Why customer satisfaction is the key to success, and how to get it right 🌟

Customer satisfaction creates more brand advocates

The importance of customer satisfaction (CSat) cannot be downplayed. Analysis across the board has shown that CSat, alone, has a significant impact on business performance 🌟

Breaking it down even further, customer satisfaction is a recognised prerequisite for customer retention & brand loyalty. Studies have found a positive trend between customer satisfaction, repeat business, and word-of-mouth recommendation to friends (and a negative trend between customer satisfaction and complaints) 📈

Statisticians among us will know that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. However, experimental studies and further analysis concluded that customer satisfaction was the determining factor here - in other words, varying levels of customer satisfaction were responsible for the shift in customer advocacy.

What actually is customer satisfaction (CSat)?

In general terms, it is what it says on the tin - a measure of how satisfied a customer is with their experience (for this article, the customer support that they received). The most common form of CSat is an email survey. You know the one - “How would you rate the support that you received from (agent name)?”.

Whilst CSat is simple in nature (e.g. 4 out of 5), it’s important to go deeper. After all, there’s no use in acknowledging its importance, and investing heavily in resources, if it’s not done right 🧐

Getting it right – the team 👥

Having the right team is key. Studies have found that particular qualities, such as responsiveness, accountability, trustworthiness and empathy, have the most significant impact on determining CSat ratings.

These findings can be incorporated into training and procedures:

Accountability: ticket ownership, where an agent ensures to get to the bottom of each customer enquiry
Responsiveness: ticket-handling approach, setting SLAs, priorities and automations, resourcing and scheduling appropriately, streamlining work-flows
Empathy & trustworthiness: this is all about getting the right people, and of course these traits can be embedded into training & company values

Getting it right – the measuring tool 🛠

It’s important to capture CSat data reliably and accurately. The tool being used should:

Measure what it is supposed to be measuring (accurate)
Be consistent across time (reliable)

It may sound simple, but there are many instances where data might not be accurate; for example, a customer may be asked to rate the support they received (CSat) and end up leaving a poor review of the product that malfunctioned. Having a (small) set of clear questions alongside the star-rating helps to identify cases like this and combat against them.

Reliability goes out the window in cases where an agent receives a single 5-star review, and the tool automatically shifts them to top of the leader-board with 100% customer satisfaction. High response rate and having prerequisites in place for leader-board stats (agent only placed on leader-board if they hit 10 + reviews etc.) are factors that help ensure reliability.

We’ve partnered up with Stella Connect – a clever and eye-catching tool that takes all of these factors into consideration and more. Positive ratings (4 or 5 stars) even give customers the opportunity to choose an agent reward (anything from chocolates to a beach day 🏖). There’s also an open-ended feedback box (optional, of course) to capture even richer qualitative data. Gamified in nature, Stella survey response rates are up to 10 x higher than industry averages. If you see a Stella survey in your inbox, trust us, you won't ignore it!

Getting it right – acting on insights 💡

It’s essential that CSat has an impact - that it’s used to drive change and improvement, where necessary. Anything less would be a missed opportunity.

An agent is top of the leader-board for the whole month – reward them! Set up an incentive scheme to motivate the team and recognise their hard work 👑
Share the results – the 'voice of customer' is something that affects the whole business. Sharing customer kudos and concerns can shape product changes and prioritisation - like fixing that one bug that’s been on the roadmap too long! 📣

Summary

That concludes our whistle-stop tour of CSat!

Overall, customer satisfaction drives business performance and is an area of opportunity to create more brand advocates. There are some important factors to get right along the way – the team, the tool and the turnaround.

We love working with Stella Connect for CSat, but there are lots of great tools out there! If you have any questions about tools or CSAT in general, feel free to message the Koda team on LinkedIn.

References 📚

As per, we’ve summarised findings from psychological studies in our article. Here they are below:

Abdullah, H. N., & Hilmi, M. F. (2014). Service quality as determinant of customer loyalty. International Journal of Business and Innovation.
Brcic, J., & Latham, G. (2016). The effect of priming affect on customer service satisfaction. Academy of Management Discoveries.
Esmaeilpour, M., Sayadi, A., & Mirzaei, M. (2017). Investigating the impact of service quality dimensions on reputation and brand trust. International Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research.
Loke, S. P., Taiwo, A. A., Salim, H. M., Downe, A. G., & PETRONAS, U. T. (2011). Service quality and customer satisfaction in a telecommunication service provider. In International conference on financial management and economics.
Nair, G. K., & Choudhary, N. (2016). The impact of service quality on business performance in Qatar-Based Hotels: An empirical study. The Journal of Hospitality Financial Management.