Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
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Sep 6, 2024 10:19 PM
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Sep 6, 2024
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understanding-the-limitations-of-csat-and-frt-in-customer-support
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Support metrics are useful indicators, but they can also be over-fetishized
Take the often-used CSAT and FRT as examples:
CSAT:In Klaus' most recent Customer Service Quality Benchmark Report, they found that the average CSAT response rate was:
- 19% for chat
- 5% for email or phone
That means over 80% of users do not provide feedback. How many people would advise making decisions based on what the 20 of the 80:20 of users want? Even fewer had any context to justify the rating (a grand total of 5% of interactions had a CSAT rating AND a comment). So really, you find yourself having to 'read between the emojis' to work out what someone actually thought. Even then you may be wrong - what if the answer was helpful but the user just didn't like it! (not a joke). Yet websites will proudly present their CSAT score on their site, despite it rarely representing the customer base at large. Not only that, but these scores can be easily 'gamed' by asking after positive interactions but not negative, for instance.
FRTis a slightly different case: Companies push to reduce their First Response Times to minutes or sub-minutes, but really, unless your response time is single-digit seconds, the user has probably bounced already or got distracted. You'd probably be better off taking the time to respond more fully, later, if you can't respond instantly.
We all want data to help us make decisions but be careful not to put too much weight on it when making decisions.
