Get more feedback from your MSP customers

One of the many tools in the MSP arsenal is the use of CSAT – customer satisfaction – scoring / survey tools. Products like Simplesat, Smileback, Client Heartbeat and Customer Thermometer are all widely used tools in the MSP community.

But what good is a CSAT tool if customers don’t respond to surveys?

At Benchmark 365 we survey every single ticket and we work with Partners to not only get that score up (through better business processes, friendly support and rapid turnaround times 24 hours a day) but to also ensure that there are enough surveys coming i to paint a true picture of customer satisfaction.

Here’s 5 ways we’ve used that get MSPs more surveys:

1. Customer Education

Letting your customers know how valuable their feedback is and how to provide it makes a huge difference. When signing on a new customer it’s important to let them know you need feedback to understand how users feel about support and whether your team is doing an exceptional job. By showing them a sample of a customer survey and walking them through the process customers are more likely to pay attention when those surveys appear in their inbox.

But education does not stop there. Showing your customers the results and number of surveys received on a regular basis (ideally during a routine monthly or quarterly business review) can make an enormous difference.

To get more CSAT scores make sure your clients understand the importance of surveys and how you will use them to be an even better provider to them.

2. Ask and you shall receive

At Benchmark 365 we don’t just send surveys – we ask the customer if they will take a moment to fill out the survey. There’s lots of ways to do this and different ways to word your request but here are some suggestions for email:

Hi [User]

Thanks for your time today. I’ve fixed your printer issue and it looks like everything is working well.

I’ll be closing the ticket now and in a few moments you will receive an email asking for your feedback about my service to you today.

It would be great if you could take a moment to fill out this short, 1 minute survey.

John

If the technician is on the phone with the user it’s an even bigger opportunity to request a survey.

“I’m so glad your printer is working and thank you for your time today. One last thing – my manager will be sending out a short 1 minute survey to you after this call. It would be great if you could give us your feedback as it really helps me improve my service.”

Asking for surveys to be responded to is a sure way to get your response levels up. In fact we have seen a 20% uptick in survey responses just by asking at the end of a ticket or a phone call for a moment of their time.

3. Incentivising technicians

Some MSPs will incentivise technicians based on their CSAT score – usually this incentive or KPI is tied to the score and not the number of responses received. So if a technician gets three happy surveys and they have a score of 100% they have met their target. But is this fair? What if another technician has 100 surveys and a score of 80%? The more surveys received, the clearer the picture will be of your customers satisfaction.

Rather than just incentivising a technician for a high score – why not also create some healthy competition with your technicians to see who can get the most surveys?

4. Incentivising customers

Let’s face it.. Customers are busy and if there is no value to them in filling out a survey why should they bother?

This is a problem that faces every organization in the world. In fact most companies have come to accept that a survey response rate of 10% is considered pretty good. Yet, 10% isn’t really enough to truly gauge customer satisfaction. You might find that only a small subset of happy (or cranky) users fill out the surveys leaving you to guess or assume what the other 90% are feeling.

In our MSP days we tried one trick that improved the number of surveys we got back dramatically. We began to reward our clients for filling out surveys. First we started by sending a handwritten note to the users who filled out surveys. The note said:

“Earlier this month you filled out a survey for our technician. You might not remember, but we do! As a result of your feedback our team were able to meet their goals for this month and we had a celebration! Thank for your support”

That got our response rate up to 30% after which we took it a step further and began to send a small token gesture (ahem.. bribe) to the top survey respondents for the month. That gesture was an instant lottery ticket sent to the top survey respondents at each company we serviced.

We ran this campaign for 3 months, reached a 70% response rate, spending about $500 in total – a small price to pay to get an accurate picture of customer satisfaction across all of our clients.

Many of our Benchmark partners use some form of gesture to drive CSAT results. Have you tried incentivising your clients to get more surveys in?

5. Capable, fast and around the clock support

Of course you want more responses but what you really want is positive feedback from every single client right? That’s where Benchmark 365 comes in. We provide you with an entire team of dispatch, L1,2 and 3 support personnel dedicated to providing helpdesk support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Because our team is always on and always measured on customer satisfaction we are proud to be supporting MSPs all over the world and helping our Partners overcome the challenges of keeping customers happy.