When talking about customer satisfaction, we usually think about customer support. And for a good reason, too. CSAT has been a staple customer support metric for decades. It’s simple to understand, easy to implement, and provides actionable feedback to improve operations.

But support is not the only place where it makes sense to measure satisfaction. Every year Apple launches new iPhones, and up there amongst the most prominent stats demonstrating how iPhone is the best is the CSAT.

It’s becoming more and more common to see CSAT as not only a support department metric but as a company-wide measurement of success. A metric formed and shared by many different teams. A metric transcending the boundaries of one department or functional area within the organization.

Today, I’ll try to make a case for why it’s a good idea to measure satisfaction at various points in your customer journey and why I think it’s a great idea to measure satisfaction with your sales reps. If you like the idea, I’ll then show you how to set up a simple feedback program straight from your Pipedrive.

Why measure CSAT in sales?

Prevent customer churn

A deal closed is not always an indicator of a job well done. From the top of my head, I can think of several situations where I pushed through with the sale despite my dissatisfaction. This result often being left with a sour taste in my mind. Services such as banks, telco providers, or even specialized e-shops often have little competition. This often leaves customers in a situation, where they agree to a deal, despite not being satisfied with the way they’re treated. Just think of the last time you tried to learn more about your phone bill…

Experiences such as these are a ticking time bomb. Once an opportunity to make the switch presents itself, customers often happily jump on board, leaving their previous provider perplexed about the sudden drop in sales.

Measuring customer satisfaction can help you monitor this situation and prevent the churn of dissatisfied customers. The extra information about customers’ sentiment towards the deal can help you serve them better after purchase, when it comes to renewing their contract, or approaching them about additional upsells.

Get a different point of view

On the other hand, losing a deal may not always mean your sales rep failed. Plenty of external factors can influence a sale going either way. Just think of what happened last year. Many deals went south due to the whole COVID-19 pandemic, despite sales reps trying their hardest.

Since I can already hear the nay-sayers, let me address the elephant in the room. I’m not saying sales reps should not be evaluated based on their sales performance. Quite the contrary, at the end of the day, it’s still the most important measurement of success a sales rep can have. All I’m saying is that asking for satisfaction feedback once the deal is won or lost can help shed a light on whether this was something that could’ve been addressed better or not.

Become more customer-centric

Taking a look at the satisfaction levels of your customers can also help your reps be more customer-focused. While not always the case, sales members are often incentivized to close their deals first and worry about whether customers second. Bringing CSAT into the equation can lead to more reps thinking about their customer’s needs first and a much more loyal customer base in the long run.

Improve your reps mental health

Working in sales is hard. I have a tremendous amount of respect for people who work in sales. It’s a high-stress, high-reward environment where people are pushed to perform every day towards an ambitious goal that gets reset every quarter.

Despite trying your best, sometimes you lose a deal, and there’s nothing you could’ve done about it. Having that positive feedback from a customer can go a long way towards your reps’ self-confidence and state of mind.

How to measure CSAT from Pipedrive using Nicereply

First thing first, despite the obvious reasoning why we chose Nicereply for this part (this being a Nicereply blog and all), Nicereply is also the only CSAT survey tool with a native integration built for Pipedrive.

As of now, the best way to get satisfaction feedback on closed deals is to send a CSAT email survey after a deal is marked as won or lost. Using Nicereply, you can create a satisfaction survey that fits your needs. You can then customize this survey in terms of:

• Questions asked: Choose a wording that makes sense to you and your team.
• Additional questions: Ask additional questions to get more information.
• Rating scale: choose from 3 different types of rating scales to see what works best for you and your customers:
  • 3 Emojis
  • Thumb Up or Down
  • 10 stars
• Logo: Add a logo to help your customers understand from whom the survey is.
• Colors: Match the visuals of your survey, to your brand.

With your survey ready and connected to Pipedrive, Nicereply will now automatically send a survey email to your customer once their deal in Pipedrive gets closed. It’s a set it and forget it solution. When setting the survey up, you can choose how many hours after closing the deal should the survey be sent.

You can find all the answers to your surveys in Nicereply. There you can filter through them as well as explore charts and see different trends. The answer to a survey is also sent back to your Pipedrive deal as a tag and a comment, so your sales reps can see it there as well.

You can also use Nicereply to measure Net Promoter Score and Customer Effort Score in the same way.

Improve your sales process with CSAT

With your satisfaction feedback program in place, it’s time to put that data to good use.

Plan your immediate next steps

The first order of business will be firefighting. Is there perhaps a key account that showed dissatisfaction with the way their deal, upsell, or renewal was handled? It might be a good idea to reach out to them and try to set things right.

The same goes for accounts that showed high-level satisfaction. Perhaps they’d be interested in trying out a higher-tier plan or might be interested in securing a mutually beneficial multi-year contract.

Identify and fix underlying issues

As your next step, you should look at the feedback collected for a larger time frame (a month or a quarter) and try to identify some trends or common issues. Solving these should be your next priority.

You may find that your reps are slow to respond. This could be solved in a variety of different ways:

• One solution might be education to help your reps get information to potential customers faster.
• Another solution might be staffing. Perhaps your sales force is spread too thin, and you need to hire more reinforcements.
• Yet another solution might lie in process management. Perhaps your reps spend too much time on individual messages, and creating some canned responses and template emails would help speed things up.

Your customers may not be able to tell you what do they want exactly. Henry Ford famously said that “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”. But do fear not! That’s when you come in! And even if your customers may not tell you what exactly do they want, they’re usually fairly vocal about what they do NOT want in their feedback, and that’s a great place to start getting better…

If you’d like to try out the setup for yourself, you can make a free trial of Nicereply here. You’ll find more information about our Pipedrive integration here, and a detailed manual on how to set it up here.

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