Client satisfaction is crucial to your small business and always has been, but with the added stress of a pandemic, it’s now become harder for all of us to keep in touch, nurture relationships, and provide support.
Despite this, in April 2020, our CSAT (Client Satisfaction) score was 99%. But how did we do this? Even without a pandemic, keeping your clients satisfied is a tough job. You want to offer timely, human, and helpful responses to everyone who reaches out, but this can sometimes seem impossible!
In this blog, we’re going to walk you through how you can keep track of your own score, how we reached 99% satisfaction with useful examples, and how to keep clients happy even in circumstances you can’t control.
How to track your score
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is calculated by dividing all the positive responses by the total number of responses and then multiplying by 100. This results in your CSAT percentage.
There are several options available for measuring your client satisfaction, like sending out surveys or integrating an automatic reply asking for a rating. Tools like Wufoo, Typeform, SurveyMonkey, and Feedier are all commonly used for gathering feedback and calculating your score. We use Hively, which allows us to manually or automatically request client feedback on our Support and Customer Success teams.
Unhappy comments are reviewed with management and discussed with the team member on a regular basis. To ensure client satisfaction is a cornerstone of our business, our client-facing teams’ Hively scores are a key performance indicator(KPI) on their monthly, quarterly, and annual scorecards. By making our client’s satisfaction a part of the job, the importance of this metric is always top of mind.
Daylite Tip: You can use Wufoo and iOSXpert’s add-on Webforms to add a web form asking for client feedback right on your website. Whenever a client fills out your form, it can be added directly to Daylite and linked to the client’s Contact card!
What we’ve learned
Over the years, we’ve learned from our mistakes and have been able to really improve the way we help our clients. Our consistently high CSAT score is no accident, but a deliberate strategy that allows us to communicate with our clients in a way that works. Below, we’re sharing our favourite tips for making an impact.
Be as human as possible
The way you write matters. You can reply with a perfectly polite response that, in writing, comes off cold. You may be overly-enthusiastic, making it appear that you’re not taking your client seriously. A good rule of thumb is asking yourself what kind of response you’d like if you were the client. We’re all clients to someone, and we’ve all had our share of bad experiences. What kind of responses make you happy, annoyed, or upset? Show empathy while not going overboard and coming off disingenuous. Offer a solution and try to make it simple and easy if you can.
Example:
Hi [Name],
Sorry you couldn’t make it to our call today! I know how crazy things have been lately, there’s just too much to do! I wanted to let you know we can reschedule for any time that’s better for you, it’s not a problem at all. I’ve included my booking link below. If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to let me know.
Minimize the back and forth
If you need more information to offer a solution, try asking all the questions you need your client to answer in your first response. You may not get them all, but collecting as many details as possible right off the bat will let you resolve things quicker.
Example:
Hi [Name],
I’m so sorry you found your portfolio breakdown confusing – thank you for letting me know! Is there anything, in particular, that wasn’t making sense? Was it the format? Did you find the definitions I included weren’t helpful?
Can you also let me know what program you used to open the breakdown? Sometimes this can affect the layout. Let me know and we can go over the details again and I can break it down in a clearer way!
Ask for the big picture
Sometimes, your client will ask you a specific question about your service or product, and while you can certainly answer it, it’s worth also finding out the big picture of what they’re trying to accomplish. Their endgame will give you insight into what kind of solutions you can offer, and they may be totally different(and better) than what the client had in mind.
Example:
Hi [Name],
Great to hear from you! I can definitely help with ways to streamline your investments. What is it about the current process that isn’t working for you? What changes were you hoping to see by the end of the year? Did you have a new financial goal in mind? Let’s discuss what you’re looking to accomplish – any details you can share will help me find you the best solution!
Read between the lines
Do your best to anticipate your clients’ needs based on what you’re talking about. Look out for details they share, the pain points they mention, or other things they’ve tried. Based on what they’re looking for, you can offer additional options you know may help and solutions they don’t even know are available yet.
Example:
Hi [Name],
Thanks for reaching out! We can certainly book a time to go over your portfolio. I noticed you mentioned wanting to make it more tax efficient. Are you just getting an early start preparing for your taxes or looking to retire soon? If you have any big changes coming up, we can go over all the options available!
Quality over quantity
While responding quickly is important and you don’t want to leave your clients waiting, focus more on the quality of the reply rather than how fast you get it out. Getting back to your client as soon as they reach out to you is no good if you didn’t actually solve their problems. Pick a reasonable amount of time for responses, for example, 24 hours, and then focus on providing a quality response or solution.
When you put all these tips together, you end up with thoughtful, deliberate responses that work in any use case! At the end of the day, no matter how great your product or service is, without clients, there’s no business. Putting in the effort to provide your clients with the support they’re looking for not only makes them loyal to your small business, but it will also turn them into advocates who create new business!
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