120: CSAT with Simone Secci

Charlotte Ward 0:13
Hello, and welcome to Episode 120 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 Simone Secci. Simone. It’s lovely to have you back again. This week, we’re talking about customer satisfaction. Good old CSAT, yes.

Simone Secci 0:45
CSAT took a beating at some point when the more popular customer effort score came into the picture. But I think there were two distinct things. And I do think they see that still as an important role in defining what are the main performance and performance metrics in a team. And so I think that, you know, the most important thing about CS that is actually, from my perspective on the negative reviews, because it’s like, there’s, you know, there’s one way to do it right, and many ways to get burned, I would say,

Charlotte Ward 1:26
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, actually, the negative ones, I think always need a follow up. And, you know, it’ll be nice to have the resources to follow up on every single customer personally and the positives and say, thank you so much. That was amazing. But we can but Dream on that front, can’t we? So I’m kind of I’m kind of interested in two things. You said what one is about that follow up? And the other one is you use the phrase measure of performance in relation to cset. I’d love you, I’d love to explore with you exactly what you mean by that, because people are nervous of using cset as a performance measure, right?

Simone Secci 2:04
Yeah, I think it all comes down to the granularity of your data. Once again, it comes back with our previous conversation about data. And so for me that the biggest step would cease that was when I broke down negative reviews into another method. And I would, and I specifically like to use a Bihar for that. So the reason why is because I broke down the negative reviews with a follow up questions for the users, which for me, you have to analyse two main areas of the could determine dislike negative reaction from users. And so the questions are always around, is this due to a problem that you have with the product? Which could be a very nice substitute for NPS? Because you will have this, you know, inappropriate in that context, in the context like comments about the brother where, you know, if you don’t handle them, then they just affect negatively you’re seeing that. And, you know, this is why I think people are worried about this, and because the stuff that you can’t really do anything about, right? But if you break down this question, is this related to the product and you can separate it from the rest of your of your feedback, and you can funnel that to your product team, and it becomes from negative becomes useful. So that’s one thing. The second thing is, is this is this related to the service that you received. There, you have the growth opportunity, where you can create your example using, you know, an app that allows it, or if you record with, with scripts or whatever, you can create a trigger to follow up, which informs your agent that you know, this occurrence happened. And you can send your nice message, I have a message that says, you know, you got negative reviews for the service and stuff happens, you know that the important thing is using it as a learning opportunity is try to patch things up if we can. And so send that notification to the agent to do to write a follow up. And there we have our opportunity to investigate on our on our performance and see what are the learnings that can come from that. And there’s also like, it creates a nice repository for QA where you can dive in into those tickets and see what are the learning opportunity issue of a UI manager for example or not, doesn’t matter. And then this is a recent discovery is I created an additional and the reason for negative reviews for the for the users, which is if have follow up questions, and my issue was not resolved. That’s another, you know, another like way to move there. They issue maybe to escalate it somewhere else to skill based routing in your in your system. So it still gets him moving without a lot of manual effort.

Charlotte Ward 5:13
Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. So so often we close the ticket, assuming you’ve resolved it. And then the only opportunity the customer has to tell us that we didn’t resolve it. Is that survey. So he said that you give, you said that you have triggers in place to create the opportunity for your agent to follow up on negative reviews. Right. So So what is your expectation at that point for the agent? Is it that they just make that a personal conversation, a personal follow up with the customer? And try to extract what it was about the service? Right? Is it a rescue mission for the agent at that point?

Simone Secci 5:57
Yeah, I this tool notifications, it gets sent out, I get notified that the notification has been sent to the to the agent, so I know that they are to follow up. And so I make sure that they do. And, and then they get the notification. So the nice thing is that it goes I really appreciate that it was a very reliable, and they’ll do it themselves. I don’t have to, you know, nudge him into into doing it. They know about it, if anything, maybe before diving in, they will like, show me that they get asked me some questions or ask them to, to like, you know, somebody, if it’s a dry agent, maybe they can ask it to somebody in tears, or like, you know, if I’m not around. So, yeah, so that’s like, you know, where they take it from? And it’s like, it can be a rescue mission, but also can be simply like an opportunity to understand and maybe Gather, Gather feedback, if needed.

Charlotte Ward 6:54
Hmm, that makes sense. That makes sense. So if somebody was thinking about setting up surveys for the first time, and rather than just going and switching them on in the CRM, yeah, just as we Yeah, just as just as we close out, what would be your kind of first piece of advice for people just embarking on this journey?

Simone Secci 7:20
first piece of advice, I would say the thing I just mentioned, negative reviews are very important. Make sure that the feedback related to the product is not just impacting your, your overall score, creating a picture that doesn’t resemble, you know, the, the ability of your team to do to provide good service and make the thing grumpy, which easy, the usual thing you will hear is okay, but we have no control over this and which we just can’t get over. Yeah. So that takes care of like your team morale. And so breakdown in this tool, and there’s two pieces breaking down within product feedback, even though that’s not the base for for other feedback, ask that additional question, and use the opportunity to create a follow up for growth. That will be my very first suggestion.

Charlotte Ward 8:16
Actually, I guess I think that’s great. I think I think I have one final question. And it’s a really simple one. Do you think that the, that the default question that your CRM provides on a survey is good enough?

Simone Secci 8:28
No, because I would say you should definitely get rid of like the some other reason, option because otherwise becomes a placeholder for people to not spend time and just say, okay, whatever, some other reason, right. So that’s not very useful. So I would say definitely get rid of that one. And try to nudge people into giving you a reason.

Charlotte Ward 8:50
Yeah, yeah. Something that can truly action based on everything you just told us. Great advice. That’s it for today. Go to customer support leaders.com/120 for the show notes, and I’ll see you next time.