Make Sure Your IT Customer Satisfaction is a Virtuous Cycle of Returns
We all respect the importance of customer satisfaction. We intuitively understand that happy customers are good for business.
Of course, customer satisfaction has always been crucial to the health and growth of a business. But in this age of social media, unhappy customers wield greater power than ever before. An angry tweet, blog post, or Facebook rant may go viral, causing irreversible damage to a brand. Even if it doesn’t go viral, if the wrong person should happen to see it, it can cause a negative outcome.
On the flip side, satisfied customers – your brand”ambassadors” – will leverage social media as an outlet to promote and recommend their favorite businesses to others, increasing both loyalty and revenue.
It is, however, hard to quantify your customers’ feelings. There are numerous customer satisfaction survey methodologies, but the most straightforward is the customer satisfaction, or CSAT, score.
The scoring system is indeed simple. It is usually calculated by asking a pertinent question, such as “How satisfied were you with your call center experience?” There’s a corresponding survey scale, which might be 1-3, 1-5, or 1-10, depending on the granularity of the response you seek.
Identify Key Moments
It helps to tie your customer satisfaction surveys to key moments in a customer’s experience. That way, you can gauge your customer insights and measure the effectiveness of your interaction with the customer. These events include everything from the initial deployment of a new product or service, after a maintenance or upgrade event and certainly after any interaction with your customer support team.
Happy customers lead to increases in sales revenues. They are also much more inclined to recommend a given product or service to their peers. That’s why improving CSAT is so important – it increases your ability to make more customers happier by spurring the rate of positive word-of-mouth appraisals of your offering.
As part of your CSAT measurement, it’s vitally important to monitor social media for activity regarding your product or service. Promptly responding to negative comments may mollify the complainer but, more importantly, they may impress the many more readers who see the interaction as a genuine attempt on your part to do what needs to be done to ensure that the customer is satisfied.
The word-of-mouth interactions between peers regarding your service is absolutely driven by their satisfaction level. People value the opinions of those they trust. Especially in the case of a substantial potential investment in a new product or service – maybe it’s from a company that they haven’t done business with before – that opinion can make or break future revenues.
CSAT for MSPs
It’s common knowledge that managed service providers require the highest level of service assurance capabilities. After all, they need to manage complex technology and services that span multiple domains.
Operators need to have visibility of multiple network elements in order to enable them to manage the end-to-end quality of real-time services. The tools and systems that ensure these capabilities are a crucial link in the ability to keep the customer satisfied.
Customer satisfaction can only occur when everything is running smoothly or when issues are rapidly and accurately addressed. This means consistent performance for the growing scope of bandwidth-hungry applications and services. Machine learning and automated workflows can help reduce network and service operations costs as they manage the increasingly complex delivery environment.
A framework for customer satisfaction can be built in many ways. But these three mileposts are important to the overall customer experience:
- Initial contact
- The proper level of ongoing customer engagement (for example, customers might be happy with the service but annoyed by a sales rep who is continually trying to upsell them)
- Timely responsiveness when the customer does happen to reach out again.
On many fronts, the effort will definitely pay off. It’s a virtuous cycle of returns. Remember: “happy customers lead to increased sales revenues.”