Customer expectations are evolving rapidly, and the failure to keep pace can cost your enterprise dearly. Accordingly to Microsoft’s research, the majority of customers expect more from agents than they did in previous years – two-thirds of customers are ready to abandon a brand if it doesn’t meet their service expectations. What’s more, 75% expect agents to know their identity and purchase history before starting an interaction. You need to satisfy all of these requirements to obtain a solid CSAT score, keep churn in check, and drive referrals/repeat business.
Without regularly measuring customer satisfaction in a contact centre, you will be left shooting in the dark without any consistency in service levels and CX quality across agents and different contact teams.
3 Ways to Measure Customer Satisfaction in a Contact Centre
- Customer satisfaction or CSAT score
CSAT is probably the most tried and tested technique for measuring customer satisfaction. It asks a simple question: How satisfied are you with your recent interaction with <<insert agent name>>? Customers can answer on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10, or choose an option between extremely dissatisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, neutral, somewhat satisfied, and extremely satisfied. Some organisations (especially in-person customer support hubs) even use a visual interface where customers can click on the 😊, 😠, or 😐 emoji to express their opinion.
The average of all the scores collected for an agent or a particular location indicates how satisfied customers are with that specific aspect of your contact centre.
- Net promoter score or NPS
NPS is a customer satisfaction measuring methodology developed by Fred Reichheld at Harvard University in 2003. It goes one step beyond just satisfaction to measure loyalty as well. As per an NPS survey, you ask the customers how likely they are to refer your product or service to someone else based on their most recent interactions. Customers answer with a score between 0 and 10, 0 being very unlikely and 10 being extremely likely.
NPS calculation is slightly more complex – you calculate the number of customers who gave you 1-6 as a percentage of the total number of respondents, and you subtract this value from the percentage of respondents who gave you a 9 or 10.
- Customer effort score
Customer effort score or CES captures how convenient it is for someone to reach your contact centre and get their query resolved. You ask customers how easy it was for them to get their most recent query resolved by your brand representative, and the customer responds with very easy, easy, neither easy nor difficult, difficult, or very difficult. The percentage of customers who respond with difficult or very difficult, subtracted from the percentage of customers who respond with easy or very easy reflects your CES score.
Why You Need All Three
CSAT, NPS, and CES capture three aspects of the customer experience: the sense of delight felt, the confidence/trust/loyalty inspired, and the sheer ease or convenience of access. Together, they accurately depict how effectively you serve your customers on a daily basis.