If you believe that customer happiness is important, you’re probably looking for ways to improve customer satisfaction. Chances are you’ve tried the standard methods and seen some success. You don’t need us to tell you to “Be friendly!” You’re experts – you get that already. So we went looking for a few more ideas you might not have thought of before. It might be hard to persuade your manager to try them because they are … out of the box. We hope they might jog your imagination!    

 Throw out the macros

If your team relies too heavily on macros, you might see a decrease in CSAT for two reasons: Firstly, customers can sense when they receive canned replies. Try a human, personalized response instead. Secondly, macros can make agents jump to conclusions or offer vague advice. It’s tempting just to throw out a somewhat helpful macro and move onto the next ticket. But skipping careful consideration and troubleshooting might lead to inaccurate answers or worse, bloated responses with multiple help center article links. How about avoiding macros for a week? You will surely see how it bumps up your CSAT!

Check your automation

Are triggers and automated emails coming out of your ears? They could be annoying your customers. But, aren’t you trying to impress them? Check your autoresponder, your “updated ticket” email, your “this ticket is closed” email, the survey email, and a follow-up email a week later. Do you really need to bother them that much?

Bonus: update the content of auto emails to make them sound more “human” and less “robot”!

Replying faster

Okay, this isn’t that unconventional. Responding faster will improve your customers’ experience and your CSAT scores. However, you don’t need to shoot for the moon. There is a smart way to determine *how much* faster you should respond: Collect all your Bad satisfaction tickets and see how many mention “slow reply” as the reason why they are unhappy. If it’s very common, set a goal to respond faster and decrease the number of dissatisfied customers. Continue until you see no or very few customers leaving “slow reply” in the comments section.

Setting better expectations

Under-promise and over-deliver. If your contact page mentions 24/7 support and you take 2 hours to respond on a Sunday, you essentially meet expectations. However, if you state business only happens Monday to Friday, and you reply at the weekend – you’re a hero! The same thing applies when setting expected first response times. 24/7 and 1 hour response times sound excellent, but if you can’t deliver, you’re going to make a lot of customers grumpy!

Offer fewer channels

Yep, fewer. If your team is over-stretched with phone support, chat support, social channels, and email; it might be the time to retreat and do better with less. Phone support is a super resource intensive channel to support: 53% of customers expect a response within 3 minutes on the phone. If you consistently leave your customers hanging, you might need to focus on what you can do well. Providing excellent support just over email is much better than having really really bad support over four different channels.

Empower your agents with refund budgets

Instead of using a strict policy around refunds, provide each of your frontline team with a small budget to “make things right” for the customer. They are the best at understanding when a client deserves credit for their troubles, or if a refund is necessary. Also, being able to offer a refund without the need to escalate the case to a supervisor keeps resolution times short.

Anticipate the next question

Often called “forward resolving”, anticipating your customers’ next question can help improve their experience. Think about what you would need in such case.   

Embrace multimedia

Not all customers learn best through reading. Some might need images, videos, or interactive guides to help them accomplish their goals. Collect your biggest CSAT detractors and see if you can create some more visual content for them.

Take notes on power customers

If you have clients who write in often and have particular needs, keep track of their history using notes in their profile. It ensures they don’t have to repeat themselves. And lets you provide contextual support to your most valuable customers quickly.

Daily team standups

Problems tend to come in waves. You might have a bug of the week, a new release causing more questions or a seasonal volume increase. Instead of letting agents figure out how to deal with this on their own, take it on as a team with daily stand-ups. You’ll start the day on the same page and fire up.

Improve customer satisfaction by tracking your CSAT publicly

Put your current CSAT score in a public place. If you’re a remote team, post it on your employee forum, slack group, or email it out daily. Keeping your team’s focus on the CSAT score will encourage them to take a little extra time to make their customers happy!

 

Share your tips

We’d love to know your secrets to a better customer satisfaction score! Tweet at our @nice_reply and we’ll share our favorites.

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