13 Ways to Improve CSAT and Ensure Customer Happiness

The competition out there is increasingly stiff; you can’t be sure a customer will stay with you for long if they aren’t satisfied with your product. And you never know their happiness level unless you test it.

That’s why this blog post shows you how to measure CSAT. You’ll also see 13 practical ways to improve your score, and how user feedback software makes the process much easier.

TL;DR

• Customer satisfaction is the measure of how happy and satisfied customers are. This feeling stems from the customer experience with your product and interactions with service teams.
• Key metrics used to measure customer satisfaction include CSAT, NPS, and CES.
• The customer satisfaction score (CSAT score for short) is a metric that shows you the percentage of your customers that are satisfied with their experience.
• Best time to send user satisfaction surveys:

1. After a customer interacts with a feature for the first time
2. After their support ticket is resolved
3. When the user completes a significant milestone

• How to calculate your CSAT score: sum up all positive responses from your CSAT survey. Divide the result by the total survey response and multiply by 100.
• Benefits of a good customer satisfaction strategy:

1. Less churn
2. Higher customer loyalty
3. Increased customer lifetime value from existing customers
4. Improved brand perception

13 reliable ways to improve CSAT and have a competitive advantage in the market:

1. Set the right goals
2. Ask the right questions
3. Know your audience segments
4. Personalize your customer experience
5. Closely analyze your CSAT results
6. Address negative customer feedback
7. Build a QA framework
8. Reduce response times
9. Give self-service options
10. Keep your support omnichannel
11. Regularly measure CSAT
12. Create a customer community
13. Don’t forget about employee satisfaction

• Every company and industry is different, so a strategy that works well for company A may not yield much ROI for company B. But taking the time to understand your customers and tailoring every step to their needs will pay off.
• Userpilot helps to increase customer satisfaction by enabling you to: create microsurveys & analyze feedback, segment your audience properly, and implement different forms of self-service.

What is customer satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction is the measure of how happy and satisfied customers are. This feeling stems from the customer experience with your product and interactions with service teams.

Key metrics used to measure customer satisfaction include CSAT, NPS, and CES. Our focus in this article is on increasing your CSAT scores, which naturally bumps up the other metrics.

What is a customer satisfaction score and how to measure it?

The customer satisfaction score (CSAT score for short) is a metric that shows you the percentage of your customers that are satisfied with their experience.

It’s measured with a simple survey as in the image below:

CSAT surveys are sent after a customer interacts with a feature for the first time, after their support ticket is resolved, or when the user completes a significant milestone.

The upside of CSAT surveys is the fact that they’re delivered contextually and immediately after the user is done with the action. The experience will be fresh in the user’s mind, so you’re more likely to get accurate feedback.

How to calculate CSAT: sum up all positive responses, divide the result by the total survey responses, and multiply by 100.

Here’s an example. Imagine you had 200 survey responses, and only 85 were positive. Your customer satisfaction score is 85/200 x 100 = 42.5%.

The score above is actually very low and means something is wrong with the product experience. Aim for CSAT scores of above 70%.

Why you should care about improving customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is directly correlated with the quality of the customer experience. And the latter is the main reason customers prefer one brand over another.

It’s, therefore, essential for every company to prioritize the customer experience. Some of the biggest benefits include:

• Less customer churn: Customers come for the product and stay for the experience. Your churn rates will significantly reduce when your users are happy with the company.
• Higher customer loyalty: The more time people spend on your product, the more value they derive from it. It’s easier for this customer segment to become loyal brand ambassadors.
• Increased customer lifetime value: This is a natural consequence of loyalty. Customers that enjoy your product will keep renewing and upgrading their subscriptions to get more value.
• Improved brand perception: Brand perception is what customers think of your company. You can’t tell customers what to think, but you’ll influence their perception when you’re committed to improving their experience.

13 reliable ways to improve CSAT

Now that you’re convinced of the importance of improving your CSAT, it’s time to consider how to do it.

This section shows you 13 actionable strategies you can begin implementing right away.

1. Set the right goal for your CSAT

Since CSAT isn’t as obvious as customer acquisition or revenue targets, people rarely dedicate time to set goals for it. But you can’t make real progress if you don’t have clearly defined targets.

So, set goals to improve customer satisfaction based on the results you got from measuring your CSAT score.

The average CSAT score is 70-80%, but you should set your standard depending on your industry and product. Also, ensure your goals are realistic; don’t set targets that are too small for you or unreachable.

You can use the SMART goal-setting framework as a guide:

2. Ask the right questions

Pay attention to your wording. Impersonal or formal surveys are overdone and boring, so they may not drive as much action as creative ones.

In addition, learn to tailor your questions to the proper context. For example, the typical CSAT survey goes something like this:

How satisfied are you with [blank]?

The blank can be anything: customer service experience, recent purchase, product onboarding, app design, etc.

3. Know your audience segments

Treating your whole user base as a single entity can result in overgeneralized feedback surveys. So it’s always a good idea to segment users before rolling out survey questions.

The main thing you want to consider is where the customer is on their customer journey. For instance, new users vs. loyal customers might have very different opinions and past interactions with your product. It will therefore be unproductive to send them the same survey.

Aside from lifecycle segmentation, you can also segment customers based on their needs, product usage, in-app behavior, etc.

4. Personalize your customer experience

The explosion in customer experience technologies makes users expect personalized interactions now more than ever. They’re receiving it from other brands and subconsciously expect the same of you.

Failing to give your customers personalized touches will sooner or later result in lower satisfaction. How to prevent that?

It’s simple: use the insights from customer segmentation to create more personal interactions with each user group.

5. Closely analyze your CSAT results

Knowing your CSAT score will do no good if you don’t study it in depth to find opportunities to improve customer satisfaction. Proper feedback analysis can tell you which user segments are less satisfied, which support platforms are performing the best, which features are underperforming, etc.

Also, compare your CSAT score with other important support metrics (e.g., resolution time) to see if there are any correlations.

6. Address negative feedback

It’s not enough to monitor customer feedback; you must act on it. Whether the feedback is from a CSAT survey, an online review, or a social media comment, it doesn’t matter.

Take your time to look into the response and provide solutions where necessary—especially for negative customer feedback.

Going the extra mile in this way will reflect on your CSAT. Your customers will feel happy that you took their feedback seriously and showed interest in solving their problems.

Here’s an example to inspire you:

7. Build a QA framework

Interactions with your customer support team significantly impact customer satisfaction.

And it’s easy for customer service teams to miss the mark when there’s no Quality Assurance (QA) framework. So create one that fits your industry and customers and ensures that users get only the best experience.

8. Reduce response times

We live in a fast-paced world. People no longer have the patience to stay in line to speak with a support rep or wait for days to get a response to their emails. Your customers expect swift responses, and anything less than that will be perceived as a bad experience.

You can improve your CSAT by using support automation tools to provide 24/7 customer service. This way, no customer will be left hanging, no matter the time of the day.

You may also want to consider having extra support agents if you have a large customer base across multiple time zones.

9. Give self-service options

Almost half of consumers still prefer self-service over contacting a support specialist. Therefore, it’s not in your best interest to deprive your customers of the ability to get help on their own at any time they need it.

You can do this by building an on-demand resource center. This center should contain different content formats and enough resources to help at various stages of the customer journey. FAQ pages, knowledge base resources, chatbots, video tutorials, written guides, and forums are all great self-service options to consider.

10. Keep your support omnichannel

Omnichannel support is more than having a presence on multiple platforms; it means providing consistent, connected experiences when users switch between different channels.

Use insights from user behavior data to know which platforms your audience prefers and focus on those. Also, try to have a single unified platform with all your interactions to make it easier to monitor customer communication.

11. Regularly measure CSAT

How a customer feels about your brand or product is bound to change, which is why regular customer satisfaction checks are necessary.

This is especially important after your product has undergone major changes, new feature releases, feature sunsets, and the like.

But don’t measure for the sake of it. Compare your latest CSAT score with previous ones to track growth. Use the result to also identify areas where you’re doing well and where you’re not.

12. Create a community

Having a sense of community around your brand will strengthen your bond with customers. This can be achieved via social media groups, forums, Q&A sessions, live streams, webinars, or even offline events.

Irrespective of the channels used, communities are always a good opportunity to learn more about your user base. Solid communities also enable customers to master your product because they can ask questions and get real-time feedback from you.

13. Don’t forget about employee satisfaction

Employee happiness is often neglected when you make customers your only focus. But it’s no less important for improving customer satisfaction.

Think about it this way: happy employees have extra motivation to do their jobs well—which directly or indirectly involves serving customer needs. In other words: happy employees = delighted customers.

Also, your customer-facing employees know the most about your audience, so let them pass on their knowledge and experience to other departments. That way, all hands will be on deck to improve customer satisfaction.

How to improve customer happiness with Userpilot

There are many ways you can use Userpilot to improve your CSAT. Let’s go over them:

• Create microsurveys: Userpilot has customizable templates you can use to create quick in-app surveys. You can also build from scratch if you don’t find the template you want. After your survey has been rolled out, our platform allows you to collect and analyze feedback on one dashboard without stress.
• Segment your audience: Remember our discussion on the importance of segmentation for customer happiness?

Userpilot has advanced features to enable you to do just that.

• Implement in-app self-service: With Userpilot, you can easily create checklists, modals, tooltips, and other UI patterns that enable users to get more value from your product and be even happier to use it.

Conclusion

Create a plan to learn as much as you can about your customers before you begin executing the strategies in this article.

Every company and industry is different, so a strategy that works well for company A may not yield the same ROI for company B. But taking the time to understand your customers and tailoring every step to their needs will pay off.

Also, keep in mind that customer satisfaction is an ongoing process. As long as your product has customers, never stop measuring and optimizing for their happiness!

Do you want to improve CSAT with Userpilot, as described in the previous section? Book a demo to get started now.