Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is one of the most important metrics in customer service. Given its importance to the customer and your business, many teams make it a top initiative to improve their CSAT.

However, most customer care teams have many demands on their plate. For example, a team might aim to scale and support a new product in one quarter. This team is still expected to raise their CSAT.

As a result, we often see teams looking for quick wins or tips to raise their CSAT. To identify more specific areas they can optimize to improve their CSAT, we tapped into QA data (we’re in the business of QA…see more about what we do here) to see what agent actions were linked to high CSAT.

Here are the two areas that are most correlated with CSAT and some actionable tips to help drive your scores higher:

1. Tone and Communication Skills

Communication skill and tone related performance are tightly linked to CSAT. This is great! Tone and communication is relevant on almost every ticket. Improving here can have an impact on many tickets.

Tone and communication are especially important to avoid bad CSAT scores. Tone is a commonly cited reason for a bad CSAT score, even when the agent followed internal processes correctly.

This is a good area to focus your training. You can get a bit of improvement on all your interactions and cut down on bad survey results, even when customers are upset at your policies or limitations with your service. Nick Martin, Quality Assurance Analyst at Harry’s Razors, talks about this concept here!

2. Going Above and Beyond

This category is even more strongly linked to CSAT.

While you can’t always offer a superhero effort for your customer, there are small creative ways you can be proactive and delight your customer. For example, proactively communicating an issue to customers delights them (more on this here). When you get a chance to wow the customer, this can strengthen your relationship and drive great CSAT.

A little inside tip here: focusing on going above and beyond can also help you get more positive CSAT ratings. Many of the times you have a good but not outstanding interaction, the customer is satisfied, but doesn’t fill out the survey. Going above and beyond to help the customer builds currency with the customer. This translates into more satisfied users filling out surveys.

There is also some evidence that a single, fantastic, above and beyond effort can pay dividends down the line. Meaning, a customer may give you more positive results in the future (stay posted for future posts on this topic).

Focusing on these two areas can help you improve your CSAT. Improving your tone can cut down on bad CSAT scores, even within the limitations of your existing systems. Going above and beyond for customers will motivate satisfied customers to actually fill out their surveys. Hopefully these changes can help your team improve its scores!