Improve your Customer Satisfaction Ratings by creating a great working environment for your agents
I’ve discussed my 5 tips to improve Customer Satisfaction here and have made a video series for it as well. Here’s a quick recap of what the 5 tips or questions you need to ask yourself to see where you are:
What is your first reply time?
Are your incoming requests well categorised?
Is your Knowledge Base up to date?
Do your clients know what’s going on in the background?
Are your agents happy?
Today we will be focusing on the last one, so if you have a Saas business and are looking to improving your Custom Satisfaction Ratings in order to measure the healthscore of your customers (or just because you want to improve your overall CS for those QBRs), one of the questions you need to ask yourself is:
Are your agents happy?
I’m not telling you anything new, but If people have a good environment to work in, they thrive and produce better results. The Customer Success team (and by extent, the Customer Support team) are your eyes and ears to your client base’s pains and complaints. They interact with your customers on a daily basis and are intimate with how your product is being used. Also, they have first contact with your clients and what stops them from receiving value from your product. Clients deprived of success, are not clients that are going to stick with you for very long. That’s why you need to keep your CSMs and agents happy and in best shape to deal with support requests.
This is very general, I know, but this is the magic that glues everything together in improving CSATs.
Happy agents oftentimes equals happy clients!
Here’s a few things you can do:
1. Run a survey
Every now and then check with your team about how you can improve their working environment.
Use a tool like Hapkey https://hapkey.io/. It’s amazingly easy to use and customise.
Among the questions you can ask:
How happy are you with your organisation?
How happy are you with your role?
How can we make you happier?
Every business is different, so you will obviously need to tailor different questions for your agents.
2. Check the metrics
You definitely know what your CSATs are looking like, because I’d have to guess that that’s why you’re here.
You need to lookout for:
Ticket resolution time - how much time do tickets take to be solved from the moment they land into your support system until they get solved.
Agent first reply time - how much time do your agents need until they jump on top of a ticket.
Requestor wait time - how much time does your user base need to wait on average until they get a reply.
Agent time spent on solving a support request.
Why are some requests taking so long?
How much time did the ticket spend in Sam’s company and how much time in Annie’s company?
Use the Time tracking app for this purpose in your Zendesk. It’s also free.
If you want a detailed granular metric with how much time your agents actually spend working and how much time they spend idling, there’s Tymeshift you can use. The great thing about it is you can also throw in another metric like “Report agent time spent on ticket against a custom metric like the “root cause” of the issue“. The free version is not that great, but the paid version can definitely cover that need and for $15/month/admin it’s a steal!
3. Have one to one meetings
This needs to become company culture. Have these meetings every quarter, every month even.
You can ask good questions to help them such as:
How are your customers doing overall?
Are there any unhappy clients that we need to discuss about?
You’ve had to deal with these types of issues for the past 3 months, are we making any progress?
Some clients were very angry, did they churn(leave the product)? What could we have done differently?
How can I help?
These are great, but they are not really measurable and we need to look out for the metrics that we can measure and we need to maybe look into questions like:
The average CSAT of your customers is 12% lower than the rest of the team. Let’s put together a plan to change that and let’s start with your lowest rating customer.
You have 5 requests that have a satisfaction predictability of lower than 20%. We should review a plan for each of these cases.
Your score for this type of requests are 10% higher than they are for the rest of the team. Can you create a presentation for the team to show them how you did so well with these?
As you see, you can focus on driving value for these one-to-ones for both managers and agents.
4. Use an anonymous voting system to measure ASAT - Agent Satisfaction.
Yes, Agent Satisfaction. Sometimes, the team would be better off not saying what bothers them directly so you can encourage them to give anonymous feedback about how the office environment can become better.
5. Take product feedback
Since your support agents and CSMs are closest to your user bases’ problems and use your product on a regular basis, don’t miss the opportunity to take product feedback. It’s probably some of the most honest feedback you’ll ever get.
It’s not just one way, it has to work both ways. If your agents are happy, that directly gets reflected in the work that they do.