Customers are the lifeline of any business. If your customers are happy, they will give continuous revenue for your business. But if your customers are unhappy, it will be hard for your business to survive. So Customer Satisfaction is vital for your business to survive and run successfully.

Customer Satisfaction is not only the outcome of a good product but also the level of support and service you provide to your customers. Researches show that 90% of Americans consider Customer Service a deciding factor in doing business with a company. 71% of the customers believe that a quick response from the customer service agents improves their experience drastically.

Let’s suppose you make every effort and investment to provide the best service to your customers. You create a well-developed customer care system, understand how to find employees, hire staff, make a team of customer service representatives, and train them to give a world-class service. But how do you know that your customer service agents are doing their job perfectly and your customers are satisfied with the service? The only way is to collect Customer Feedback.

Customer Feedback gives you valuable information about what your customers think and feel about the experience they get from your organization. Gathering feedback helps you to know whether your customers are satisfied with the service provided or not. Let’s learn why Customer Feedback about Customer Service agents is necessary to collect.

Why is Customer Feedback of Customer Service Agents Important?

Do your customer service agents respond on time? Are they welcoming and friendly with your customers? Are they doing their job the right way and providing the support your customers need? Are they able to improve Customer Experience? Feedback about the customer service agents provides the answer to all these questions.

To know more about the importance of collecting feedback about Customer Service Agents, let’s explore some of its advantages.

Let’s review how these benefits of Customer Feedback help you perform well in your business.

1. It helps to measure Customer Satisfaction

The biggest advantage of collecting Customer Feedback is that it is the key to measure Customer Satisfaction. When you collect feedback, you get to know whether and how much your customers are satisfied with the service your agents are providing them.

2. It helps to track the performance of the service agents

30% of customers consider communicating with a knowledgeable and friendly customer service agent the most crucial customer service aspect. Feedback about the Customer Service Agents helps you know how well they are doing their work. It enables you to see whether they can provide the needed support to the customers or not.

Customer Feedback helps you ensure that your agents respond to customers’ requests and concerns on time and do their best to satisfy them. It helps you track improvement in your agents' performances and know which agents need more training.

3. It helps to retain customers and prevent churn

Dissatisfied customers ultimately churn after a few instances. If the customers are unhappy with your services, Customer Feedback is the way to know about this. When you get to know about this dissatisfaction, you put in efforts to increase Customer Satisfaction and improve the experience.

When you put in your best efforts, take required actions on the negative feedback and inform the customers what you are doing for them, it changes their perception to a large extent. This helps to retain the customers and prevent churn. Studies suggest that increasing customer retention by 5% can increase your profits by 25% to 95%.

4. It helps to improve your products and services

Customer Feedback acts as a guideline to improve your products and services. It helps you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your products and services, which further helps empower the strengths and overcome the shortcomings and thus improve your products and services.

5. It helps in developing effective processes

Studies suggest that 83% of customers feel more loyal to those brands that respond to and resolve their issues. So the processes of Customer Service and support are vital to be effective.

Customer Feedback helps you identify the loopholes in these processes and work on them to develop a smooth process for the customers to raise requests and concerns and get support for them.

How to Collect and Use Actionable Customer Feedback for Service Agents

When you have learned about the advantages of collecting Customer Feedback about Customer Service Agents, the question arises as to how to collect feedback and use it most effectively so that proper actions can be taken on time and your business gets the maximum benefit of it. Let’s explore how to do it.

Let’s learn how to collect and use feedback for the benefit of your business.

To collect and use Customer Feedback, the first task is to ask your customers for feedback. The best way to ask customers for feedback is to create and send them Customer Feedback Surveys. You can use Customer Feedback Software for this purpose. A good Customer Feedback App and software allows you to create and send multiple types of surveys.

You can also use metric surveys, which are very effective in measuring Customer Satisfaction, loyalty, and the perceived efforts of the customers to get their work done. The popular metric surveys are:

a. NPS

NPS or Net Promoter Score is a popular metric that is used to measure Customer Loyalty in terms of the likeliness of the customers to refer a brand to their known ones. A simple question is asked to the customers.

“How likely are you to recommend us to your friends and colleagues?”

Here, a metric scale of 0 to 10 is provided to the customers to select a rating score where 10 means ‘Most Likely’ and 0 means ‘Not at all Likely’. As per the NPS Survey results, the respondents are divided into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors.

• Promoters
  are those who rate 9 and 10. They are considered the most satisfied and thus loyal customers and are most likely to recommend the brand to their known ones.
• Passives are those that provide a rating of 7 or 8. They are usually satisfied customers but tend to try and switch to other brands as and when they get a better deal.
• Detractors are those who rate between 0 to 6. They are considered dissatisfied customers and are most likely to switch to another brand and even share their bad experiences with their known ones, thus spreading bad word of mouth about the brand.

Net Promoter Score is measured by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from that of Promoters. It can lie anywhere between -100 to 100. A positive NPS is generally considered good and a negative NPS as bad.

b. CSAT Score

CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Score measures the level of Customer Satisfaction derived by the customers with their experience with your products, services, and the organization. The interaction with your Customer Service Agents primarily affects the level of Customer Satisfaction and experience. So it is helpful to measure CSAT to know how happy your customers are with your Customer Service Agents. A simple question is asked to the customers:

“How satisfied are you with our products and services?”

Five rating options are provided to the customers in different forms like self-explanatory smileys, star ratings, or adjectives like Excellent, Good, Average, Bad, and Poor.

The final score is calculated by finding the average score, which is done by dividing the total score by the number of respondents.

c. CES

CES or Customer Effort Score is a customer service metric that measures customers’ perceived efforts to get a job done or an issue resolved. This metric directly measures how well your Customer Service Agents work to help your customers and make their lives easier.

In a CES Survey, a simple question is asked to the customers:

“To what extent do you agree with the following statement: The Company made it easy for me to handle my issues.”

A seven rating scale is provided to the customers with the options as Strongly Disagree, Somewhat Disagree, Neither Agree Nor Disagree, Somewhat Agree, and Strongly Agree. 

Results from 1-3 are considered negative, whereas responses from 5-7 are considered positive.

With effective Survey Software, you can also create and modify other types of surveys as per your industry and requirements like Customer Feedback Surveys, Patient Feedback Surveys, Student Feedback Surveys, Employee Feedback Surveys, Guest Feedback surveys, etc. You can send these surveys through multiple channels like email, SMS, website, QR codes, Android tablets, and smartphones.

2. Create tickets for issues

You can also choose to create Zendesk issues with the feedback provided by the customers. Suppose a customer provides negative feedback that involves a concern with the products and services. With the integration of survey software with software like Zendesk, Helpscout, and Freshdesk, you can choose issues and tickets to be created automatically with negative feedback raising the concern.

This will help you to use Customer Feedback effectively to take the appropriate actions required to improve customers' experience at the right time and Close the Feedback Loop.

3. Send Automated Customer Feedback Surveys

For getting information about the exact Customer Experience with your Customer Service Agents and the support process, you can use automation to send the feedback surveys at the right time. You can trigger surveys along with the ticket raised for the customers’ issues.

You can trigger surveys at events like raising a ticket, updating a ticket, and most appropriately closing a ticket to know the Customer Experience of getting an issue resolved.

4. Send Embedded surveys in Service Communication Emails

While providing support and services to the clients, there are many instances where email communication is carried out. In such cases, you can add embedded surveys in the body of the service communication emails. Email surveys are more likely to be responded to as they reach the customers as a part of the regular communication emails.

It is very simple to embed a Customer Feedback Survey in an email. You just need to copy the HTML code of the survey from your survey application and paste it into Zendesk’s email. It will pick the survey and display it embedded in the email body itself. These surveys are very beneficial to gauge the Customer Experience with the service agents at each touchpoint. They let you timely know if there is any concern between the process so you can take action at the right time before things worsen.

5. Share Survey Results with Customer Service Agents

When you have sent the feedback survey, and the customers have responded to it, the next step is to take action on the feedback received. 52% of the global customers feel that companies need to take Customer Feedback seriously and act on it. Did you know that 77% of the companies do not have well-developed systems for responding to feedback? And it’s not at all a wise decision to be one of them, right!

So you should develop an efficient process of responding to Customer Feedback, taking actions, and Closing the Feedback Loop effectively. You must train your service agents to take action on Customer Feedback and improve the experience. For this, it is essential to share the customers’ feedback with your agent, so they know how they perform and where their performance dissatisfied the customers.

You should use the sharing option for this purpose, especially if your feedback-gathering team and customer service agents are different. This feature gives you options to share the rating score given by the customers and their comments. You can choose to share either of them or both of them with the agents so that they know where things go wrong, what action they should take, and how they can avoid issues in the future.

This will help in improving both, your agents’ performances well as Customer Experience.

Conclusion

Customer Service Agents are the face of your company. It is evident to keep a watch on their performance and the way they deal with your customers. Customer Feedback is the best source of this information, and it is crucial to collect feedback about your service agents.

Zonka Feedback is a comprehensive Customer Feedback Software that you can use to create and send surveys to gather feedback from your customers about the services they get from your agents. With Zonka Feedback, you can create any type of survey and send them through multiple channels and ways.