CSAT is short for Customer Satisfaction, a key performance indicator. We look at why CSAT is your key to long term success as you grow your business.
General
Why You Need to Care as Much About Customer Satisfaction as Customers Do
General
Today’s business mantra is all about customer service and providing value. Here’s why you need to care as much about customer satisfaction as customers do.
New and Improved Look of NPS, CES, CSAT surveys for Mobile, Desktop, and Email
General, Product Information
We made a bunch of updates to the look and feel of NPS (Net Promoter Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), and Ratings questions and have given you more control to help them match your brand. Our updates have been made to make your customer experience surveys more visually pleasing and customizable. No worries if you haven’t had time to check out all the new features—we’ve pulled them together to show you what we’ve been working on.
A new and improved look of surveys for mobile, desktop, and email experiences
We’ve switched to a more modern look for our survey experiences. This new look is used for mobile, desktop, and email experiences and is a little more pleasing to the eye (or at least we think so). No matter where you’re sending your survey, you can be sure that it will look good and represent your brand well.
New question preview during build mode
Now you can see exactly how your question and style options will look during build mode so you don’t need to switch back and forth between build and preview modes.
Customize colors, shapes, and styles used in NPS, CES, and CSAT surveys
Branding is important. That’s why on top of making some changes to make our surveys look better, we’ve also added a number of options for you to customize your surveys. When building your survey, you have the option to change colors, shapes, styles, and more.
Choose your brand color
You can select a specific hex code, which makes it easy to keep your surveys on-brand. This also makes it easier for consultants and agencies to white label the platform and provide better branding options to clients.
Change the button shape and style
You have more options for adjusting the look of the buttons. Select rounded buttons, circle buttons, or square buttons, then choose whether you want your brand color to just be the outline or to be the fill. All of these style options allow you to not only do something that you think looks better but also to create a survey that better matches your brand’s visual aesthetic.
Rating questions can have thumbs, faces, or stars
Who said surveys and customer experience questions can’t be fun? Add the finishing touches to your questions with up and down thumbs, emojis, or stars. To make this feature a little easier to use, we’ve also added the ability to change the number of icons that appear. For the thumbs, you’ll want to choose two under the Steps dropdown. You can also choose to use four stars, three faces, or five boxes—whatever works best for you.
CES and CSAT answers can now be shown as text
In case you have something against numbers, we’ve made it so that you can use text on your CES and CSAT questions. Now you don’t have to worry about whether or not your customers are confused about whether or not 1 or 5 means strongly agree.
As a company that lives and breathes customer feedback, we’re always listening. We’ve been hard at work making changes that will help you build better questions faster so that you can focus more on analyzing the results. We hope you enjoy these new features!
What to do with Negative Feedback – 5 Proven Steps to Improve It
General
Sending out surveys always brings results, some positive and some negative.
While you may find yourself cringing as the negative results pile in, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You of course appreciate the positive comments because they are reassuring, but the negative survey results are a growth opportunity.
Most business leaders know that negative feedback doesn’t have to spell disaster, and they instead turn it into a positive experience. (tweet this)
In this article, we look at what to do with negative feedback and five proven steps to improve it.
#1: Don’t Let Customers Down
Once your customers have taken the time to complete your survey, you don’t want to let them all down. Show your customers you value their time and their feedback by providing a response.
If you don’t, you show customers their input is useless, and they’ll likely never complete another survey for you again.
What happens after your customers send their survey feedback is the most important part of your survey
#2: Review Your Survey Responses
Gather your team and make sure everyone has read and re-read the customer feedback.
Delegate someone to respond to the negative feedback and someone to respond to the positive feedback.
Discuss together how your staff should handle their responses, especially to the negative feedback.
For starters, they should respond immediately. This isn’t something you want to fester. After all, the last thing you want are negative reviews all over Google and Facebook.
You can improve the customer’s opinion of you by learning more about what they’re upset about, remaining empathetic and showing you care. This is all regardless of whether you think the customer is right or not.
#3: Take Action
As you prepare to take action, it can be helpful to have a template for your employees to follow. Set guidelines and parameters so your staff is well-versed on just what to say.
They should always customize the response, though, so the template is really just an initial guide.
You may find that you can improve your negative feedback with the right response. Customers may even end up sticking with your company because of the way you handled their negative feedback.
Your follow-up is key to keeping the customer and turning them into one of your most loyal ones.
Train your staff to create a response that renames their concern, acknowledges it, and then lets them know how you can remedy it. Always let them know how much you value their input and how sorry you are for the problem.
#4: Review Responses
The next step is setting aside a time to meet with your staff to discuss your negative feedback.
This is so important because it’s the only way you’ll improve your business and your service and avoid negative feedback in the future.
#5: Analyze Your Data
Finally, as you review responses and make a plan for turning things around, you want to really analyze your data.
This means looking where the negative feedback came from. Is it just one department? Is it a particular area of the city or country?
By analyzing the data, you’ll find areas where you might provide more training. Or, you might learn you need to add a staff person because the wait time is too long. You also might find problems with products.
Analyzing your data provides a wealth of information and lets you know where to act.
Final Thoughts
When businesses respond promptly to negative feedback, they benefit. If you ignore, you’re likely to suffer in the form of bad reviews all over the internet.
Communicate with your customers. Try to fix the problem, and once you have, reach back out to those same customers and let them know what you’re doing to fix it.
This means contacting them more than once and showing them that not only did their feedback matter, but you took steps to make sure it didn’t happen again. Thank them one more time and let them know their role in affecting change.
Providing good customer service is vital to the success of any business. So, when you get negative feedback, you want to do everything in your power to improve it.
Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.
How to Measure the Success of Your Support Department
General
Well-known management consultant, Peter Drucker, said, “What gets measured, gets managed.”
His management philosophy means that the best plan of action is to measure the things that matter to your company. One of the most important things to measure is customer satisfaction.
If you’re ready to more than meet your customers’ needs and exceed their expectations every time, you want data you can measure.
Here’s how to measure the success of your support department.
How to Measure Satisfaction
One way to measure success is to send out feedback surveys. This helps you assess how well your support team is doing while learning what your customers need and expect.
These metrics help you keep tabs on what your customers experience when they talk with your support team. Is the time spent with your support staff easy, or is their time difficult and frustrating?
You can always use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey to measure customer satisfaction. Yet, in this case, the NPS merely scratches the surface of your customers’ whole experience with support.
Consider also sending surveys that measure the following:
- The number of conversations a person had with your support department to resolve the issue.
- How many customers hung up frustrated.
- If your customers felt their issues were resolved.
- Overall satisfaction.
- If customers felt the amount of time spent on the phone was satisfactory.
- Whether or not the team member was friendly, courteous and ready to help.
Final Thoughts
Your customer support department is highly measurable. From things such as call volume, chat time, interaction counts, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction, you can record data and measure it quite easily.
Remember that you can only change and improve the things you are aware of. If you don’t know about the success of your support department, you can’t reward it or improve it.
Because your support department and ensuring customer service is meaningful to the success of your company, it makes good business sense to measure it on an ongoing basis. (tweet this)
Your satisfied customers who had a good experience with your support department are the ones who’ll return to shop with you.
Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.
How to insert a survey question into an email
General, Product Information, Survey Tips
At SurveyTown, we give you the HTML you can copy and paste into an email you send to a customer.
See how to embed a survey question in an email.
This means that your question will show in the email itself, allowing your customer to one-click in the email and give their response.
There are four types of question types that you can embed into your emails.
- Rating
- Net Promoter Score
- Radio
- Picture (choose one)
The process of embedding is to go into the “Promote” tab, and then clicking on “Questions” from there you can copy and paste the HTML that you can embed into an email.
We created a full video that guides you on how to put the HTML into an email.
Happy Surveying!
Alerting customer service by email to negative reviews automatically
General, Product Information, Survey Tips
One of the main reasons to use surveys is to keep a pulse on customer satisfaction. You can add questions such as Ratings or Net Promoter Score to gather immediate feedback from customers. But what if you get a negative review and want to follow up on it right away? Using SurveyTown you can get alerted to negative reviews by sending an email to your support or account management department for immediate followup. Here’s an example of setting up SurveyTown to do this.
Let’s assume that you are creating a ratings question of stars 1 to 5 and wanted customer service to be alerted by email if anyone rated their experience less than 4 stars.
First create your question
Step 1 is to create your customer service question. In this example, we are using a simple ratings question – “Please rate your experience.” and we give the customer a choice of 1 to 5 stars.
Second, create an “Action”
Under the “Logic & Actions” tab, click the button to “Add New Action”. The action we are creating is to send an email when a someone rates the question as less than 4 stars. So the next step is to create the condition.
Third, define the condition
Add a Condition
Press the button that says “Add a Condition” and defein the condition of “How would you rate our service?” is less than “4”.
What this means is, if someone rates their experience as less than 4 stars your action will be triggered.
Set the Alert email recipient
Now set the “Alert Email” which means put in the email of the person or the group that you want to receive the email alert.
Save the logic an action and then you are done.
Using the “Preview” you can test our your new functionality. If you have set things up correctly you will get an email when take the survey and give it less than 4 stars.
The email you get will contain the condition that was met. It will also contain a link to be able to click on and see the full response.
If you have asked for the customers phone number or email or if you have passed this data along to SurveyTown when you passed the customer onto us then you can find that information and followup with the customer.
That’s it. Happy surveying.
What Is A 360-Feedback Review?
General
Performance reviews happen in companies the world over, and some of them are done well, and others aren’t.
In this article, we’re going to talk about how to conduct employee reviews so you can see the entire picture of your team members’ performance.
We ask the question, “What is a 360-feedback review?”
The 360-Feedback Review
As the name implies, the 360-feedback review provides a full-circle review of each member of your team.
While you’re most likely familiar with the traditional annual or semi-annual review, this type of review is a bit different.
How? The traditional review only involves the manager and the employee, so there is only one opinion involved. The traditional review is appropriate in many instances, but it doesn’t give a total snapshot of the employee as a whole.
With the 360 review, which is not a performance review in the traditional terms, the employee is given the feedback needed to develop business and interpersonal skills.
The 360-feedback review provides the following:
- An identified place to begin working on new skills.
- A way to measure progress. For example, if your employee needs to improve conflict management skills, you have a starting point to begin measuring progress.
- The chance for you and the employee to identify personal blind spots of behavior that the employee may not notice. For example, the feedback review may alert you to personality issues or traits that bother co-workers.
Just remember: the traditional review is about the job the employee is doing, and the 360-feedback review is about the employee personally.
Who Participates in the 360-Feedback Review?
A team member’s co-workers provide the feedback on an employee’s performance. The manager requests this information.
The co-workers who participate may include:
- The boss or manager
- Peers
- Other employees who come into contact with the employee
The best part of the 360-feedback review is that you can gauge your employee’s performance from 360 degrees of your organization. (tweet this)
Co-workers can weigh in on the skills and contributions of the reviewed employees. They’ll let others see how they feel about the employee’s contribution and performance. Areas they’ll weigh in on include:
- Leadership
- Teamwork
- Interpersonal communication and interaction with employees and customers
- Management
- Work habits
- Accountability and punctuality
How Does the Feedback Work?
You’ll find a few different methods for gathering feedback about your employees.
In most businesses, the managers request and receive the feedback. They then analyze the feedback paying particular attention to the employee’s behavior. They aren’t just looking for the negative feedback but the positive as well.
The goal is not to degrade the employee, but to give them important information about how others view his work and his work habits so he can improve.
Some businesses hire external consultants to administer the surveys. This is most often true if it’s the manager receiving the 360-feedback review.
Other companies use electronic employee surveys to look at the results objectively in an electronic format.
With electronic surveys, employees can score their peers using supplied answers as well as open-ended questions.
Let’s look at how to use electronic 360-feedback surveys.
Crafting the Electronic Survey
One of the easiest and most effective ways to craft a 360-feedback survey is to do it electronically using an online survey software. You can also use the system to help you categorize and compile your results.
As with all surveys, don’t overwhelm your staff with survey questions. Think about what you’d exactly like to learn and only ask the questions you’ll use.
If you’d like to get started developing your own 360-feedback survey, here are some areas to concentrate on. Be careful, and don’t concentrate on all the areas at once.
Ask too many questions, and you’ll lose the concentration of your survey respondents. You might find they carefully consider the first questions and just start clicking buttons if it’s too long.
Here are some ideas for your 360-electronic feedback survey:
- Ask questions about leadership skills such as delegation, listening, approach-ability, communication, coaching, decision making and management.
- Pose questions about communication skills that include how the staff member listens, how clear they are, and their speaking and networking skills. Don’t neglect to ask about their non-verbal behavior, their ability to give and receive feedback and how they handle constructive criticism.
- Another area to concentrate on is team skills including their ability to work as part of group, listen to others and their openness to the ideas of others.
- Ask about organizational skills – can they handle projects, multi-tasking, logistics and fine details?
- You also want to know about their problem-solving skills – how do they identify problems? Are they creative in solving them? Can they brainstorm and come up with solutions?
- When helping employees grow, other good questions surround their interpersonal skills and include empathy, confidence, stress management, how positive they are, their negotiation skills, enthusiasm and personal appearance.
Final Thoughts
The 360-feedback review is valuable for companies and employees.
The review provides a chance to address core competencies and provide opportunities for developmental progress.
The 360-feedback survey allows employees a chance to see how they measure up in the areas of work as well as interpersonal skills.
This feedback review isn’t about their performance, but how they can grow as people and as workers.
You’ll find that the 360-feedback review allows managers to help their employees grow so they are the most productive employees possible.
Today’s workers appreciate this type of feedback. It helps them learn more about their strengths and weaknesses while justifying training and development opportunities.
You’ll find that 360-degree feedback reviews are important to your company as whole as well as employees and managers.
- Managers benefit because they get feedback from multiple sources, and they can improve their leadership skills and fine-tune their strengths
- Employees benefit because as we mentioned earlier, they want to improve.
- Your organization benefits with a more productive workforce and a culture that welcomes feedback and continual improvement.
Give the 360-feedback review a try in your company and learn how to help your employees reach their full potential.
Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.
Images: Paolo Candelo