118: CSAT with Nicholas Zeisler

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode one hundred and eighteen 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 to the podcast today for the first time, Nicholas Zeisler. Nicholas, it's lovely to meet you and have you on the show. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Nicholas Zeisler: 0:42

Thanks, Charlotte. Certainly. I appreciate uh the opportunity to join you and your and your voluminous uh uh fans out there. Uh my name is Nick Zeisler, Nicholas Zeisler. I am the principal of Zeisler Consulting. It's a CX consultancy that blends voice of the customer work for those insights along with uh process engineering, which is to say doing something with the voice of the customer that you're collecting and then also concentrating quite a bit on developing customer-centric culture within organizations as well.

Charlotte Ward: 1:10

Awesome. Thank you so much. So, voice of the customer is a big part of what I brought you here, what I lured you here to talk about today.

Nicholas Zeisler: 1:19

False pretenses, I'm sorry.

Charlotte Ward: 1:20

Yeah, it absolutely wasn't. I would love to spend the next, you know, few minutes talking with you about customer satisfaction, good old CSAT. Uh, which I so far in all of my conversations with other support leaders, recorded or not, as has elicited quite the variety of responses from love to loathing, I have to say. Where are you on that scale?

Nicholas Zeisler: 1:44

I am on that scale. Absolutely. And uh, which is to say, I find myself all over that scale. There's a lot of discussion about this. And I used to be quite the contrarian. Uh, when I worked at HP, I was a bit opposed to the use of NPS, which was something that we, you know, swore by at the time. And the more I looked into it, the more I realized that it wasn't so much NPS sucks, CSAT sucks, customer effort score, what are we going to use as a top line uh CX KPI is terrible because there's always going to be people who are acolytes on one side or the other, people are going to champion for this one or that one. And quite seriously, Charlotte, at the end of the day, uh it's more what you do with it. Because people who are working in an organization that is just they swear to CSAT. Swear that's the ultimate. That's what we use around here. That's the gold standard. And there will be some folks in there that'll say, Wow, this is just no good. We shouldn't be using this. It's no good. And I say, you know what, you're absolutely right. Because on its own, it is no good. And uh I break it down into two things. First of all, it's no good without some sort of supporting information because CSAT, NPS, just like revenues or sales, quite frankly, there's not a knob you can turn to make it go to where you want it to go. It's an output measure, it is a top-level KPI. And you know, I started this whole career of mine as an analyst. And one of the things you learn right away is that those higher level numbers are influenced by so many other things. And so if you're just collecting and just looking at CSAT or MPS or pick your poison, you're not going to do yourself any good unless you're also looking at attribute data, unless you're asking about, well, let's dig into the different aspects of the experience that the customer had. Let's talk about uh, you know, the agent's attitude, whether the agent uh solved the problem, whether the agent you know was conversational or whatnot. What is going on behind the scenes below the surface of that KPI? Yeah, if all you're looking at is CSAT, it does suck because it's not going to give you that insight.

Charlotte Ward: 3:59

Even if it's a big number, it still sucks, right?

Nicholas Zeisler: 4:01

Because what if you tell you that's right, we're at 100 and the information sucks. Your number's great, but yeah, but it's but it's not a good measure if you're not digging down below the surface and finding out what's driving it. And you have to look for those uh corresponding numbers, you have to look at the correlation between all of these other attribute data and that. And then quite frankly, you have to do something which also kind of sucks because there's a lot of work involved in it. You have to look into your verbs too. You have to read the things that your customers say to you in those open-ended text questions that ultimately you definitely should be asking. I trust you are, Charlotte.

Charlotte Ward: 4:39

Well, I uh have yet in my new place to implement a CSAT program. But believe me, I I when I wrote about CSAT quite some time ago, I I expressed a desire.

Nicholas Zeisler: 4:51

Do tell, do tell.

Charlotte Ward: 4:53

I had a dream, Nicholas. I had a dream that one day, and maybe I maybe this is the place, who knows, that I will implement a CSAT program that has no numbers tied to it at all.

Nicholas Zeisler: 5:04

Very good.

Charlotte Ward: 5:05

That is just that open-ended question. And it and it and it will not even be very specific. The question will be is there anything you would like to tell us?

Nicholas Zeisler: 5:16

And there's a question mark, and that's the end of it, right? I love it. That's fantastic because quite frankly, you know, the second part of my admonition about CSAT sucking as a measure is so what? So what are you going to do with it? And the one thing that's for sure about any of these top line numbers, you can't do anything about them. You can't do anything about CSAT. You can't do anything about NPS, you can't do anything about customer effort score, generally speaking. But you sure as heck can do something about, boy, all of our customers are telling us that we're not solving their problems when they call into our help center. All our customers are telling us that our IVR is a real pain in the ass to try to navigate. Uh, whatever that you can actually do something about that. And that's where, quite frankly, to your point, where those open-ended questions really serve you a lot, uh, serve you very well. It's unfortunate that a lot of times people just want to make a word cloud or say, hey, here's here's some sort of search that we did. But you're asking your customers for their feedback. They're doing you a favor to tell you what their experience was. You should be grateful for that. And as a result, you should be reading every damned one of those.

Charlotte Ward: 6:24

Yeah, and absolutely looking at what it is. Absolutely. Absolutely. I want to I want to track back slightly to something you said before, which is just about looking at the underlying like attributions and and correlations. Obviously, there are all sorts of things you can go look away, go away and look at in your organization that might be an influence on CSAT. For example, like easy one, response times, right? That's a nice easy one. And that's one that people often uh incentivize on or look for correlations to with their CSAT. You know, one thing I learned about correlation is that it doesn't equal causation. And I'd be interested in like how you identify what those like what those factors, what those attributions are or might be, and how you identify what's an accidental correlation with what is actually something you can action.

Nicholas Zeisler: 7:16

Yeah, yeah. That's a great question, Charlotte. And in fact, you'd be surprised how often it is that if you ask that top-level CSAT number and then ask five or six attribute questions, you'd be surprised how highly correlated some of those five or six attribute questions are. And do you know why? Well, because those are the damned questions that you asked. They're not going to give you very true.

Charlotte Ward: 7:37

Yeah.

Nicholas Zeisler: 7:38

The insights unless you give them that open-ended. And that, by the way, should lead into your VOC program and your surveys shouldn't be cast in stone. And it's those insights that you're getting from those open-ended questions that should inform what the newer version of your survey with new attribute questions are. You could just add and add and add and add every time you see something, and then of course, nobody will respond to your survey, right? Because it's it's as long as your arm. But you should be looking for insights in those open-ended text responses so that you can refine the questions that you're asking. Yeah, absolutely. And then I'll also say, make sure that you're certain that when you define something somehow, that your customers also understand it the same way as well. When you talk about resolution, does resolution is resolution mean that your agent closed the ticket, or does resolution mean that the customer is satisfied and is fixed and is is made whole?

Charlotte Ward: 8:35

I love that. Just make sure that you're you're both talking about the same thing because resolution doesn't mean the same thing to everyone.

Nicholas Zeisler: 8:41

Yep.

Charlotte Ward: 8:42

You know, and that's a that's a great big dollop of food for thought just in that one sentence. Well, my work is done here. I I might we might have to have a long pause now while I just think about it.

Nicholas Zeisler: 8:53

Now Charlotte and Nicholas will reflect.

Charlotte Ward: 8:56

Exactly so. Exactly so. You talked about refining the questions there. You're probably also refining a lot of stuff internally as well. You're improving processes, you're redefining like incentivizations, you're you're doing you're doing a myriad of things in internally and externally. Maybe this is a question for another podcast, Nicholas, but but if you can tell me, if you can tell me in a couple of sentences, maybe. How do you decide the cause and effect as you're changing both aspects? Because these are both kind of moving targets, aren't they?

Nicholas Zeisler: 9:30

Well, yeah, the thing about it is that we satisfy ourselves with CX being CX people, and we all convince ourselves, for example, in each other how important it is. And in a similar sense, we can become kind of solipsistic and just figure, well, we're gonna fix this stuff, right? Well, we should be able to show to our colleagues in other parts of the business that things are getting better as a result of it, right? Uh the the some brilliant person once said that if you want to change reality, or if you want to change perception, change reality. Of course, I messed up the quote there, but uh the idea is that we're measuring this, and this we believe is driving CSAT. And this presumes that you've already made the connection between driving CSAT drives revenues, drives sales, drives the bottom line, right? But with that, you know, you are you've already got that chit. You've got that one. That's good, all right. But you have to be able to show that when you do this, when I turn this knob here, this input variable, when I hire a couple more people for the contact center, when we change the way that we do this, when the script goes this way, when we blow up that stupid IVR and implement this new one, we're going to see people stop complaining about this. They'll not stop complaining, but they'll stop complaining about this. Well, that's an impact, right? And if that correlates and if that leads to that improvement in CSAT or NPS or whatever your CX KPI is, then you can feel confident that you've actually done it. And people will look at that and go, okay, I don't know all this CX voodoo that you're doing over there, but I do see that when we changed this, it really did change the top line KPI from you know from the customer experience perspective. Um sometimes that's all you can get, right? Um, you better be sure that when that KPI changes, that your revenues and your sales do change as well. But like I said, that there you you want a topic for another for another podcast. That's the one there, too. Yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 11:26

Please come back and record that another time with me, will you?

Nicholas Zeisler: 11:30

I'd be happy to.

Charlotte Ward: 11:34

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one one eight for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.