The real secret to a sustainable CSATScore

Tips on achieving a sustainable CSAT score

How to achieve a sustainable CSAT Score

Too many businesses fail to see the link between employee engagement and customer experience and wonder why they can’t achieve a sustainable CSAT score.

Every company today is preaching customer experience initiatives, thought leadership, innovation, culture focus, and yet most of them don’t even know where to start.

It’s one thing to hire a marketing agency and rebrand your business so that it fits into the industry puzzle with all the buzzwords and key messaging, but in most cases, businesses are selling a culture that doesn’t exist.

They are selling you an illusion.

They think they’re investing in their people because they bring in consultants who don’t take the time to understand the business, run through their agenda and present your employees with a thick booklet of pointless garbage which goes into the drawer and never gets used again.

The real secret to sustainable CSAT score

The single most damaging and common mistake is the wrong people being placed into key positions.

This does irreversible damage to everything about the business the initial investment was originally made to protect.

Companies need to invest more time in preparing the right people for key roles.

A profound statement I once heard went something like…” look after your people, so you don’t have to look after your people.”

Customer experience and employee engagement go hand in hand.

In actuality, it’s your employees who are usually the largest customer-facing component of your business and if they’re not happy and inspired, it’s hard to see how they could possibly excite or inspire your customers.

It may not be in a face to face capacity but omnichannel interaction is common across all customer-facing operations these days.

See related case study:- https://hbr.org/2015/12/proof-that-positive-work-cultures-are-more-productive

Employees first, customers second – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCdu67s_C5E

Invest in leadership, knock down the corporate wall. Get to know your people, get a feeling for the pulse on ‘the floor’, because I’m here to tell you that failure to do so means that you don’t understand your people, and you don’t understand your business.

To provide an extraordinary customer experience you need to care about your customers, you need to understand that you are servicing them and whatever product or service you provide is simply the vehicle to the outcome which is helping people by providing solutions to their problems.

What most businesses are doing wrong

Most businesses in this day and age preach about how they provide ‘quality service & dependability’.

This to me is negligible.

It means nothing.

My next question is usually, “so what are you telling me ?

When purchasing any product or service of any kind, there is a base expectation of quality service & dependability.

I don’t consider this as a value add, its implied.

You need to earn your customers loyalty and demonstrate why they should go with you.

The truth is that most customers don’t care about your carbon footprint, or whether you make payroll, or what goodwill initiatives you are pursuing.

They don’t even want to be intruded upon.

The only reason they deal with you, or they let you deal with them, is because to some extent or another they see a self-serving outcome in it for themselves.

The greater your business is at communicating, demonstrating, illustrating how you render that advantage better than anyone else, the higher your chance of winning their business.

How to meet customers expectations today

Meeting customer expectations means shifting from being customer-focused to customer committed.

This deliberate transformation requires a fundamental change in how companies think, act & collaborate.

From initiating action to embracing change.

From leading the creation of governance to ensuring the right intelligence exists and making informed decisions, as customer service professionals we need to figure out how to meet the new demands.

Customer experience has been affected by the omnichannel base.

Analytics & client intelligence teams have learnt how to create a holistic view of the overall customer experience.

Upon this digital disruption discovery, client-centric organisations know what the customer is thinking.

Businesses are today moving away from information delivery and toward enterprise accessibility.

Companies have long emphasised touchpoints – the many critical moments when customers interact with the organisation and its offerings on their way to purchase.

The narrow focus on maximising satisfaction at those moments can create a distorted picture suggesting that customers are happier with the service than they actually are.

The bottom line is that when customers interact with your organisation, they are interacting with your employees, your people, the heartbeat of your business.

Forget about preaching whatever is trendy in today’s market and focus on working with your people because the truth is that any manager is only as good as the team that reports to them.

If you want to look after your customer’s and provide the best possible customer experience, then first look after your people.

If you do that, then trust me when I say it’s your people, who will look after your customers.

Recommended further reading: 20 Great tips for conducting customer surveys

Find a list of suppliers that can help you achieve a sustainable CSAT score including consultants, technology suppliers, Voice of the Customer programs and more in the free CX Directory >>>

About Nick Di Fuccia 1 Article

Currently the Head Of Delivery at Excite IT, Nick brings over 10 years experience managing high volume Enterprise Contact Centres, having started his career ground up on the phones.


He has a proven track record in the areas of People Leadership, Operational Delivery, Process transformation and last but not least, Client relationship management.

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