Share This Article:

We often hear about user and community rating systems as a measure of customer satisfaction. Stars, diamonds, smiley faces all serve as marks of excellence – or shame, depending on the experience – for users to gauge potential engagements with a service provider. But shouldn’t these same rating systems matter to managers and salespeople inside a service provider? Autotask seems to think so, judging by the new feature added to its professional services automation platform.

Autotask added a customer satisfaction survey tool to its PSA platform. As soon as a job is completed or a ticket is closed, the Autotask system will automatically query the client about their experience. The tool translates the response into a five-star rating system. Customer ratings are displayed in the Autotask dashboard – giving account managers, technicians and company owners an immediate measure of their customers’ perceptions of their performance and value.

Measuring customer satisfaction isn’t a novel idea. Vendors, VARs and managed service providers routinely survey their customers about their experience as a means of quality control. What solution providers want from satisfaction surveys is metrics for making course corrections in their services to ensure they retain customers and avoid missteps in acquiring new accounts.

Conventional customer satisfaction rating systems are often a cumbersome process. Knowing the right questions to ask is difficult enough, but most systems are dependent on a separate surveying tool. The results must be collected, aggregated, parsed and analyzed outside their CRM or PSA platform. And surveys and results are often done after the fact when specific tasks are but a memory to the customers, making the results less accurate and reliable.

By automating and incorporating customer satisfaction surveying in its PSA platform, Autotask is both taking away the pain of this process as well as making the information actionable.

The satisfaction ratings – a classic five-star scale – are aggregated and reported in the PSA dashboard. At a glance, account managers can see where they stand with their customers before heading into the next engagement. The system is customizable; managers can be alerted whenever a rating fails to meet a certain threshold. For example, any one- or two-star ratings will initiate an alert to management to review. This alerting mechanism puts problem accounts immediately in front of management.

Numerous benefits will come from this unique system: Management will have a better sense of where their company stands with customers; supervisors will have another gauge for measuring the performance and effectiveness of their in-house and field service teams; and salespeople and account managers will have better insights of customer perceptions before approaching them for new products, services and renewals.

But what is a good customer satisfaction rating? Is the goal to have all customers at five stars? And what do these ratings mean in context? Autotask took these questions into consideration as well.

Autotask PSA users can opt-in to a network, where their anonymized ratings are aggregated and shared across the Autotask community. Once enough community data is collected, Autotask users will benchmark their performance against peers. The relevancy of this benchmarking is limited. Autotask cannot provide granular analysis such as comparisons by region, company size and business characteristics, since it wants to ensure participating companies remain anonymous.

Autotask doesn’t expect all of its PSA users to achieve a five-star rating with all their customers. The idea is to encourage continual improvement and give its PSA users deeper insight into their customer perceptions. The ultimate measure is whether the customer continues to use the provider’s services, not the number of stars they give on a survey.

Bob Vogel, chief marketing officer at Autotask, says many of the features and innovations iterated in the PSA platform come directly from the users. The rating system isn’t one of those features; it’s an innovation that Vogel correctly states as something the Autotask user community needs even if it doesn’t know it.

The world is becoming less enamored with the shiny lights and bleeping sounds produced by our technology, and more concerned with having a high and productive experience with the totality of the system – including services. Autotask is correctly reading the market trends in recognizing the need for providing its service providers with a tool for deeper introspection.

* * *

Lawrence M. Walsh is CEO and president of The 2112 Group, a technology business advisory service that specializes in optimizing indirect channels and partner relationships. He’s also the executive director of the Channel Vanguard Council, a thought leadership group and advisory committee to CompTIAon channel issues. He is the former publisher of Channel Insider and editor of VARBusiness Magazine. You can reach him at lmwalsh@the2112group.com.

One Response to “Autotask Provides Users with Introspective Ratings”