We’ve all heard about the positive impact customer satisfaction rates have on your business results, right? But what happens if your business has a low CSAT? How can that harm your business?
In a nutshell, low CSAT means your customers are not happy with your company (your product, services, etc.). Unhappy customers tend to not stick around, which means that your customer retention rates will go down and your churn rates will go up. With those CSAT results, your best case scenario is losing a lot of money, the worst case is your company going out of business.
Investing in great customer service may be just what your company needs to make your customers happier and will leave you worrying a little less about falling into the scenarios we mentioned above.
Let’s explore a few tips together.
5 Customer Service Tips to improve your CSAT
1. Why settle for “okay” service when you can create memorable experiences?
This is not the first item on this list by accident. Being the leader of a customer support team and having several years of customer service experience, I can safely say that “good” customer service can be found almost anywhere and is easily forgotten, while memorable, unique experiences are hard to beat.
One of my first work experiences was as a salesperson at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World Florida, aka The Happiest Place on Earth. Why am I telling you that? To make sure you understand right from the beginning how high my bar is when it comes to customer service.
Disney would never be as successful as they are if they didn’t create unparalleled experiences for all of their guests. There are hundreds, even thousands of amusement parks in the world, but only the Disney parks can offer that level of magic. That’s how high you should set the bar for your company’s customer service as well.
2. Fewer bots, more human
Yes, I’m fully aware that scaling customer service based on the number of people in your team is only possible up to a certain point. Exploring automated resources such as email flows or chatbots doesn’t necessarily mean adopting a cold, distant approach that’ll leave your customers hoping they could just talk to a person, though.
A good way to start would be exploring all of the customization options offered by your automation solution. If the information is available, make sure to leverage dynamic content and always refer to the customer by their name. That in itself makes a big difference.
When sending automated messages/replies, make sure your templates have a certain amount of customization. While having an automated onboarding email sequence can be the best solution you found for onboarding your customers, they are hardly ever customized enough and that may be the reason why your open/click rates keep getting lower and lower.
I’m not saying that you should never use automation of any kind, quite the contrary, actually. I’m saying that using the right amount of tech combined with some human touches may be the winning combination that’ll lead you to success.
3. Value (and reward) loyal customers: Creating brand ambassadors
If you wow your customers with your product and customer service experience, they’re far more likely to stick around. Consider taking advantage of having satisfied and loyal customers by turning them into brand ambassadors.
There’s a restaurant near the office where I work where I used to go to all the time because they had a small “loyalty” card that they stamped every time you came over and, once you got all 10 stamps, you got a free meal.
Seems easy and silly, doesn’t it? Well, it drove me and a lot of my colleagues to become loyal customers because we were motivated by the possibility of a free lunch and, every time we went there, we took one or more colleagues with us, making us brand ambassadors.
Instead of just being loyal, we became promoters and started generating new business for the restaurant at virtually no cost to them.
That is an oversimplified example, of course, but if you think about it, there are several ways brands use these strategies to make their customers come back, become loyal and ultimately think so highly of their product/service that they’d recommend it to their friends and family.
4. Invest in your customer support
If you think investing in customer support software, team and strategies is a waste of money I’ll have to ask you to stop and reconsider. Think about when customers reach out for customer support? They typically need help with something or they have a problem, right?
Offering high quality, omnichannel support can separate the people who could become very frustrated with your company from those who could be impressed by the efficiency of your customer service.
Customer support should not be seen as an unnecessary expense. It’s a solid investment with a very high possibility of reduced churn, increased CSAT scores, customer loyalty and ROI.
The preferred support channels may vary depending on your industry, so the best way to find out what will work best for your company is by doing research. Analyze your customers. Where do they normally seek help? Are they self-sufficient enough to use a self-help portal and go through an automated bot flow to find an answer or are they in need of more human touch?
There’s no “one size fits all” formula when it comes to customer service. However, there are several available types of research and benchmarks you can use as a starting point. While some industries may benefit from 24/7 real-time support, others may find it enough to have async channels or support only during business hours.
Talk to your customers, find out what they expect and figure out the best way to accommodate their needs with the resources you have available. Remember, customer support is not a cost, it’s an investment.
5. Customer feedback is gold, treat it well!
The best way to find out what your customers want and need is to ask them. Just gathering the information and leaving it collecting dust in a corner will do you no good.
Having a structured process to collect, evaluate and close the feedback cycle by getting back to the customer is a guaranteed way to make sure they’re happy. Even if you get back to them to say that their request won’t be prioritized, just taking the time to let them know how important their feedback is and how much your company values it is normally more than enough to ensure higher customer satisfaction levels.
Other than just focusing on being customer-centric, your company should be feedback-centric. Don’t sit back and wait for your customers to tell you what they think or what they want, go ahead and ask them. Show them that what’s most important to your company is doing everything you can to help them achieve their goals and you’ll have happier, more satisfied customers in no time.
Explore all of your available channels, such as NPS or Voice of the Customer surveys, to gather feedback and make sure that all of the information you get will be properly forwarded to the people that can actually do something about it (such as your product development team, for example).
There are so many different ways you can leverage your customer service to create amazing experiences and turn simple customers into promoters and brand ambassadors.
Start by taking a minute to go through the tips above and identify which one would be the best way to start, then do something about it!
You may be lucky enough to have high CSAT rates without putting a lot of effort into it, but I’m almost 100% sure luck won’t take you all the way to your final destination.
