quality of their customer care.
Metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) , Customer Effort Score (CES), and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) are the most commonly used Customer Success Measures . Each has a calculation method that gives a numerical value that can be used as a benchmark and leading indicator when making improvements to customer service operations or when reconsidering your brand’s customer journey.
What’s The Difference Between NPS, CES, And CSAT?
CSAT, NPS, and CES scores are all used to quantify how happy the customer is with the service received. Each metric has its own use and limitations. Businesses can use these metrics jointly to identify where to improve their customer care, including interactions, productivity, and technology.
CSAT
CSAT surveys are ideally sent when you want to see how happy customers are with an action your business took, or certain aspects of your products and/or services. CSAT survey scales range from poor to excellent, 1 – 5, or even angry face to happy face.
The CSAT score is an average based on the results of the survey. Generally, expressed in a percentage from 0% to 100% NPS
Net promoter scores (NPS) is a growth indicator. It calculates how satisfied consumers are with your products/services and how loyal they are to your brand. To measure NPS, customers are asked how likely they are to recommend a company or product to a family member, friend, or colleague on a scale of 1 – 10.
Customers are scored into three categories, based on their responses:
Promoters — Customers who responded with a score of 9 or 10. These are your most loyal and enthusiastic customers. Passives — Customers who responded with a score of 7 or 8. These customers are satisfied with your business, but not as likely to recommend it as promoters. Detractors — Customers who responded with a score of 0-6. These customers are unsatisfied and may discourage friends and colleagues from engaging with your business.
To calculate NPS, you’ll need to calculate the percentage of respondents who are promoters and the percentage who are detractors. To get your final score, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. You will end up with a number between 0 and 100. The higher your number, the better your NPS score.
CES
Customer effort scores (CES) measure how easy it is to engage and interact with your brand. While this doesn’t measure satisfaction directly, it can be an excellent indicator of customers’ experiences when they’re looking for information, making purchases, asking questions, or looking for support. To measure CES, customers are typically asked to rank their experience with a business from one (very easy) to five (very difficult).
CES surveys are most commonly used:
- After a customer touchpoint that has led to a purchase
- Immediately after a customer service interaction
- To track the overall customer experience with your product or brand.
To calculate CES, divide the sum of all scores by the number of respondents. The lower the score, the better.
How To Improve NPS, CES, And CSAT Scores
We have established that it’s important to track these scores, but once you know what your brand’s customer satisfaction scores are, how can you improve them?
Here are four ways to get started.
1. Speed Up Customer Service Interactions
A recent Khoros survey revealed that around 50% of respondents said that they had interacted with brands on social media. From those customers who do interact with brands on social media, 65% expect brands to respond to their message and around 30% said they would stop giving a brand their business if the brand did not meet the customer’s time frame expectations for a response. Speeding up customer service interactions can help improve customer satisfaction and make customers willing to spend more.
The best way to achieve this is to modernize your contact center. More modern contact center's deflect calls to digital channels and automate repetitive and predictable tasks with chatbots, which streamlines workflows and resolves customer needs more quickly.
An online community is also a great resource for any enterprise looking to reduce customer resolution time. Instead of relying on a phone or chat agent to help with an issue, online communities give customers the resources they need to solve their own problems. Online communities can scale organically as a business grows, as they often rely on user-generated content (UGC) to resolve issues and answer questions. HP, for example, reduced first response time by 37% and resolution time by 41% with a Khoros-powered community.
2. Boost Customer Service Interactions
Sometimes a customer’s problem can’t be resolved with a single interaction. Should an interaction need to span sessions or transfer between agents or chatbots, make sure that the customer’s conversation transcript and interaction history transfers with it.
If agents aren’t able to refer back to conversation history and notes, customers have to repeat themselves. This causes frustration and ultimately lowers customer satisfaction. In Salesforce's State of the Connect Customer report, 68% of customers say that it is “absolutely critical” for customer service agents to know their service history so they don’t have to spend time explaining it to them.
3. Be Where Customers Need You
Be easily accessible. Offer people the ability to contact you through web chat, SMS, social, messaging, review sites, and peer-to-peer communities. This will allow customers to reach you on the digital channel of their choice, saving them time of seeking you out (and we already know that saving customers’ time is a good thing).
4. Increase The Number Of Customers Who Participate In Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Customer satisfaction surveys can give you a better understanding of how your customers feel, but if the total number of survey respondents isn’t large enough to represent your customer base as a whole, you might not be getting the most accurate data. The more consumers who participate in customer satisfaction surveys, the better your data will be.
You can improve your survey’s response rate through personalisation. According to research by Linkdex, 79% of customers expect brands to get to know them on a deeper level and provide tailored offers and experiences, including customer communication experiences. To personalise your survey notifications you can A/B test email subject lines and body content, include the customers name, send the survey in the customer’s preferred language, and more.
See how Khoros helped increase Midco’s CSAT survey completion rate by 460% in our case study.
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Modernise your contact center with Khoros Care. Let AI and automation streamline your workflows so you can listen, filter, categorise, and route incoming conversations to the best possible bot, human agent, or self-service resource to resolve the customer’s inquiry (which has been proven to boost customer satisfaction).
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