Salted CX extracts customer satisfaction from supported platforms if they are available. You can report on customer satisfaction and use customer journey to understand what caused the customers to be happy or not as happy as you would like them to be.
Collecting and acting on customer satisfaction is a discipline by itself. This article tries to cover the basics of collecting customer satisfaction feedback.
Overall you are trying to get feedback to as many conversations as possible, as soon as possible in a way that helps you identify what to focus on and provides you with enough context (either from the conversation itself or from customer comments) that you can take an action.
General Recommendations
There are some high-level recommendations that we will elaborate on later in the article:
- Keep it simple. Ask straightforward as few questions as possible. Questions that are easy to answer from the customer's perspective.
- Ask for a rating and opinion. Quantitative rating enables you to calculate averages, monitor trends, and easily find issues. Qualitative feedback enables you to uncover things you were not aware of and provide customer perspective on their experience.
- Maximize coverage. Try to ask customers for opinions on every single conversation you have with the customers.
- Time the survey appropriately: Send the survey shortly after the conversation while the experience is still fresh in the customer's mind. Make sure you do not ask in the middle of an ongoing request before you think it is resolved or at least over.
- Act on survey results. Make sure that you constantly monitor customer feedback and take action to improve customer satisfaction. Even when customer satisfaction rating stays the same and above your target, it is a good practice to check at least the negative customer experiences regularly.
Keep it Simple
A simple customer survey with few easy-to-answer questions increases the response rate and makes the results more reliable as customers are not confused when answering them:
There are general recommendations for keeping the survey simple:
- Minimum number of questions. Fewer questions equals a higher response rate. In most cases knowing that a customer is not satisfied is enough. You have the entire conversation in Salted CX to find out what went wrong. When considering adding questions always consider whether you will act on the specific questions and whether you want to delegate quality control to the customer or you can do it on your side.
- Plain language question. Ask plainly and directly without jargon and encourage customers to be honest and share as much as they can with you.
- Unambiguous clear answers. When forcing customers into picking answers, make sure the answers are not confusing, or overlapping and they cover all possible options. Use open-ended questions to give your customers the option to cover cases you have not thought of. Make sure people understand what exactly individual answers mean especially if you use numeric (stars) scales.
- Optional questions. If you decide you need to ask more questions that is a bare minimum, make the extra questions explicitly and visibly optional. It is better to get some feedback without the customers answering the optional questions than to get no feedback at all. If you ask more than one question, you can consider displaying the first one only and after the customer hits the submit displaying a follow-up to make sure you get at least the first one answered. Long forms can cause you to get much less feedback overall.
- Do not ask what you should know. You should not ask the customer for any information that you already know or the customer thinks you know such as questions they were asked in a menu, or IVR before they even talked to an agent. In Salted CX you should have those data already.
Ask for a Rating and an Opinion
One question is the least you can ask. However, it is difficult to ask for both quantitative and qualitative feedback in one question. So typical minimum you can get to are two questions — one rating and one free comment.
Rating Questions
Rating questions are great because it is easy to calculate averages, watch trends, and identify conversations that are below a threshold that need attention. Although there is of course subjectivity when answering the questions, there is also less room for interpretation.
The following table lists a couple of examples of questions you can ask and covers some of their advantages and disadvantages.
| Question | Possible Answers | Discussion |
|---|---|---|
| Was your request resolved? | Yes, No | Often resolving an issue has a critical impact on customer satisfaction. Unresolved issues typically have a higher chance of lower customer satisfaction. The problem with this question is that it does not cover the scenario where a customer had to go through a bad experience to resolve. So you almost always should pair this question with another rating question. To keep the number of questions minimal you might want to consider different means to detect successfully resolved requests, such as using Salted CX auto reviews. |
| How was the conversation you had with us? | Bad, Good, Great | These three options force customers out of the neutral zone. They enable customers to express dissatisfaction and a great experience. At the same time, it forces the customer not to be entirely neutral and choose Good instead of the neutral position. You might consider other options as the middle one, to be more neutral such as “Acceptable”, “OK”, etc. The advantage of having these three options is that they are easy to understand for customers and there is not that much ambiguity (which grows with granularity customers can choose from). |
| How would you rate the conversation on the scale from 1 to 5 stars? | Stars | The clear advantage of this question is that it is easy to understand and customers have a good understanding what starts means. The issue with stars and any other granular scale is that with growing granularity the boundaries between the individual options are not that clear and the scoring becomes very subjective. You can help with naming the stars such as 1 - Terrible, 2 - Bad, 3 - Neural, 4 - Good, and 5 - Great. However the same applies - the more granular scale the less customer are aligned on the meaning of individual scores. |
| On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague? | Scale 0 to 10 | This is an industry-standard metric for collecting customer satisfaction. The advantage of this metric is that you can compare yourself to other companies in your industry and use it in marketing if you are good at it. The problem is again with the granularity of the scale which NPS eliminates that it actually groups the responses into 3 categories at the end — Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. |
| How would you rate our company? | Stars, Bad/Good/Great, etc. | Often used by companies that want to distinguish between scenarios where an issue is on the company side or the agent side. In theory, this might help you to identify agents that significantly underperform or overperform despite customers being in a bad situation. In most scenarios, we have observed insignificant differences. This distinction might be useful in some scenarios but requires caution. Even when customers express opinions on the company the agent might have an impact on it - both positive and negative. Customers might be often unable to distinguish whether the experience is actually impacted by the company (terms, processes, etc.) or an agent. |
| How would you rate our agent? | Stars, Bad/Good/Great, etc. | Often used by companies that want to distinguish between scenarios where an issue is on the company side or the agent side. In theory, this might help you to identify agents that significantly underperform or overperform despite customers being in a bad situation. In most scenarios, we have observed insignificant differences. This distinction might be useful in some scenarios but requires caution. Even when customers express opinions on the company the agent might have an impact on it - both positive and negative. Customers might be often unable to distinguish whether the experience is actually impacted by the company (terms, processes, etc.) or an agent. |
Always adjust the wording to match your brand language.
Opinion Questions
There are key reasons to ask customers for their opinion is to discover unknown problems — and cover your blind spots. As you company evolves and externalities change there might be a new issues customers encounter. Free text customer feedback is one of the sources that helps you raise issues you were not previously aware of.
The exact wording of the opinion question depends on your business and you should align it with your language. We generally recommend asking just one open-ended question at the end of the survey and encourage customers to elaborate on any answer they have given in the questions with a closed set of answers.
Recommendation
Always consider your specific business needs. The survey that tends to work well in many cases has just two questions:
- How was the conversation you had with us? with possible answers Bad, Good, Great
- What we can do to make your experience better the next time? that is open-ended free text
Always word the questions to match your company brand language.
Maximize Coverage
The more customer feedback you have the better. You should gather feedback for any customer conversation with you no matter whether it was handled automatically or by people.
Time the Survey Appropriately
It is important to ask the customer as soon as possible so their experience is fresh. This will often lead to more opinionated, honest, and emotional answers. This is what you are looking for though. You want the customers’ opinions, honesty, and feelings they went through the experience with you. Customers will also remember the most details about the conversation and the customer survey will be isolated from another conversation that may follow right after that.
The ideal scenario is to ask in the same channel right after you believe the conversation is concluded. For example post call IVR in phone calls, survey right in the chat window on the web, email reply in a thread that is resolved.
Act on Survey Results
Every company wants their customers to be rather more satisfied than less satisfied. For this reason, it is often expected that when the customer satisfaction is not great you try to mitigate negative root causes in the future. The effort to improve customer satisfaction differs significantly depending on the root cause. So it requires as with any other activity to weight effort and positive impact.
General recommendations:
- Act as soon as possible. Review — especially — negative customer feedback as soon as you can ideally right after you receive it. If the root cause of the negative experience can affect more customers and can be resolved quickly you prevent more customers from being affected.
- Be transparent and invite people from the entire company. No company is perfect and it is a continuous process to improve your business. Visibility into customer satisfaction issues enables more people to resolve issues over time.
Negative Customer Feedback
One negative experience can overweight a lot of good experiences the customers have with you company, reduce loyalty and thus chances of future use of products and services by the customer and or their friends. Extremely negative experiences can also have more serious consequences including legal.
There are some common root causes and how you can act on them:
- Just one bad conversation. Something went wrong for any reason but it is obvious from the conversation it is not a persistent or repeating issue. You can try using semantic search to confirm it is really rare scenario. In this case, depending on the severity and your policy you can either ignore it or reach out to the customer and turn a bad customer experience into a better one by apologizing or giving compensation.
- Agent behavior issues. If agents behave in a way that is not up to the required standard you can talk to the agents on site and ask them to change their behavior. It is best to do this immediately and verify in the agent profile that the behavior is not an exception but a rule. You can for example check a few conversations in which the agent was engaged and received bad customer feedback.
- Team behavior issues. Similarly to agent behavior issues, you can use dashboards to check if the team dropped in customer satisfaction compared to a previous time period or if they are doing worse than the rest of the teams. Then it is worth talking to their team leader and checking whether the team can benefit from additional training for example.
- Process, product, or service issues. These take often significantly longer to fix or improve. You can use auto reviews in Salted CX to quantify the problem. Understanding the problem scale helps you to prioritize fixing the issue. Auto reviews also contribute to transparency as you can show them in a dashboard to let everyone know that you are aware of the problem.
Positive Customer Feedback
Managing a contact center does not always have to be about fixing issues. There are also opportunities that you can take advantage of when you receive extremely positive customer feedback:
- Encourage customers to provide public review. You can reach out to customers that give you very positive feedback and encourage them to review your company or your products and services in public forums such as Google Maps, Facebook, X, Instagram, Trustpilot, etc. Just make sure you have customer permission to use personal information to reach them with such a request.
- Encourage the customer to buy more of your products and services. Positive experience helps with loyalty. You can mark customers who had positive experiences with your company in the past in your CRM as they might be more likely to respond to future product and service offers.
Changing Customer Surveys
Depending on your current state and your goals you might need to change how you do customer surveys. The changes might impact the numbers you want to see. In constantly evolving business you need to be ready that trends may be influenced by these changes.
Some changes have an obvious impact, some might have an impact without people realizing it:
- Changing the questions entirely. In this scenario, you can expect that results from these surveys will not be comparable with the previous ones at all.
- Changing possible answers/scales. With different options, customers will interpret them differently and it may skew scores. For example number of people choosing an answer “Very Good” might drop when you rename it to “Great”.
- Rephrasing questions. Even when you just clarify or polish a question it may have an impact on customer perception and customers may reply differently.
As you have typically a 10% or higher response rate in customer surveys you will get a benchmark relatively quickly after changes. So although you will lose long-term continuity, you can get benchmark value to compare against in one day. For having a good benchmark value after changes we recommend timing the changes in customer surveys in a way that it does not collide with major events (new product releases, start of the season, process changes, etc.) that you expect might significantly affect customer satisfaction.
We recommend improving customer surveys over time and would recommend having a track record deep into history. The approach however depends on your company.