119: CSAT with Chris Taylor

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode one hundred and nineteen 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, Chris Taylor. Chris, it's lovely to have you back. This week we're here to talk about customer satisfaction. Now I know you're particularly data-driven, and uh maybe we can get on to a little bit about how we respond to some of the data that we might get out of a CSAP program in in a second. But first, what's your what do you think is is the biggest takeaway we can have from any effort into attempting to measure our customer satisfaction of our service?

Chris Taylor: 1:03

I think for me, the biggest takeaway on like an operational management level is how healthy is your support team in that week, in that day, in that month. Um, CSAT can vary wildly, right? So when I was working in the contact center with 200 agents, you can very quickly get an after-call CSAT survey that's bad. Pinpoint the agent, are they having a bad day? And then that's a really nice and effective way of just having that conversation because it's literally a customer scoring straight after an interaction, they're feeling the emotion of that interaction right then. Um, so I think it's a really good indicator of the health of your support area as a whole, but it's a nice way of narrowing down individual issues and people that need discussing and failures in process as well, I think.

Charlotte Ward: 1:53

Um in an environment like a call center, which is pretty intense and pretty high volume, you're getting a lot of measures through the door every every minute or every hour of the day, aren't you? So I guess um when you see that volume of data, you you're able to respond quite quickly. As you said, you can just walk over to an agent and have a word. What what what are what are the other things that you know, how else might you respond to it to low CSAT scores? What what what are what are the what are the mitigations that you can make?

Chris Taylor: 2:25

So whenever I so if I get a bad CSAT score now at Tyke, we're business to business, what I do with that is literally respond to that client straight away, ask them what went wrong, be really upfront and say, I've review the interaction first. Were you happy with it? If you were sitting on the other side of that table, would you be okay with that? Um, again, thinking about us at Tyke, we want to make our customers feel like we're part of their team, we're on their side. So it's really looking through that interaction. Has it gone well from my perspective? No. Message that client, how could we have done better here? And it's trying to elicit feedback from that negative experience that we can feed into our continuous improvement processes. Um, that's where I find the most value because I don't see an unhappy client as necessarily a bad thing a lot of the time. Um, from my perspective, it can really help to highlight failures in process, organizational practice, and maybe agent training, knowledge, that kind of thing. Um, so I actually think it's quite useful. Obviously, you don't want loads and loads of bad CSAT. You want to be able to spot the problems in the data, do something to fix them. Um, but I think it's really valuable from that perspective. Yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 3:35

Yeah, I think I couldn't agree more. That that's interesting what you said there, that you know, um it's really I think it's really easy to think we've got a bad survey, we better just fix this and shut it down as quickly as possible. But actually, I think it's worth taking the time to spend spend time with that customer, figure out what that particular issue was, but maybe have the conversation in a slightly bigger way as well, and see what else you can elicit. Because by filling out that survey, they're effectively reaching out to you. You're they're they're giving you a like that they're investing time in you when they respond to a survey. They're investing time to tell you, okay, it might is probably, let's face it, going to be a negative comment because we're all human beings, we're all much more, much more likely to fill out a box with something negative than positive, particularly when it's really specific. But but it really is a valuable opportunity to get a conversation going, isn't it?

Chris Taylor: 4:34

Absolutely. And I think from my uh where where we're at now for the last year, we've had obviously that's been 97% week on week. Um, we have a really good score. Those that 3% is the area of opportunity for us. What can we do to this is where our process fails, and that's how we narrow down where we can do better. Um, so I only see it's the same principle of when you make a mistake in anything in your career, it's an opportunity to learn. Um, and CSAT is definitely an a useful resource for that. The other side is for an agent training perspective, um, even not looking at wider process, if you can sit down an agent or who's had a call or a ticket or whatever and give them that CSAT score, and then they can understand and rationalise how how that has occurred, I think that's a really useful tool as well.

Charlotte Ward: 5:23

Yeah, absolutely. Uh and I think actually it's worth bearing in mind, as you said, that it's the 3% that's interesting, not the 97%. Because frankly, no I I've yet to come across an organization that has 100% CSAT surveys. Um I and I think that the 3% are frankly well done on 97%. And if you maintain that or improve it, great, but nobody's gonna get to 100. And I think that the c the real value is in the in the difference. It it's where it's where you can extract a really useful set of conversations.

Chris Taylor: 6:00

Yeah, and I think if you're a business that hasn't got this metric already, right, and you've been running for 10 years, you implement it and you're getting a 50% C SCAT CSAT score. You know there's a massive problem. So it's it's really we work in startups, so we we've done customer support before, we've implemented this early on, so our agents can learn and grow with it. Whereas if you have agents in a business established but they don't have any metric like this, they never really know how their customers feel or whether they're happy. So, how can you give proper feedback? Um so that's another flip side, I guess.

Charlotte Ward: 6:37

It is, and I guess it's worth um noting that it's very likely when you introduce this you're gonna start with low scores, right? Because because you don't have that information, it's a baseline. It's a baseline at first.

Chris Taylor: 6:49

Absolutely, agreed.