CSAT, CES, NPS and Other VoC Metrics Compared

Tracking the Voice of your Customer (VoC) has become the norm for most large brands today. Post-interaction surveys across multiple channels now provide a plethora of valuable customer insight, available in real time. But, what methodologies are most commonly used and how do they differ? And what other factors do we need to take into account when implementing a VoC programme?

Here, we take a look at the most common methodologies, with some further thoughts and best practice tips:

CSAT: Customer Satisfaction Score

Example Question: How satisfied were you with the service you received today? [1-5]

This widely used ‘traditional’ method for gathering customer feedback is focused on an average customer rating, usually from 1-5, where the scale is from very dissatisfied (1) to very satisfied (5). It is very easy to monitor, benchmark and compare an average score over a period and across channel.

CES: Customer Effort Score

Example Question: How easy was it to do business with our organisation today? [1-5]

This question is all about understanding how much effort a customer has to ‘put forth’ to resolve an issue. Our example question is flipped to ‘ease’ so it can work on the same 1-5 scale, from negative to positive. Research by the CEB shows that service organisations create loyalty by reducing customer effort.

NPS®: Net Promoter Score

Example Question: How likely would you be to recommend [company name] to a friend or colleague? [0-10]

NPS calculates the percentage of your customers who are promoters, passives or detractors. Where CSAT is considered a good gauge of short-term satisfaction, NPS focuses on measuring longer-term happiness and customer loyalty. NPS is claimed to be a better predictor of customer behaviour and is strongly linked with company growth.

Tracking Agent Performance

Example Question: How helpful / knowledgeable was the agent who handled your enquiry? [1-5]

Agent performance only comes to life once you are able to track surveys, across voice, email, chat and social media channels by individual agent. You can then create a live agent league table to engage and motivate your customer service team. Reports can help reward top performers, whilst also identifying training requirements.

Free Text Comments

Example Question: Please leave any further comments to help us improve our service…

Harnessing verbatim comments is vital to any VoC programme. Structured questions and answers are important for benchmarking performance. But, capturing free text comments often highlights issues you may not have foreseen. Best practice is now to stream these comments live and populate a word cloud to help identify issues quickly.

Capturing Social VoC

Wholly unscripted content from the public domain!

We now work in an age where our customers have an open forum to rant and rave about our brand in the public domain, across channels like Twitter and Facebook. We must monitor these comments in real time to protect brand reputation, proactively responding to our customers and resolving their issues as quickly as possible.

In summary, what we need to keep in mind is that all of these metrics are important and can provide valuable customer insight. Our view is that organisations should not be scared to experiment with a range of different methods to gather customer feedback. Talk to us about how we can help you tailor a CSAT solution, across multiple channels, to gather the most powerful VoC insight.