Blog Post
In industrial B2B companies, it’s a strategic imperative to increase CSAT to ensure customer loyalty, build long-term relationships, and boost referrals. But what is CSAT, and how can automation help improve your scores? Read on to discover everything you need to know.
What is CSAT?
A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) quantifies how customers feel about your company’s products and services. Many factors shape your customers’ satisfaction levels, including pricing, quality of service, value for money, complaint handling, and the overall customer journey. For industrial B2B companies, order automation helps improve these factors and enhance your CSAT scores.
How is CSAT measured?
Measuring CSAT is as easy as asking your customers how satisfied they are with their buying experience. You can provide your customers with a prompt that asks them to rate their level of satisfaction on a scale from one to five:
- Very unsatisfied
- Unsatisfied
- Neutral
- Satisfied
- Very satisfied
To turn customer responses into a CSAT score, calculate the total of the responses, divide that by the overall number of responses, and multiply by 100 to give you a percentage.
Why CSAT is Important in Industrial B2B Sales
Customers increasingly expect B2B buying to match the seamless B2C service that companies like Amazon provide, and 80% of business buyers value the experience a company provides as highly as the quality of its products. Yet, 63% say most interactions don’t meet their expectations, driving them to the competition.
Let’s take a closer look at the direct impact CSAT can have on your business.
Customer Retention
88% percent of customers say good service makes them more likely to continue doing business with a company. Keeping existing customers happy increases customer lifetime value (CLV) and is five to 25 times more cost-effective than acquiring new customers. What’s more, loyal buyers outspend new customers by 31% and are 50% more inclined to buy new products.
Revenue Growth
High CSAT scores result in increased profits, revenue, and market share. One study found that companies with consistently high CSAT scores achieved a cumulative stock market return of 518% over 14 years compared to 31% for the S&P 500.
Brand Reputation
Providing excellent service enhances satisfaction levels and boosts your brand's image. Eighty-five percent of business buyers base their recommendations on high levels of customer service.
Product Improvement
Negative CSAT scores can be viewed as a valuable opportunity to improve. One dissatisfied buyer may represent hundreds facing similar problems but choose not to complain and instead go elsewhere. Therefore, it’s crucial to examine why some customers are frustrated and proactively improve your product or service to reduce churn.
Competitive Advantage
High CSAT can be a differentiator in competitive B2B markets. While 86% of business buyers are more inclined to purchase from a company that sees things from their perspective, 59% believe that sales representatives don’t understand their needs.
AI and sales order automation help modernize your customer experience, increase CSAT scores, and ensure long-term success.
5 Ways Automation Increases CSAT for B2B Companies
AI-powered order and invoice automation removes friction from the customer journey and significantly maximizes CSAT by lowering costs, reducing errors, and saving time without requiring customers to change their buying process.
Today’s customers expect automation, with 73% welcoming the use of AI to improve service and 72% believing it will help companies deliver a better experience.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits automation can bring to your customer satisfaction levels.
1. Streamlines Order Processing
Although 49.3% of B2B orders are sent manually via email, it’s a slow and inaccurate bottleneck that can lead to late or incorrect deliveries and negative CSAT rates. Moreover, it ties your staff up for hours in tedious, repetitive tasks.
By contrast, automation can extract and process orders directly from emails as soon as they are received, cutting the process from hours to seconds, boosting accuracy to 100%, and ensuring on-time fulfillment. It also frees employees to focus on tasks that require the human touch, such as helping customers.
Rexel implemented order automation and saved thousands of hours of labor, allowing their sales team to focus on enhancing the customer experience.
2. Personalizes Customer Interactions
While 78% of buyers expect a personalized service that aligns with their needs, 46% believe most companies don’t treat them as individuals.
With Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and marketing automation tools like HubSpot and Marketo, you can leverage rich data and analytics regarding customer firmographics, interests, and behaviors. These insights enable you to personalize experiences at scale, from lead generation to delivering customer support. For example, your system could automatically identify customers who repeatedly buy certain products and inform them when items are on special offer.
3. Enables Predictive Analytics for Proactive Service
Almost three-quarters of business buyers believe companies should preemptively respond to their needs, but only 48% experience this.
Order automation lets you harness the power of real-time monitoring and predictive analytics to anticipate needs and resolve issues before your customer reaches out.
For example, you can deploy a chatbot on your website that offers visitors help while browsing your pages or use one to greet customers when they follow your social media accounts.
Predictive analytics can also forecast demand based on historical sales, market trends, and customer sentiment and identify potential supply chain disruptions, allowing you to manage inventory, avoid stockouts, and minimize costs.
4. Enhances Self-Service Options
Self-service portals enable customers to place orders, track shipments, and update accounts, and chatbots can answer routine inquiries and provide technical support on demand.
Self-service options satisfy the 74% of customers who expect any in-person or phone-based service to have a 24/7 online equivalent. For customers, self-service means reduced waiting times, personalized service, accurate orders, and control over their buying journey.
Self-service reduces the workload for your staff and drives down costs for you. It also provides valuable data about customer behavior and preferences, enabling you to make strategic decisions to future-proof your business.
5. Facilitates Continuous Improvement
Automation makes it easy to discover your customers’ pain points and determine how to improve your offer to meet or exceed their expectations.
Some automation solutions allow you to send CSAT surveys after every customer interaction. AI and machine learning algorithms can mine feedback to identify common themes and highlight your weaknesses. You can use these insights to continuously optimize every customer interaction.
Despite all the advantages of sales order automation, just one in four companies have automated at least one sales process, offering a competitive edge to any business that bridges the digital automation gap.
Field worked with Conexiom to deploy automation for sales orders, AP invoices, and order acknowledgments, and have reallocated thousands of hours annually to enhancing CSAT levels.
How Conexiom Helps B2B Companies Increase CSAT
Conexiom's automation solutions enable you to increase CSAT by streamlining processes, reducing errors, improving efficiency, and exceeding On-Time, In-Full targets.
The Conexiom platform is a no-code solution that integrates seamlessly with your systems. It provides enhanced visibility and control from the moment orders are received and rapid processing enables same-day shipping.
Thanks to AI, and advanced machine learning algorithms, you can automate the processing of sales orders, invoices, and order acknowledgments and deliver the data to your ERP and CRM systems with 100% accuracy. This not only reclaims time lost on manual data entry but also alleviates the high cost of correcting errors and lets your CSR team concentrate on serving customers.
Automated sales order solutions can help you increase CSAT scores and boost your bottom line.