117: CSAT with Mo McKibbin

Charlotte Ward 0:12
Hello, and welcome to Episode 117 of the customer support leaders podcast. I’m Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is customer satisfaction. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I’d like to welcome back to the podcast today. Mo McKibben, Mo. It’s lovely to have you back again. This week, we’re talking about CSAT.

Mo McKibbin 0:42
Ah, yes. CSAT,

Charlotte Ward 0:45
oh, such enthusiasm?

Mo McKibbin 0:48
No, I love I actually do, there’s a lot of controversial feelings in the support community about the value of CSAT, and what’s valuable about it and how to use it. I personally think it is incredibly valuable. But I do think about it as really more like a spice than a meal. So it’s not, it’s not the protein, it’s not even like a really good side. But you know, something more like salt, or pepper or paprika where it gives, you know, it gives a lot of flavour, it can be really useful for enhancing. But if you use too much or rely exclusively on it, it’s, you know, if you’re going to have a very unhealthy support, you know, measurements for support.

Charlotte Ward 1:38
Yeah, I think I think you’re right. I think it’s one of those things that people feel a lot of that people are really ambivalent about, right. But there’s a lot of antipathy and there’s also a lot of love. And I think that you can use it in a number of different ways. And I think that I think that the kind of classic idea of just like, my, my go to example of Sisa is when you’re at the bathrooms in an airport. Clean this is dirty. Yeah. Yeah, sir. Yeah, there’s a Yeah, exactly. The Happy Face smile, or sad face, maybe a middle face, right. But as you leave that, what does it tell you? Right?

Mo McKibbin 2:24
That’s actually a really awesome point. It’s like, cuz when are you in a bathroom? If you go into the bathroom, and it’s disgusting, you are going to unhappy face because you want to fix that? Like you’re like, cool. But like, when are you like, wow, that was a lovely bathroom experience. I’m gonna put a happy face. So everybody knows how happy I was to use this bathroom in the airport. And similar, yeah,

Charlotte Ward 2:49
yeah. Because that is a cset measure. Right? And I think that I think this I’ve just had kind of just in the last two sentences, a bit of an epiphany about that, because that’s, that’s always I always kind of go to that as a somewhat ridiculous answer. But what you said there about what your expectations are, you really only want to care, you’re only really only care, like about two or three things when you go into a bathroom. So actually, you don’t perhaps need all of the nuances that you might like to get in other support scenarios around a call of that personal feedback, please tell us how we did you know, what, what can you tell us about the agent that served you and everything else? Because what do you know, when you’re running a bathroom app or, you know, who was on duty, and you know, the three things that your customer cares about, right? So, you know, they want it to be clean, they want it to be open, you want it to be private? You know, it’s that that might actually be it, right? And I do

Mo McKibbin 3:46
like, and this is why I love see step two is it can be it can be the canary in the coal mine, or it can be it can be a great morale booster, um, but like, it really isn’t necessarily, I think that valuable for giving you deep insights into how people are doing or how to get better. But if you see it’s a great for just measuring a broad stroke trends. So if like, you have you know, 90 800% happiness rating, you’re like you, you can feel good about that, like, you can feel good that like, um, for the most part, trending wise, very few people are unhappy when they come into the bathroom. And I’ve also noticed, the higher your happiness rating is like the lower percent of customers actually rate you for exactly the reason that we kind of talked about where it’s like, nobody says this was a great bathroom experience, like usually happiness is silent. And, you know, and that’s another reason why, you know, I you know, I’ve talked with you before about how much I like connecting support to revenue because, you know, ultimately what matters is a happy customer and They’re, they keep paying for the product, they’re expanding, they’re buying more. And they’re referring people like, those are the things that really show if someone’s happy. And I do think another thing that’s really funny about cset, too, is like, I have found too that sometimes, you know, people won’t give us great ratings. And people will sometimes even give us what sometimes even in my, in my past, never give us negative ratings, but have like a lot of critical feedback. And then I would meet them at a conference. And they were like, Oh, my God, we love helpscout. And like all this stuff, and it’s like, it is such an interesting thing. Because sometimes people are very deeply invested in your product, and you’re and your customer support, that they have a lot to say. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re unhappy, it actually means that they’re deeply invested. And they want to make it better, and they want to help and they want to contribute.

Charlotte Ward 5:49
So they have to get any, you have to give them the opportunity to do that, then right? That’s when the that’s when the three smiley faces are not going to do any favours. And you actually need that more qualitative feedback. You can do some basic quality quantitative measures. But the qualitative deep dive that you get in that text is, is the important things that comes out of that investment in your surface, isn’t it?

Mo McKibbin 6:10
Yep, absolutely. And then the Yeah, so I think like using it as a canary in the coalmine, and using it as just a general litmus test for how things are doing, I think there’s nothing wrong with that. If you see some negative ratings cropping up, it’s a really good indicator like oh, something is afoot. But it’s not necessarily like you shouldn’t hang your hat on on cset just have it as a as almost like a monitoring system. And then the other thing I will say is what how to not use cset is I really do not think that is unless it’s like trending issues should ever be monitored for individual agent performance. Simply because there are so many factors that you come into, if it’s like a good experience or a bad experience at the agent level for cset. I don’t think that you should measure individual performance, it should more be used as a coaching tool. And again, like a litmus test to look for trends, and only only use it to kind of like lift people up if they’re trending down and like, but again, it’s a spice, it’s not a meal.

Charlotte Ward 7:25
And you make I like the idea of using it as a coaching tool. And in fact, I think there’s an interim stage is that it’s, it’s perhaps like in terms of like individual pieces of feedback, maybe there’s coaching opportunities for certain agents, but I think also in terms of those big trends that you’re pulling out, I think that they are information that you feed into programmes, aren’t they, they’re information that you feed into your quality programme or into your process improvement, or whatever else they aren’t necessarily and probably almost never truly indicative of an individual.

Mo McKibbin 8:00
Absolutely 100% agree.

Charlotte Ward 8:05
That’s it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com/117 for the show notes, and I’ll see you next time.