Managing CSAT Proactively

Customer Satisfaction Surveys have become the default to measure how content customers are. By nature, CSATs tend to be reactive; they measure the satisfaction of customers long after the customers and the business have completed their interactions.

Most CSAT surveys fail because they ask customers to merely rate the business’ infrastructure and check whether it meets customer requirements and expectations. A number of questions in CSAT surveys focus on how the agent behaved on the call and less on how the customer wants the experience to be structured.

When carried out by independent organizations such as JD Powers or ACSI or NRF Amex, the results of CSATs eventually find their way into the media for wider consumption. This brings the focus entirely on to ratings, with lower ratings likely to send management teams rushing into devising newer strategies. By merely looking at the numbers coming in from CSATs, everyone is guessing on why the ratings went so low.
And thus, the reactive spiral begins. Different survey methods are adopted; changes in quality assurance are re-looked. The chase is on to improve the CSAT ratings rather than to truly find out how to give consumers what they expect in terms of experience.

And in many cases where CSAT numbers are at expected levels internally or externally, innovation to take customer experience to the next level ceases. CSAT gets into maintenance mode.

There is more to customer satisfaction than what the numbers tell. It is vital to prevent this catch up game and to move from reactive to proactive mode in managing CSAT. Being proactive means looking at CSATs from the customer’s perspective and ensuring that the customers get what they need in a timely manner. And for businesses, this could even mean changing their current service infrastructure.

Listening to customers is vital for businesses to prevent dissatisfaction among customers and to predict what they would need in future interactions. Equally important is the timing and methodology of translating such feedback into areas of strength. Customer interactions offer a wealth of data that can be analyzed to derive intelligence for driving future business activities.

Whether a survey happens or not, the end customer is communicating with a call center agent all the time using a multitude of channels such as blogs, social forums, twitter and also surveys. By constantly monitoring and analyzing what the customers are saying in interactions and in the social media, and correlating this to CSAT, companies can innovatively and proactively manage customer expectations.

While the benefits are obvious, deriving actionable intelligence from disparate sources of data – customer data, agent data, interaction data, and sales data – can be a daunting task. Consumer insights need to be extracted from unstructured conversations and opinions. This requires advanced and sophisticated levels of data mining and conversation mining. Businesses can use the results of such analyses to shape customer experiences the way end-customers want and not in the manner they were created by the business.

The 24/7 Innovation Labs team has been working on these areas for over three years now and has come up with mathematical models and advanced analytics that help companies in making this shift from reactive CSAT to proactive CSAT management.

This approach is game changing and hence requires a change in mindset. Companies have to come out of their CSAT management – which is based only on the traditional ratings approach – and embrace a new one that is based on prediction of customers’ needs. The question really is that of readiness to explore and transform and measure and manage based on what and how customers expect their experience to be.