To make your customer service better, you first need to know what needs improving. Customer feedback is your go-to source of knowledge in this case. It’s the gas that will keep your customer service machine rolling in the right direction.
However, what if you don’t get enough gas? If your customers don’t tell you what’s wrong or right about your service, you can’t really make informed decisions. Once that happens, you are forced to guess and gamble while your customers’ satisfaction is on the line.
See how The Chat Shop, one of LiveChat’s Experts, tackled the problem of getting very few chats rated and tripled the feedback they were getting by introducing one additional message to their communication with customers.
Why customers don’t provide feedback
One of the biggest reasons why customers don’t leave any additional information after a chat is because they simply don’t know they can. In LiveChat, you can leave your opinion in two ways: either by giving the agent a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ during the chat or by providing some additional comments in a survey after a chat.
For The Chat Shop, the chat ratings are an important indication of the quality of service their agents provide. “Our agents love the LiveChat scoreboard as a way of checking who’s delivering the service we promise,” said Jonny Everett, Director of Customer Development at The Chat Shop.
Top rated agents scoreboard.
The Chat Shop used both methods to gather customer feedback. However, they noticed that their post-chat survey was generating more data than the in-chat ratings:
We had post-chat surveys in place which we noticed had much higher completion rates than the in-chat ratings and wondered if customers simply didn’t register to ‘place their vote’ before the conversation ended.
On top of that, the customers served by The Chat Shop seemed to use the rating buttons mostly when the wanted to leave negative feedback, which skewed the already scarce results:
Customers would also often seek out the thumbs down if they were particularly annoyed, but positive customers wouldn’t always take the time to cast their vote.
Although many users were satisfied with the received service, The Chat Shop team was getting feedback from the small minority of the unsatisfied users. If they were to act based on those few negative opinions, they could risk ruining the experience for the silent majority of the satisfied users.
Getting a detailed look on feedback
The Chat Shop needed to find a way to get a clearer look at the big picture – a method that would show more accurate distribution of the good and bad ratings. One way to do that is to inform the users about the rating option and encourage them to use it:
Amy, our Team Manager, wanted to find a way to increase the in-chat ratings usage so it could give her and the team more insight into the service we were delivering so she decided to flag the rating option to customers so that there were a larger volume of responses allowing the agents and our management team to have another tool to monitor satisfaction.
The Chat Shop agents started sending a small message at the end of each chat that encourages visitors to rate their experience. Two such messages were tested. Jonny stated that both were suggested by The Chat Shop’s agents – Rhys and Jess B – who are “at the sharp end of the service,” which makes their feedback on the matter vital.
Here’s what the messages look like:
“Been a pleasure chatting with you today. If you need anything else, feel free to start a new chat. Please consider clicking the ‘thumbs up’ at the top of the chat if you were happy with the support provided.”
“Thank you for chatting with us today. If you were happy with the support provided, please consider clicking the ‘thumbs up’ at the top of the chat! If there’s anything else we can help with, please feel free to start a new chat.”
Results: three times more ratings
The introduction of these closing messages led to great results. Visitors are now more aware of the rating function and The Chat Shop gets a lot of additional data.
Before the change, they got only 5.5 percent of their chats rated. After introducing the closing messages, they saw a jump to 17 percent of chats rated. This means that their customers left three times more ratings. “That’s a lot of additional valuable data, especially when you consider how well the LiveChat system integrates the in-chat rating vs. say a post-chat survey response which is more cumbersome to analyse by agent and transcript,” said Jonny. “Shout out to Amy, Jess B and Rhys from our team for this awesome idea,” Jonny added.
Change made mid February yielded great results.
Having this much additional data to play with makes both the agents and managers more aware of the service quality and allows them to make more informed decisions on how to improve it.
Any company using live chat can utilize this method to get more chats rated. Simply start asking visitors to rate their experience at the end of each chat. You can test several messages to see which yield the best results. By adding a canned response with a rating request, your agents will be able to send it with just a couple of keystrokes.
Companies often spend thousands of dollars on complex market research to learn what their customers think. With this simple change, you will get that extra feedback at the cost of one additional message sent at the end of a your chats.
Jonny Everett, Director of Customer Development at The Chat Shop
For the last 3 years, Jonny has developed clients’ businesses by helping companies better communicate with their customers, allowing Real People to have Real Conversations. With a firm belief that brands must put service first, Jonny has worked with a range of clients improving their customer service and lead generation. You can get in touch with Jonny via Twitter or email: hello@thechatshop.com.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Reid via Creative Commons.