Customer Satisfaction, or CSAT, is a customer experience metric measuring satisfaction with a product, service or support interaction. The metric is captured through a short simple survey to enable the customer to provide their feedback.

CSAT in Jira Service Management

Did you know that your customer feedback is collected by default within Jira Service Management Projects? This means that when an issue is resolved, the customer receives an email requesting their feedback through a simple question such as "How satisfied were you with our service?". That simple question is editable, and can be defined by your project admin.

Remember, if you're utilizing next-gen projects, site administrator access is required to edit your CSAT survey question

There's a handy Satisfaction report built into Jira Service Management, visible to project administrators and agents. This report displays average customer satisfaction scores, as well as individual scores and comments for the team. You can toggle the report anywhere from the past 48 hours, all the way up to the past year by month!

It's also possible to configure your own custom report to track satisfaction trends. For example, you may want to see satisfaction by assignee, satisfaction by service request, or even a trend graph to track satisfaction changes over time.

The Pros of CSAT

CSAT, a very popular methodology, offers a quick and easy way to entice customers to give feedback. This then provides a clear metric for you to understand customer expectations, and work to exceed them. With CSAT enabled, your customers will receive a survey every time their request is resolved. This enables you to track customer satisfaction at different stages of their journey with your team, making bottlenecks and areas for improvement clear, with very little effort on your part.

CSAT also offers a fast way to compare yourself to your peers. According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the average CSAT score across the nation is 76.5% - that's just over 3/4 of your customers reporting a satisfying experience. This figure differs by industry - you may not be too surprised to hear that, in 2019, Internet Service Providers and Subscription Television Services reported low CSAT benchmarks of 62%, while Breweries reported a much more favorable CSAT benchmark of 85%. But remember, while it is useful to be able to compare yourself to your competition, the true value from CSAT comes when you analyze and utilize feedback to drive continuous improvement and better your own customer experience.

Considerations of CSAT

While CSAT is a useful metric to track, there are a few considerations to take into account. The customer who takes the time to fill out their satisfaction is likely one who is happy with the service they received. Customers who are unhappy, or just moderately satisfied, are less likely to complete the survey, which can skew the data. CSAT has also been found to be a poor measure of loyalty - although poor CSAT scores can predict attrition, a high CSAT score has not been found to be a reliable predictor of repeat business. Cultural differences should also be taken into account - different standards and expectations will affect the score that customers are driven to pick, which, in part, can make it difficult to understand true customer satisfaction.

So, CSAT isn't a unicorn which can address all customer concerns with support. However, it does offer a valuable insight; one which should be paired with other tools to track and measure customer satisfaction. At Praecipio, we can help you make the most out of the benefits of collecting CSAT in Jira Service Management, and use those results along with other anecdotal evidence such as customer comments, number of tickets raised, cadence call discussions, and repeat business, to drive change, improve your customer offerings, and ultimately, reap the rewards!

SaaS Providers & Customer Service

The year 2020 has forced organizations to consider how they service customers and enable staff to do their work by having them reconsider the benefits and value of their current technology practices. 

Look at the fun visual below: most businesses use a combination of managing their own data centers and software or by using cloud-based facilities. Software as a Service (SaaS) allows a provider to perform a service on their technology. You pay for the provider's expertise and convenience to maintain the servers, networks, security, software, and the upgrades or changes. No more cooking as you always eat out!

SaaS providers now perform almost any main business functions: HR, Accounting, Sales, Finance, Communication, Coding, Marketing, Websites, and more. The cost benefits dazzle the eyes but consider that when you allow someone else to perform a business function that the customer still sees you.

At a restaurant, if the service is terrible, you never return to that restaurant. In the eyes of your customer – you are the restaurant! Therefore, how you interrogate the provider before deciding to use them and how you monitor and respond afterward is paramount to your business's success.

The rest of this article offers insights and tips to ensure that your relationship with a SaaS provider does not ruin the relationships with your staff and customers.

Training

• Transitioning to SaaS changes your workflow – how will you be trained, and what documentation will you receive?
• Are any other vendors impacted, which will also require training, and who pays for this?
• Your products will require integration with the SaaS provider, so how will you train them?
• How will changes to the SaaS provider service be addressed?
• Do customers require new FAQs?
• If someone has a question, do they go to an internal team, the service desk, or the SaaS provider?

Know Your User

Before you move a service to SaaS, you need to define the user of that service. Deep dive:

• What is the user of this service in terms of ability, technology, the reason to use the service, expected benefits from their view, and dislikes?
• What is the journey of that user as they use the service? Where will there be issues?
• How can the SaaS provider mitigate these issues? How will you know that problems are occurring?
• What messages can you provide the user to help them on their journey or if they get stuck? Can the message be personalized?
• What can you automate for the users, such as renewals, reminders, or upsells, or anything to make the journey more enjoyable?
• Can users form part of your test team to improve the journey's flow or provide feedback on proposed changes before go-live or to develop future releases?

IT Service Management

ITSM is the practice of allowing technology to benefit someone. It is a required business set of processes that engender better, faster, safer technology applications that deliver value. Initially the IT domain, Enterprise Service Management (ESM), is now commonplace as organizations take advantage of the cloud, SaaS, or move to digital products.

Not long ago, more technology services supported a single department, with only Finance reaching out across all areas. Now technology services are so integrated into your work that a change in one place impacts the entire organization and could disrupt your customers. ITSM processes and tools can help by:

• Logging all incidents or requests, no matter who sees them, the SaaS provider or your teams.
• Merging the incident and request data for performance reporting, improvement actions and decision-making. Daily integration is best practice.
• Helping to determine how long it takes for incidents or requests to be resolved or some sort of communication is issued to the customer? Lack of service will increase customer churn, and they might disparage you in social media.
• Creating alerts for monitored services.
• Obtaining historical information to ensure that improvements are of value.
• Enabling user support via live chat, AI chat, easy to find widgets, easy to read FAQs, and reporting on these interfaces' satisfaction.
• Acquiring your customers' level of satisfaction and does this match to the XLAs (Experiences Levels Agreement) with your provider.
• Informing support staff on offers as refunds or incentives during disruptive events or poor service.
• To know when to follow up with customers that require special care.

Metrics of SaaS

At some point, your customers will have issues that highlight your value stream or service pipeline's weaknesses. The tools that you use to monitor, alert, investigate, and respond to these issues can be improved by agreed metrics that make sense, such as the ones below:

• How fast do customers receive a response?
• What do they feel about that response?
• How fast are incidents or requests resolved?
• What is the lifetime value of a customer?
• What is the cost of servicing a customer?
• What is the cost of acquiring a customer?
• What is your customer churn?
• What is the total investment of SaaS over your customer value or cost?
• Is there a group of customers that benefit more from a SaaS provider than others allowing you to decide how best to service those customers?

Final thoughts

The economy of tomorrow will be fully customer (user) centered. SaaS, cloud, digital and ESM will enable your products and services to become more individualized. Your SaaS provider has little value to you if the user journey is full of bad service. Your goal is to leverage the provider to retain and attract customers and staff. Thinking about how this will happen, setting clear expectations, expectations, documenting service examples with metrics in the contract, testing and monitoring service delivery, and having active conversation with your SaaS provider will ensure that the customers' experiences are delightful.

If you are looking for ways to improve your customer experience through technology and digital transformation, let's chat!

SAFe 5.0 puts a greater focus on the customer, placing them at the heart of all decisions around the product or service the business delivers. Although the technical and functional aspects of a product are key, the satisfaction of the customer ultimately decides the true fate of the solution. If the customer continues to have a positive experience, your business can continue to grow and thrive! In the updated SAFe 5.0 framework, Scaled Agile elaborates on Customer Centricity, which puts the customer at the center of all business decisions that guide an organization to not only meet customer needs but exceed them as well.

What is Customer Centricity?

Customer Centricity is the mindset that the business must adopt to provide a positive experience for the customer. With every decision business leaders make, how those decisions impact the customer must be at the forefront of their minds. For this reason, the organization studies market research and user insight to ensure they truly understand the customer's pain points and develop solutions to address them. Customer-centric organizations take new approaches to solving customer problems by using empathetic design, i.e. putting themselves in the shoes of the customer. In turn, the organization can fully engage with the customer and build long-lasting relationships with them. After all, this is what we try and capture in User Stories; however, in SAFe 5.0, we're capturing this information at every level of the organization to build the right solutions.

Why is Customer Centricity important?

Customer Centricity is important because customer satisfaction is the key to developing a business and maintaining it. If your solutions and services fail your customers, your business will also fail. This new focal point also matters because it allows organizations to get direct feedback and input from the customer. Listening to their ideas and opinions allows businesses to tailor the solutions to their exact needs, which increases company profits, attracts new customers, and enhances current customer relationships.

How does Customer Centricity Affect Me/My Organization?

As an individual and as an organization, this piece of the framework may change your mindset and the entire company vision when it comes to creating solutions. When in the decision-making process, whether on your own or collectively as an organization, the outcomes that affect the customer will need to guide those decisions. As an individual working on client solutions, you may sometimes get requests that aren't necessarily best practice. Using Customer Centricity, you can consult user and market research to arrive at a solution that is best practice while also satisfying the customer.

Our Thoughts on Customer Centricity

At Praecipio Consulting, we are excited about this emphasis on Customer Centricity, as we love providing an exceptional customer experience. While working on our projects, we gather customer feedback daily to ensure we're moving projects in the right direction. With this, we're also able to revise on an iterative basis, meaning changes are made consistently throughout the project, instead of piling up and causing delays at the end of the project delivery. We also find that this approach allows us to truly be customer-centric, as we are constantly engaging with the customer and strengthening our relationship with them. Internally, we keep a close eye on the updates to SAFe so we can practice it successfully, as well as guide clients through the changes as well.

Contact us today to learn how our Digital Transformationists can help your organization scale successfully.