Your center is in the business of customer service. You know that to keep things running smoothly, you need to regularly evaluate how well you are serving those customers. What you might not know is how to choose the best way to assess your customer satisfaction levels.

With so many options for surveys and feedback opportunities for your consumers, it can be difficult to decide which one is the best fit for your center. Here, we’ll talk about one of the most popular and one of the most straightforward methods of measuring the way you’re serving your consumers: the Customer Satisfaction Score, or CSAT.

What is the CSAT?

What does the Customer Satisfaction Score measure - and how can it best be applied in your facility?

The CSAT survey score - through simple surveys - measures how satisfied a consumer is or was with their interaction with your company. This may include the use of your product, the receipt of your services, or the interaction with your staff. Regardless of what is being assessed, easily understood scale rating systems are used to help consumers express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction - and that feedback can be used by the company conducting the survey foe whatever purposes they decide on.

How Does the CSAT Work?

The CSAT is short, simple, and straightforward. It uses a set of questions that are easy for consumers to read and understand to collect feedback in the form of responses. Generally, these responses are collected in the form of multiple-choice or rating scale style responses. This makes collecting the responses quick and easy and makes it more likely that consumers will interact with the request for feedback rather than simply overlook it.

Because of the simplicity of the format, the response rates of CSAT surveys are high - especially compared to other forms of feedback requests. The format also makes it easy for companies to personalize and tailor questions to their own needs, making the feedback that they can glean from the surveys truly valuable.

When Should You Collect a CSAT Score?

Most experts agree that the best times to collect information from consumers about their current satisfaction rating is at different “customer lifecycle moments”. What are these? These are different points during the overall relationship a person develops with a company or organization. These include:

• Discovery - This is when a consumer first learns about a product, service, or organization
• Evaluation - This is the point when a consumer considers whether they want to commit to a product. These days, this may include online research, weighing peer reviews, and more. For some customers, this period may last quite a while, while others may skip this step almost entirely
• Purchase or commitment - This is when the money changes hands. When a consumer makes a purchase or a commitment to a product, service, or organization, things become a little more “real.”
• Use or experience - This is the period during which a consumer uses the product. If a learning curve is involved, this time can be risky for the manufacturer of the product or provider of the service, since consumer opinion can be based on their overall experience even though they had this learning curve to overcome. Their experience during this time will influence the majority of their feelings about the product, so this is the most important lifecycle moment in many experts’ opinion.
• Bonding - Hopefully, the initial experience period will be positive. If so, this will lead to bonding, which is defined as the accumulation of positive experiences with the products or services. Consumers often grow fond of and find their “favorite” products during this time.
• Advocacy - Have you ever met a person who loved a product so much that they couldn’t stop talking about it or showing it off? That person was a consumer advocate - and they are valuable to the brands that they are advocating for. This is the final step of the relationship development of consumer and brand and is the optimal point for conducting CSAT research.

During these different phases of the growing relationship between the consumer and brand, industry experts recommend conducting and repeating the CSAT survey. Answers may change but are always most valuable close to these changing lifecycle stages.

What Are the Uses of a Customer Satisfaction Score for Your Center?

You’ve collected a Customer Satisfaction Score from numerous consumers or clients - now what? What does your center need this information for and what can be done with it?

Knowing how well you’re currently doing when it comes to keeping consumers happy and meeting their needs can guide you in doing so in the future. Therefore, CSAT survey results can be used to adjust your agent performances and serve consumers better. How well they can be applied depends on a variety of factors, including the way your surveys were worded and how detailed the requests for feedback were.

Consumers aren’t always looking to share large amounts of feedback, so be sure to offer opportunities that make it quick and easy to do so. Using rating scales for otherwise detailed questions - such as a one-to-ten scale - is one simple way to streamline the feedback process and deliver the most information to you with the least amount of effort on the part of your consumer.

Using Technology to Make CSAT Application Easier

Regardless of why you collect CSAT scores and what your center does with them, it’s easier to do that with the right technology on your side. At ChaseData, we can provide that to your team, as well as the tools to serve your customers better and enhance those scores along the way. Contact our industry experts today to learn more about what we can do to help make it easier to land a great Customer Satisfaction Score every time!