Tips for improving your customer satisfaction ratings

Customer satisfaction rating (CSAT) is a critical measure of the work your support team does. It's a good way to measure the general health and quality of your team's interactions with your customers.

Dips in CSAT can be attributed to many factors. For example, maybe you've had a surge in tickets and you're struggling to meet demand, maybe a product launch didn't go as planned, or maybe you just need to do a bit of soft-skills training with a team member. But which is it?

Here are a few tips we use at Zendesk to figure out what's not working out when CSAT takes a dip:

• Follow up on your tickets rated 'Bad': Always ask what you could do better. Almost 50% of bad ratings leave some form of open feedback. Read it, follow up, turn it around. If you're only going to pay attention to one of these tips, make it this one.
  
  
• Notify managers when bad CSATs come in: You can set up a trigger to notify a manager or group of managers when a ticket receives a bad rating. Use the following two trigger conditions:
  
  • Ticket: Satisfaction > Changed to > Bad
  • Ticket: Satisfaction > Changed to > Bad with comment
    
    
• View your score and ratings in the Customer Satisfaction dashboard: This dashboard enables you to view your overall customer satisfaction score, individual ratings, comments, and satisfaction reasons (if enabled).
  You can also export your customer satisfaction ratings data for further analysis. If you're using Zendesk Explore, you'll find customer satisfaction reports on the Satisfaction tab of the Zendesk Support dashboard (see Overview of the Zendesk Support dashboard).
  
  
• Give your agents more information about your customers: Tickets with more interactions (or touches) often have a lower CSAT rating. Making more customer information available to your support teams with CRM integrations or custom user and organization fields can help your team know more about customers up front. If you can eliminate initial questions on tickets, that leads to faster resolution times and more one-touch ticket solves.
  
  
• Compare ticket stats on bad tickets to those rated good: Did your agent provide inaccurate information or were they fantastic but there an issue with resolution time? Look at the ticket holistically. At Zendesk, we regularly go through all our bad-rated tickets and categorize them based on the reasons why it seems the ticket was rated the way it was. If it's purely about ticket handling, resolution time, or workflow issues, then those are some great projects to work on going forward.

Tip: To help you access, search, and analyze Customer Satisfaction survey results in real-time, see the built by Zendesk Satisfaction Console app.