165: Year in Review: Can’t Get No Satisfaction

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode one hundred and sixty-five of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week I continue to look back at 2020. What's in a number? Quite a lot, actually, if you're incentivising agents on it or marketing your service based on it. But what does 9.2 or 97.5 really mean? What do these numbers represent and what are they trying to tell us? Most importantly, how good is the data they're based on? Surveys of any sort, MPS, CSA, and probably all the rest, which ask an individual to rate some feeling on a numbered scale, have issues. First, the question context is not always obvious. When a survey lands in my inbox, it's not always clear what they're asking. As a support professional, I can recognise MPS as the classic how likely am I to recommend question? But as a layperson, the question might be a little confusing. Most people don't realise the MPS question is seeking information about the organisation, not the service you just received. Where does that confusion take a human person to make a best guess at what they ought to respond or not respond at all? Second, question interference isn't always obvious. Surveys are only as good as the question you ask. There are subtle differences between would you recommend? Are you happy with? And how satisfied are you with? Yet I'd venture most people don't read the small print and just stab at an approximate number. Third, I'm sorry to say it, but cultural bias is a thing. I don't like to draw on national stereotypes and common tropes, but I'm gonna have to. Some cultures are more prepared to give five out of five than others. Speaking for my own people, British in case you weren't aware, generally we are a little less inclined to offer full marks even if we've had exemplary service than our American cousins, for instance. And here I must stray into a little aside, a little personal story. Once I was passed over for a relatively minor but actually deserved promotion, because my average survey score was 4.3 and not the requisite 4.5 average. I could easily query the surveys returned and show I was getting significantly more 5 out of 5's from the US clients than the British clients. The problem was my time zone. I was working a UK day shift almost exclusively serving British customers for maybe about 70% of the day. You can probably guess how hard I tried to achieve that goal the next time the opportunity presented itself. Number four subjectivity exists too. It is a thing. Nationalities aside, my seven is not the same as your seven. Heck my seven on a Monday is not even the same as my own seven on a Friday. Sometimes I've had a long day. Sometimes I've had some chocolate. Sometimes your promised two-minute survey was difficult to get into, and I arrived at it a little irritated. It's fairly reasonable to assume that such subjectivities will be ironed out in large data sets. Many smaller organizations with lower volumes, however, choose to place as much significance on a single number as larger businesses serving thousands of customers a day. And finally, numbers don't fit. Have you ever had that nagging feeling that you wish this scale was out of ten instead of out of five? Or out of a hundred instead of out of ten. I have. Maybe I'm a little too exact, maybe I overthink it a little, but the inexactitude of some scales frustrates me. And so I undermark. I'd rather give an organization nine out of ten than ten out of ten. If there was something tiny but irritating in the experience. Out of a hundred, they might well have got ninety-eight. Ultimately, what I really want is just the opportunity to tell an organization what's on my mind. I don't want to have to try and measure it, codify it, or translate it to your scale. That's your job. Let's hear some leaders talking about customer satisfaction.

Denise Twum: 5:06

There are some customers that will never be satisfied because you're not giving them exactly what they want, when they want it, how they want it. And it is one of those aspects of support that can be a little disheartening because when you're in support, you want to help the person and you want them to be happy that you helped them and you're excited when they finally get it. But even when they get it, because you didn't deliver it on the platter they want it, or in the color they want it, or in the shape they wanted, they're gonna ding you. And part of that is also because while they might you the CSAP question is asking, well, how is your experience with this support agent or the support person? They are actually rating the tool or the app or the product that you support. Um, so in my ideal world, there would be a very easy way to rate the product and the support experience.

Mo McKibbin: 6:04

Ah, yes. CSAT.

Charlotte Ward: 6:07

Oh, such enthusiasm.

Mo McKibbin: 6:10

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

Charlotte Ward: 7:00

Yeah, I I think I think you're right. I think it's it's one of those things that people feel a lot of uh that people are really ambivalent about, right? That there's a lot of antipathy and there's also a lot of love. And I think that um you can use it in a number of different ways. And I think that um I think that the kind of classic idea of just like my my my go-to example of CSAT is when you're at at the bathrooms at in an airport. This is clean, this is dirty.

Mo McKibbin: 7:31

Yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 7:35

Yeah, there's a yeah, exactly. The happy face, smiley or sad face, maybe maybe a middle face, right? As you leave that what does it tell you, right?

Mo McKibbin: 7:46

And that's actually a really awesome point. It's like because whenever you if a bathroom, if you're going to the bathroom and it's disgusting, you are going to unhappy face because you want to fix that. Like you're like, but like whenever you're 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. Um similar, yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 8:11

Yeah, and because that is a CSAP measure, right? And I think that I think I 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, do you really only want to care, you only really only care like about two or three things when you're going to a bathroom. So actually, you don't perhaps need all of the nuances that you might like to get in other support scenarios around like all of that personal feedback. Please tell us how we did. You know, what can you tell us about the agent that served you and everything else? Because what do you know when you're running a bar a bathroom at an airport? You know who was on duty and you know the three things that your customer cares about, right? So you you know they want it to be clean, they want it to be open, and they want it to be private, or you know. Is that that might actually be it, right?

Mo McKibbin: 9:08

Well, I do like, and this is why I love CSAP too, is it can be um it can be the canary in the coal mine, or it can be um, 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 great for just measuring broad stroke trends. So if like you have, you know, 98, 100% happiness rating, you're like you you can feel good about that. Like you can feel good that, like, um, for the most part, uh trending-wise, very few people are unhappy when they come into the bathroom. 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 silence.

Nicholas Zeisler: 10:10

Well, 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 or KPI is terrible because there's always gonna be people who are acolytes on one side or the other, people are gonna 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 or swear, that's the the our ultimate, that's what we use around here, that's the gold standard. And there will be some folks in there that'll say, Well, this is just no good. We shouldn't be using this. It's no good. And I say, you know, 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 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 gonna give you that insight.

Chris Taylor: 12:17

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 uh individual uh issues, uh people that need discussing and failures in process as well, I think.

Charlotte Ward: 13:07

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 to low CSAT scores? What what what are what are the what are the mitigations that you can make?

Chris Taylor: 13:39

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 uh 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 CSA. 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.

Simone Secci: 14:50

Negative reviews are very important. Make sure that the feedback related to the product is not just impacting your um your overall score, creating a picture that doesn't resemble um, you know, the ability of your team to to provide good service uh and make the team grumpy. But you the usual thing you will hear is yeah, okay, but we have no control over this, and which is which is kind of negative review. So that takes care of like your team morale. Um and so break down in this two in these two pieces.

Charlotte Ward: 15:28

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