Why Social Messaging is the Key to an Unbeatable CSAT Score

Brands with unhappy customers don’t last long.

Your customers’ perceptions of your company affect everything from brand reputation and customer loyalty to your bottom line. If they’re happy, do more of what’s making them feel that way. And if they’re not, you’d better learn why and do something about it—fast.

That’s why measuring and reporting on customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a must. It’s a key metric you can use to spot changes and trends in your customers’ overall satisfaction with your products and services as part of tracking the overall health of your brand.

CSAT is most commonly used by customer service and support teams to gauge how well they’re doing at answering questions and resolving issues.

But as those interactions increasingly move to social media, it’s important for your marketing team to pay attention to it too.

Many brands measure customer satisfaction in its simplest form using a CSAT survey—a simple one-question survey that asks a customer to rank satisfaction with your product or service on a scale of one to 10.

While a CSAT survey gives you a snapshot of customer satisfaction at a specific moment (such as after a purchase or support call), any individual customer’s score is likely to change over the duration of their relationship with your brand.

That’s why smart brands strive for more than just a high score on a CSAT survey—they want to make an emotional connection with customers.

Customers who are emotionally engaged with an organization are more likely to recommend its product or service, more likely to buy again, and much less price-sensitive than those who are not, according to a study from Harvard Business Review.

One highly effective way to build a positive emotional connection with customers? Social messaging. By offering social care on the channels customers prefer, you’ll make it faster and easier for them to find the help and answers they need.

Let’s look at five of the top ways social messaging helps brands connect with customers to improve customer satisfaction.

1. Meet customers in convenient, personal channels

To deliver great customer experiences and improve customer satisfaction, you need to connect with customers on the platforms they are already familiar with—social media, social messaging apps, and other digital channels.

Gartner predicts that 60% of all customer service engagements will be delivered via digital channels like social messaging by 2023.

While it still makes sense to offer phone support—which many people still prefer for complex interactions, accessibility reasons, or personal preference—a growing number of people are turning to digital channels for the speed and convenience they offer.

Social and messaging apps let people skip the dreaded phone tree (“for customer support, press 12!”) and hold music (“greatest soft-rock hits of the ‘70s and ‘80s!”) to get the information they need quickly so they can get on with their day. In most people’s books, that’s a great customer experience.

To make a smooth transition from phone to social and messaging you can offer your customers a way out of the hold queue and enhance their experience with conversational interactive voice response (IVR) or ‘call deflection’. It gives them the option to switch from phone service to messaging service.

2. Serve customers on their own terms

Ask someone who just spent their lunch hour on hold waiting for service if they’re satisfied with the experience, and you’re likely to get an earful.

With social messaging, there’s no need to confine your customers to a 9-to-5 service window or subject them to lengthy wait times. They can message you on their own time—while they take a Zoom call, wait for the train, walk their dog, or take an, ahem, extended reading break.

By enabling customer service via messaging, you’ll save customers from feeling like they’re wasting their valuable time, because they can multitask and pick up the conversation when it suits them. Social messaging puts customers back in control—where they should be—and helps boost satisfaction.

WhatsApp has become a very popular channel for customer service via messaging.

AXA, the first insurance company and roadside assistance provider in Belgium to use WhatsApp for customer service, now boasts a customer satisfaction score of 4.5 out of 5 for customers served on the channel.

3. Don’t make customers repeat themselves

In a recent study, one-third of respondents said the thing they find most irritating in a customer service engagement is the need to repeat themselves to multiple support representatives.

Data should follow your customer wherever they go to spare them from this frustrating repetition. Whether they’re communicating with a sales representative by email, engaging with a social media manager on Twitter, or connecting with a customer care agent via WhatsApp, customers only see one brand.

To deliver effective omnichannel care, it’s vital that you capture key data at every customer touchpoint and equip each representative with the information they need to communicate effectively.

By integrating customer data into your messaging platform, you can smooth out a bumpy experience and deliver great customer service—no repetition required.

4. Deliver personal customer service

One of the best opportunities that social messaging provides brands is the ability to integrate customer data into the messaging platform to get personal with customers—even at scale.

By integrating your social media and messaging data with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, you can create a better experience for your customers and a smoother workflow for your teams.

And by adding automation to your engagement and customer service workflows in the form of messaging bots to handle the most repetitive questions from customers, you can handle repetitive inquiries faster than ever while still delivering personalization at scale.

Customers will appreciate the efficiency and speed of response. Nearly 80% of consumers say speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service are the most important elements of a positive customer experience, according to PWC.

5. Solve customer issues faster

Messaging provides an opportunity to resolve problems quicker—a win-win for customers and for busy service agents.

Messaging apps support rich media content like interactive voice, video, and images, making it faster and easier for service agents to both gather and deliver the data they need to troubleshoot and resolve problems faster.

This helps improve important customer care key performance indicators (KPIs) like first contact resolution (FCR), average handle time (AHT), and—crucially—customer satisfaction (CSAT).

The best way to build an emotional connection with customers is to meet them on their own terms and engage with them on the same channels they use to connect with their family and friends—social messaging.

Request a demo of Sparkcentral by Hootsuite to see how you can deliver an exceptional customer service experience on every digital channel.

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