I’m Measuring All The Things, But My Customer Service Agents Aren’t Improving!

I love CSAT as a measuring tool.

I hate CSAT as a motivator for agents.

When I worked in retail sales, the company rolled out CSAT as a metric they suddenly cared a LOT about. Every customer would get a survey, and every supervisor would be tasked with relentlessly tracking and fussing about numbers with their teams.

As a frontline salesperson, I knew what it meant: if I get a 9 or a 10 out of 10, my supervisor would leave me alone. Let that number slip to an 8, and weird conversations about how numbers work were in my future. Why? Because an 8 was a 0. Anything below a 5? a negative number gets averaged into my scores.

Such a scale only truly tells you something about a customer’s level of satisfaction if every customer is unaware of how the ratings relate to the score, and immediately falls apart as soon as even 10% of your customers know how it works under the curtain.

CSAT is excellent at surfacing only the extremes of customer satisfaction.

That makes it a really subpar way to train and motivate your agents. “But every customer should get a 10!” you say? Sure. but the psychological hit of “guy gave me a 7, which is really a 0” after a huge effort on my part to make it a 10 is tough to come back from. Much easier to explain to every customer that a 7 is a zero, and to only fill out the survey if they want to give me a 9 or 10.

The numbers are immediately gamed. Ask me how my coworkers in retail began relentlessly explaining that they’d rather not get a survey response than to get an 8.

If I want my team to actually get to a 10 every time, I need them to look at “insider numbers” that take into account far more than “this customer had a bad day, and gave me a 6 because he’s mad at his wife.”

If you’ve read my book, you know that I outline the exact metric system that we use with my teams to get these kinds of results:

800+ Trustpilot reviews (with a 4.9 rating, even though Trustpilot averages in a bunch of 3.7s just to make sure we’ll nearly never get to 5 flat)
90% CSAT scores for more than 2 years running.
Significant decrease in agent turnover/churn. (I need to sit down and calculate it, but only 3 people have ever been terminated, and a couple left)

Today I’ve released a tool that uses those tested metrics to aid you in actually motivating your team the Sustainable Support way.

Introducing the CRR Scoring Tool.

Go on and buy it today.

Features:

Completely browser-based. There’s no database, nothing ever leaves your computer. (unless you use the handy “Copy to Google Sheets” button.)
Simple. Set up Supervisors and agents in less than 5 minutes, and immediately start reviewing interactions.
Guided. You have to consider and document *why* you give someone a 1 or a 3 (three point scale. 1 is “this is a problem,” 2 is “this is fine,” 3 is “this is exceptional”) on any given metric.
Team-wide reporting helps supervisors spot problems according to individual metrics, with real data on specific issues.

Some day, this may turn into a hosted solution that throws all of the data into a database, and I make people sign up with me, and make recurring revenue. But today, it’s a simple downloadable ZIP that runs in any modern browser, and you keep all of your data.

I’ve already started using it in my workflow. We are using ZenDesk QA (Formerly branded Klaus), and by comparison Klaus is a multitool that can be coerced into providing actionable data, while the Sustainable Support tool is a scalpel that will help individual agents up-level their Support Quality Assurance, all while providing the exact data that you actually want to track.

Replace your Klaus internal reviews today.