More Transactional CSAT

Continued from Part-1 Transactional customer satisfaction surveys are certainly a valuable tool. They provide several benefits for a company looking for an objective means of collecting data in order to formulate their business decisions. They: Help spot specific problems that occurred with a dissatisfied customer.

Identify the employees that provided great or flawed service. Help companies make more immediate business decisions. Transactional customer surveys provide a considerable amount of useful data that the company is able to analyze in its business decisions.

However, the usefulness of the data correlates considerably with how you understand the data. Transactional data is very easy to misinterpret. Here are a few brief examples: Small Sample Sizes On an employee level, transactional customer satisfaction surveys can tell you when some employees are going above and beyond the call of duty or creating a poor customer service environment.

However, it’s important to remember that sample sizes are still important. If you only receive 5 respondents about a particular employee, and 3 of them are negative, that may be a bad sign but it may not be reflective of the employee’s actual ability. It may simply be a small sample.

Polarized Results Depending on how you motivate customers to take your survey, you may only receive two types of respondents: Those that had an excellent customer experience and those that had a terrible customer experience. Those that had a “fine” or even “above average” experience may not be motivated to take time out of their day to fill out the survey without the right motivation, and you may be losing an important part of your data. Inconclusive Results You receive a survey from a respondent that complained about a terrible customer service experience.

During that day they saw 10 different employees. That will leave a lot of questions – which employee really gave bad customer service and which simply was seen negatively because the customer was already upset? Who is truly to blame and who is innocent? Depending on the method you use to collect your data, the results you receive may not accurately reflect very specific aspects of the transaction.

These represent some of the potential problems that may come up with a transactional survey. Yet it should be noted that it is not a problem with the survey itself – the survey itself is extremely valuable. In reality, it is a problem with human error.

You will need to make sure your surveys are collecting the right data, and that you are interpreting the results correctly.

Transactional surveys have a lot of value to companies. They can provide more data than overall customer satisfaction surveys and may be used to make better immediate business decisions, save customer relationships, and more. They do have their flaws, but these flaws are almost always introduced by the company, rather than the survey itself. Running these surveys is a useful way to find data to make business decisions, but always make sure that you have experts on staff that understand how to use the data correctly.