Our Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) standard is 94% this year, and we keep our team members aware of our progress by publishing a CSAT report monthly.
You might be wondering, ‘Isn’t the CSAT gold standard 80%?” According to Monkey Learn and Refiner, it is!
So why do we strive above that?
In 2019, we developed a new vision statement for the Customer Advocacy team: We strive to transcend the typical and deliver the exceptional. As we strive to transcend the typical during our interaction with customers each day, we look up to our CSAT score to give that confirmation that indeed we have hit or exceeded our mark.
To keep the entire team abreast of our progress, I put out a CSAT report each month.
Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash
At the end of the day, the goal is for this report to serve as an opportunity for our Customer Advocates to sit back and have a moment of reflection when the report is shared. Some of the questions we hope to trigger in the minds of Advocates are:
- What did I do differently this month to have a higher or lower CSAT score?
- When I look at tickets where I had a negative review, is there anything I could have done differently?
- Can any of the quotes left in my ratings translate to how I interact with customers on a daily basis?
- What gems can I pick from the tickets of other Advocates?
I must say that creating the report is one of the highlights of each month for me. Nothing beats that feeling of going through the comments our customers have left us, smiling at them, and then putting it all together into a meaningful report for the team.
Want a sneak peek?
Below are some screenshots of our March report. Each report seeks to celebrate and appreciate each advocate for their contribution to our amazing CSAT scores. I’d love to share more about each of them.
CSAT report sections
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Results
What it includes
This section shows an 'at a glance' summary of our results for the month and how it compares with the previous month.
The value
It is a very quick way for Advocates to have a sense of how the month looked like when they are diving into the report.
How I get this data
This data is available directly within Zendesk Explore, which is the tool that provides reports and analytics for everything that we do within Zendesk.
What it looks like
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Recognizing our Star Players
What it includes
Star players are 3-5 Advocates that scored had the highest average CSAT scores at the end of the month.
The value
This section seeks to recognize Advocates individually for their contribution to the CSAT score for that month. What I find most valuable about this recognition is that it is not at all static. Every advocate has had a chance been a star player at least once since we started putting these reports together.
How I get this data
To determine the star players, we pull up the statistics from Zendesk and then upload it into a spreadsheet. We eliminate negative reviews where the customer mentioned that the advocate was helpful but the negative review was pointing to something about the product that they were unhappy with. A few spreadsheet formulae later, we are able to spot the advocates who rose to the top that month!
Fun fact - We had three consecutive months where all of our star players had a 100% CSAT. Amazing, right?!
What it looks like
Let’s check out our star players from one of our most recent reports:
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Context
What it includes
This is a brief summary that gives a picture of the month in terms of coverage, pertinent issues that may have resulted in higher volume, downtime and feature launches.
The value
This section allows Advocates to have a lot more clarity on what influenced our numbers during the month. For example, if there was a higher number of Advocates out on vacation, it helps to explain why there was lower coverage at a point that could eventually have resulted in a lower CSAT score.
How I get this data
As a transparent company, everything that goes on is available within our internal communication tools. I’d go through the relevant ones in order to gain the context for the month.
What it looks like
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Quoting our Customers
What it includes
Six of the most stand-out customer positive quotes from the CSAT ratings for that month.
The value
These comments summarise what we strive to achieve each day when we pick up our computers and sign in to work. Seeing them written down all in one place helps the impact of our work really hit home. It allows us to increase the human connection we have with the customer and provide them with the kind of support they need in a very timely manner.
How I get this data
Admittedly and humbly, it’s quite tough to select only six uplifting quotes! It’s amazing how kind and thoughtful customers can be with their comments, and it’s so telling of the hard work our Customer Advocates and all support professionals are doing around the world.
What it looks like
Here are some of the comments that we got to highlight in one of our most recent reports:
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Learnings
What it includes
This section usually includes three to six tickets that I believe contain useful learning points for advocates.
Sometimes, these learnings are as straight-forward as adding a personal touch to the ticket, such as commenting on a remark the customer has made about something that is currently going on in their lives. Other times, they are as impactful as the advocate taking the extra effort to dig under the surface to give the customer full relief from a long-standing issue.
The value
As a team working on a product that has a lot of moving parts, there’s always so much we can learn from one another. In this section of the report, I look at the comments that have more of an uplifting story.
What it looks like
Beyond showing appreciation and delight for our support, these comments are usually an indicator that the advocate did something that was super impressive or totally unexpected. Here’s what the Learnings section looked like in one of our recent reports:
Focusing on the positive
You might have noticed that we don’t cover our negative reviews in the CSAT report. Since the focus of this report is to celebrate our team, we don’t share negative reviews within it. Instead, those conversations happen within the team member/manager one-on-one meetings (we call them syncs).
We also do peer reviews where team members review tickets of their Advocate colleagues. Through this knowledge-sharing process, both teammates are able to discuss how to effectively and efficiently work through the much tougher tickets that come our way.
Over to you! How do you celebrate your Support team? Which aspects of our report format did you find most useful? Send us a tweet with the hashtag #customersupportthoughts.
Signing off,
Cheryl