Imagine walking into the office tomorrow and your CEO is waiting for you in your office.
"We just lost an account. No warning. No signals. Just gone. How did we not see this coming?"
You have nothing. You check with the account manager and they are just as blindsided by the news as you are. You go into the system and the customer has never complained or sent any bad feedback. There are no signs to be found that the customer was ready to churn. So how were you to prevent it? If you're only running transactional CSAT surveys when customers open a ticket the answer is, you can't.
This is exactly what happened to Leif Cederblom, Director of CX at Effortless Office. Leif reached out to CustomerGauge on the second Friday of December 2020.
"Guys, I know we've been talking for months, but I just lost a customer. I have the green light to get our NPS® program rolling and I want to unveil the results from our first survey at our VR holiday party next week."
You heard that right. they wanted to onboard CustomerGauge, send our their first relational survey and get the results posted all in less than a week!
Short story short, the deadline was achieved and they got their program launched in 4 days and got their first-ever NPS score of 44.
Effortless Office was running transactional surveys with CSAT. But the problem was, customers were rating the service agent's ability to fix the problem, not the companies performance as a whole. So what was happening was the service agent was able to fix the problem, which led to a positive score, but the same problem would occur over and over, leading to frustration with the company. Effortless Office had a respectable CSAT of 98.4, but it wasn't telling the right story to management. After only four months and two relational surveys, they are already seeing huge results.
When they moved to sending relational NPS surveys, the respondents were no longer rating a single transaction with customer service–they were rating the overall experience with the company. The switch from opinion (we think our customers are happy) to data (we know which customers need attention) completely changed the way Effortless Office was able to prioritize their efforts.
So the big takeaway here is don't rely on transactional CSAT scores to tell the story of your customer's experience with your brand. You can't even rely solely on word of mouth from your account managers, because they don't always know the full story.
