The Best Advice For Improving Customer Satisfaction Scores

By Deon Nicholas

How satisfied are your customers? It’s a question that keeps business leaders up at night. In pursuit of being a customer-centric organization, you have to know how your customers feel. To do this, you need to look at customer satisfaction scores (CSATs). 

From this data, you can identify gaps and opportunities to enhance customer experiences to improve CSAT. Our customer satisfaction experts curated some best advice that every company will want to consider. 

Provide omnichannel support options.

Customers expect options when it comes to support. With the many ways to communicate, picking up the phone to call support is no longer their only channel. According to a U.S. customer survey, 58 percent prefer email and digital channels, including chat, text, and social media. The minority (42 percent) still favor the phone. You can expect that gap to grow as most customers become digital natives.

So, you have to meet customers where they are and integrate support channels into one to offer omnichannel support. Doing this is key to consistent experiences for customers and, in turn, greater satisfaction. When looking at the channels available, you’ll find self-service is a priority—and the next topic for our advice.

Power self-service with conversational AI.

Did you know that 69 percent of customers prefer self-service support, according to one report? That one data point illustrates how important it is to have self-service options. However, a standard chatbot won’t help you raise those customer satisfaction numbers. The reason is that most chatbots don’t understand intent or sentiment. They simply find keywords and relay answers based on those, which could be completely irrelevant. 

Conversational AI-powered self-service is much different. It understands human language and delivers answers based on the content available in knowledge bases, macros, or past tickets. When you answer customer questions quickly and accurately, they’ll feel more positively about your brand. 

Create and continue to update knowledge bases.

Knowledge bases are central repositories that can assist your customers before engaging support. They are a very popular resource for customers, according to research. They like them because they can find answers fast. The average customer doesn’t want to jump through hoops to get information. 

For your knowledge base to continue to be a resource, keep it fresh by adding questions that begin to pop up more routinely. Also, when you release a new product or service or update one, create new content around it. 

Consider a knowledge base to be proactive customer support. If customers find what they need here, their satisfaction will increase. 

Empower agents to be faster and more accurate with responses. 

You can also see improvements in CSAT by supplying agents with what they need. Give agents the tools to be better prepared when a ticket hits their queue. You can do this by using conversational AI to analyze and categorize tickets. Smart routing also ensures the customer gets to the person that can best resolve their issues.

AI that uses natural language processing can also improve CSAT and other attributes by detecting and labeling sentiment automatically. The reason why is that AI is tagging tickets to ensure they go to the agents most able to help them. When those agents receive tickets, AI continues to be a useful tool by providing past tickets, macros, and other information to resolve the issue quickly.

You can also use conversational AI platforms to build intent models. They can cover common customer questions around topics, such as password resets, payment remittance, order status, and so on. 

AI continues to assist agents by looking at existing macros, past tickets with similar content, and current ticket history. All this valuable information is at the agent’s disposal as soon as they open the case. A search tool for agents helps them find answers faster as well. 

An excellent example of the impact of supporting agents with conversational AI is our case study with Lime. They were able to reduce the time to first response by 77%.

Prioritize employee satisfaction.

If your team is dissatisfied, it can become apparent to customers. According to research from Glassdoor, there is a strong statistical link between employee well-being and customer satisfaction. If you treat your staff well, they’ll be more loyal and engaged. As a result, they’ll deliver better service to customers. 

If you want to understand employee and customer satisfaction, you’ll need to study employee engagement. Start with requests for feedback. Then, find common themes and work toward improving them. 

You can also look at turnover. Customer service is known for high turnover rates. According to industry experts, the average call center turnover is between 30 percent and 45 percent, at least twice that of other departments. 

While some turnover is inevitable, it’s also costing you money and affecting the customer experience. One of the best ways to curb this is to give your agents the tools they need to be more productive and assist them with their daily work

How will you boost customer satisfaction scores this year?

Many variables go into improving CSAT. Most of them, however, hinge on customer experiences and making them more seamless and convenient. Others focus on supporting your agents to deliver these. Conversational AI is at the heart of both. 

Dive in.

Interested in generative AI for customer support? Check out this guide to learn about the 3 key pillars you need to get started.

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