There was a survey from Help Scout recently, which took the data from over 500 companies, in a multitude of different industries, to judge the strength of their Customer Success team.

80% of those companies rated their own customer service as ‘superior’.

And yet, only 8% of their customers agreed. That’s a staggering difference.

So what’s the cause of it?

Why do companies view their Customer Success teams as so beneficial, whilst the customer thinks otherwise?

What can you do to abate these statistics?

And what are WKND doing to avoid falling foul of the issue?

The first thing to realise about Customer Success is the vast difference in the perspective of a successful resolution that your customer holds, versus that of your own.

When your customer presents your business with an issue, the person responding might be as equipped as anyone can wish.

Swiftly and competently finding the root cause, explaining it to your customer, and sending it for the next step to reach a solution.

Reasonably, you consider the conversation successful. Your customer, however, disagrees. And if you work in the igaming industry, you might find this gap even wider than elsewhere.

We deal with people in a generally high stakes environment.

Energy is already buzzing from the excitement of the game, the tension of its outcome, the joy of the win, and the doubts of its realness until it’s safely in their hands.

And, seemingly holding the key to your customers bank account, the resolution you give in your Customer Success team needs to be perceived as instant.

Service holds a much higher weighting in our industry.

So, what to do?

Well, if you're one of the people who reasonably deem a conversation successful based on quick root cause analysis, explanation and escalation, you might already be in trouble.

Without emphasis on Emotion Management, you won’t get far. As the story goes, it’s not always what you say, but how you say it.

1.First impressions: Establish connection.

To get people to listen and engage, it’s helpful if they like you.

If your company’s already rated top tier for customer care, congratulations, you might have a free ride here.

If not, that auto greeter you’re serving is never going to measure up to first using their name, and second making a specific reference to their personal profile.

2.Stability: Be available

Answer fast, answer every question, answer everywhere.

Boasting email and live chat is old news. If you’re not there to catch them on their personal favourites, be it Discord, Twitter, Whatsapp or Tiktok, you’re not truly available.

3.Authority: Take responsibility

The 3rd party vendor might be the ones who are dragging the case, but the customer won’t care. And trust me, trying to further convince them you can’t help will only make you look… well, unhelpful.

Take ownership and convince them you’re the expert on their case. They’re in good hands and you’ll see this through together.

4.Influence: Positive framing

Take your team on a challenge, and try a day to avoid “unfortunately”, “I’m afraid not” and all their siblings.

If it’s something you “can’t” do, is there something else you “can” do?

Can you present an alternative?

Negatively framing your message only tends to cement that what you’re saying is in fact a less favourable option.

5.Empathy: Step into their shoes

Your customer ultimately wants to feel seen, heard and cared for.

If you really can’t do what they want, a friendly, empathetic and personal reply will soften the blow in a way sending them a link to your FAQ can’t.

Over 80% of consumers will read online reviews before interacting with your brand.

Performing in a lower tier will actively deter users.

Staying in the mid performing tier might allow you to pass by incognito.

Positioning yourself in the higher tier will actively drive customers to you.

Eventually, you’ll need to make a decision on how important your Customer Success delivery is to you, in reference to your other marketing activities and competitive position.

To deliver above expectations you need to make investments in your people and software.

A cheap tip for you if you set out to invest in your customer experience team, is to be mindful of the data you interpret.

Most customers are sent a review once their interaction with a CS agent has ended. Typically, there’s a rating from 1-10 on those forms with questions set out to rate the effectiveness of their interaction.

Questions like “How satisfied are you with the result of today’s interaction?” Or “would you recommend us based on today’s interaction?”

Simply casting your eye over data like this and presenting a score based on those results won’t give you any detail to improve your service.

As an experiment at WKND, we’ve just finished trialling a simple change in the questions the player receives at the end of a CS chat.

Where the questions were once:

1. Was it the first time you contacted us about this case?

2. Was this case resolved during the chat?

3. How would you rate this chat

They’re now:

1. Was it the first time you contacted us about this case?

2. Were you happy with the agent who assisted you?

3. How would you rate this chat?

After a month of trialling this on a market that was previously below average, we saw a huge increase in customer satisfaction and above average responses in surveys.

Even if we’re not always able to provide a first time resolution, we can still assure a happy customer based on how we framed the alternative solution to them.

And a reminder of this in the second question, had a positive knock off effect on how they perceived the rating of the overall chat.

The last thing you want is to not resolve a customer’s problem. But a really good team knows this is a reality we also need to deal with.

Knowing which questions to ask, and pairing them with the passion and desire of your team to deliver a good experience, is critical.

Else, you could spend a lot of time with your agents working on things they don’t need help with, and miss out on the things they do.

WKND works towards a ‘one call help mindset’.

This means we try everything in our power to offer a resolution with only one person, and preferable, one interaction.

That, for me, is the definition of a well run Customer Success team, but also calls for highly able people and broad skills of each individual team member.

Don’t sleep on the importance of quality people over quantity numbers in your hiring process. They’ll quite literally be the face of your business.

The customer shouldn’t be passed on or face multiple attempts for one issue to be resolved because of limiting knowledge to individual team members.

Even if you ultimately reach a solution they’re happy with, having made a customer note down people’s names and case numbers while getting there, will see people leave with a bad taste in their mouth.

Brushing off your customer to complete tasks on their own won’t make your department a success. Yes, it can be more time consuming to do these tasks yourself, but my opinion is, even if the chat takes 15 minutes, it’s a better strategy to help them there and then.

However, and this can not be stressed enough, always take a proactive lead to make the customer journey as easy and seamless as possible next time.

How can they see the information?

How do they load a document next time?

What other question usually comes up later in this process that could be solved now?

These small steps may prevent the customer from needing to contact you in the future, which would help both them and you.

In fact, a study by Nuance Enterprise found that 67% of players will prefer to solve their own issue if they can.

Those occasions are a rare win/win.

You don’t want to lose new customers.

You don’t want closed accounts, or poor word of mouth to be passed amongst consumers.

Whether it’s positive or negative, the way you handle their issue will have repercussions above and beyond the outcome of one interaction.

They say the customer’s always right, and whilst that’s definitely not true, thinking about their experience will take you a long way.

The UX of your customer is paramount to business success.

Customer Success can be a tough gig. But taking measures like the ones above will help you marry how good you think you are, with the opinions of your customers.