What Is Your DSAT Score and How to Improve It

DSAT, the evil twin of CSAT, is another useful contact centre metric. It may not feature in the discussion as often as big hitters like CSAT, NPS, and CES, but it can be an invaluable tool for identifying CX issues and an important indicator of overall call centre performance.

While CSAT refers to the percentage of satisfied customers, DSAT looks at the darker side of things—the percentage of customers that are dissatisfied. We all know the value of learning from your mistakes, and DSAT illustrates these mistakes, giving you a platform for improvement.

What Is DSAT?

DSAT, an abbreviation of customer dissatisfaction, is a contact centre metric that refers to the percentage of customers that are dissatisfied with their experience.

Companies often focus on CSAT rather than DSAT. However, dissatisfied customers can offer a different kind of insight than happy customers, so it’s worth monitoring your DSAT score and taking steps to improve it.

Why Is DSAT Important in a Call Centre?

It’s somewhat surprising that companies don’t put more of a spotlight on DSAT scores, because we all know the damage that can come from unhappy customers.

Not only are unhappy customers more likely to churn, but they can also create further problems by speaking to family, friends, and social media about their negative experience, damaging your brand and potentially costing you sales opportunities.

With customer retention, brand image, and revenue at risk from dissatisfied customers, it can be argued that companies should focus on DSAT a lot more than they traditionally have.

Not only is DSAT an important metric in and of itself, but it’s also an important source of information around CX and overall contact centre performance.

How to Calculate Your DSAT Score

There are two methods for calculating DSAT score, both of which are quite straightforward. You can either carry out a survey and calculate the percentage of dissatisfied customers or, if you have an up-to-date CSAT score, determine your DSAT score using that existing data.

Method 1:

DSAT = # of Responses for 1 (Very Dissatisfied) + # of Responses for 2 (Dissatisfied)/Total # of Survey Response x 100

Method 2:

DSAT = 100 – CSAT

How to Improve Your DSAT Score

There are a number of actions you can take, at both agent-level and company-level, to improve your DSAT score and identify potential areas for CX improvement at the same time.

Below, we will take a look at five ways to improve your DSAT score and ensure that you are getting the most value from this underrepresented metric.

1. Agent Coaching

Agent-customer interactions are the basis of contact centre operations, so if agent performance isn’t up to scratch, customer satisfaction will inevitably suffer.

Poor product knowledge, inefficient resolution approaches, or even a lack of empathy can contribute to negative interactions, leading to dissatisfied customers.

By improving agent performance, you can improve DSAT scores and keep your customers happy. Using evaluation tools like scorecards, you can pinpoint areas for improvement and provide tailored training programs based on these areas.

This targeted approach will ensure that agents are capable of delivering the standard of service that customers have come to expect, leading to more positive agent-customer interactions and lower DSAT scores.

2. Comprehensive Onboarding

It’s important to give your agents a solid platform when they join the company. If your onboarding process is lacking, this will cause problems down the line.

Sure, you can provide agents with targeted training, as noted above, but why waste resources on resolving the issue when you could avoid the issue entirely with an effective onboarding process.

Agents who receive comprehensive onboarding are more likely to perform well within the contact centre and consistently meet customer expectations.

By developing an onboarding program that equips agents with the right tools, you can ensure happier, more engaged agents and, as a result, better DSAT scores.

In particular, it’s a good idea to signpost common customer complaints and make sure new agents are learning from the mistakes of existing agents.

3. Company-Wide Initiatives

Although customer experience is a core contributor to DSAT scores, customers may be dissatisfied with a business for reasons that go beyond CX. DSAT can offer insights into some of these other reasons.

Maybe certain company-wide policies are frustrating customers, or operational procedures are falling below the standard customers have come to expect.

Things like shipping, product design, and refund policies are beyond the scope of frontline agents, but they can be significant factors in whether or not the customer has a satisfying experience.

By understanding the wide range of issues that cause customers to become frustrated, you can prepare your agents to speak about these issues during their interactions and alleviate customer concerns.

Keeping agents in the loop and up-to-date on company-wide policies will allow you to manage customer expectations while you resolve bigger issues.

4. Regular Internal Reviews

Carrying out ongoing quality assurance within your organization will allow you to identify areas for improvement and ensure a higher standard of agent-customer interactions.

By monitoring agent performance and fine-tuning the support process, you can deliver higher-quality service, overcoming the problems that frustrate customers and damage DSAT scores.

Advanced QA tools like conversational analytics allow for in-depth analysis of agent-customer interactions, pinpointing the issues that matter most to customers so you can prioritize and plan your contact centre strategy accordingly.

If you aren’t carrying out regular internal reviews, you are limiting your team’s ability to deliver excellent service and keep customers satisfied.

5. Data-Driven Improvements

DSAT is a valuable learning tool for contact centre leaders. More than just measuring the percentage of dissatisfied customers, you can also drill down into the reasons for their dissatisfaction.

By examining the data associated with DSAT, you can develop an understanding of what went wrong for these customers and what you can do to fix it. This level of insight allows for proper root cause analysis and data-driven decisions.

It’s also important to track the impact of these decisions to ensure that they are having the desired effect. QA platforms typically contain in-depth reporting tools so you can monitor whether or not your decisions improve DSAT, or if you need to take a different approach.

Final Thoughts

DSAT may not be as glamorous as its famous sibling, CSAT, but it’s an important metric for contact centre leaders nonetheless.

Through proper analysis of DSAT scores and the associated data, you can learn from your mistakes and improve CX standards within your call centre, preventing customer churn and reputational damage.

You can use scorecards and conversational analytics to identify the issues causing high DSAT scores, implement changes accordingly, and then track the impact of these changes using customizable dashboards and in-depth reports.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Scorebuddy – View the Original Article

For more information about Scorebuddy - visit the Scorebuddy Website

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.