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In the realm of IT outsourcing, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a crucial service level agreement (SLA) that plays a defining role in contract continuity. It’s a straightforward metric with high stakes: if a vendor fails to meet the CSAT threshold—often around 95%—penalties are imposed, and repeated failures can even lead to contract termination. Given my experience with 250+ clients over the past 25 years, I’ve seen firsthand the nuances of CSAT and the issues that can arise. On the surface, CSAT might seem simple: measure user satisfaction, meet the target, and avoid penalties. However, achieving true, unmanipulated CSAT scores is often a complex endeavor, especially when unethical practices slip into the mix.

In this blog, we’ll uncover some of the key challenges surrounding CSAT in outsourcing and discuss how IT Operational Analytics (ITOA) can expose and mitigate manipulation risks, ensuring that satisfaction metrics truly reflect the customer’s experience.

Understanding CSAT: The Basics and the Challenges
CSAT metrics work by sampling users who have recently interacted with the service, asking them for feedback that reflects their satisfaction. The objective is for the vendor to meet a minimum satisfaction threshold—commonly set around 95%. If a vendor fails to hit this benchmark, they face financial penalties, and if the target is missed consistently, the client may terminate the contract altogether.

However, meeting this target fairly can be more challenging than it seems. Before surveys are sent, certain filters are applied: specific types of issues might be excluded, and each user can be surveyed only once per month. These filters, while meant to ensure fair measurement, sometimes lead to unintended consequences—especially when vendors lack skilled resources and resort to manipulation.

Common Manipulation Tactics in CSAT
When a vendor lacks the skills or resources to maintain high service quality, they may attempt to “game” the CSAT metric. Here are some of the more frequent tactics observed:

  1. Ticket Attribution Changes: When it’s known that a user can only be surveyed once a month, a poor experience can be “masked” by attributing the interaction to an alternate user—often one who has already been surveyed or a generic admin account. This avoids triggering another survey and sidesteps potential negative feedback.
  2. Survey Tampering: In cases where the supplier fears a negative response, they may intercept the survey itself. For instance, a supplier might reset a user’s email password, complete the survey positively on behalf of the user, delete any trace of the survey email, and reset the password back. This ensures a controlled response, even though it is highly unethical.

Detecting Manipulation: The Role of IT Operational Analytics
Organizations may struggle to detect manipulation since it requires specialized skills to catch these tactics in action. Often, clients sense a discrepancy between the reported CSAT and their own “voice of the customer” data, where clients provide feedback directly through less formal channels. However, they may lack the technical expertise to validate these suspicions.

This is where Jnana Analytics’s ITOA services come in. At Jnana Analytics, we’ve leveraged insights from millions of calls and ITSM (IT Service Management) records to identify manipulation patterns in CSAT and other SLAs. By analyzing service data trends, Jnana Analytics can spot unusual patterns—such as unexpected ticket transfers or unusually high admin account usage—that often accompany CSAT manipulation.

How Jnana Analytics Supports Organizations
Jnana Analytics’s ITOA services deliver more than just monitoring; they provide actionable insights and proactive risk mitigation by:

  1. Benchmarking Voice of the Customer (VoC) with CSAT Metrics: We cross-reference user feedback from VoC programs against the CSAT metrics reported by vendors, allowing us to detect significant disparities that could signal manipulation.
  2. Pattern Recognition and Anomaly Detection: Our advanced algorithms analyze massive datasets to identify patterns that often align with manipulation tactics, such as repetitive attribution to non-surveyed accounts or the sudden appearance of admin-related entries on low-performance incidents.
  3. Proactive Reporting: Our system generates reports highlighting manipulation risks in real time, empowering clients to take immediate corrective action and enabling more transparent, reliable SLAs.

Conclusion and Call to Action
Maintaining authentic and accurate CSAT scores is essential for building trust and delivering value in IT outsourcing relationships. When manipulation takes hold, it compromises the entire service experience and erodes customer trust. If you suspect manipulation or want to safeguard your CSAT metrics, Jnana Analytics can help. Visit www.jnanaanalytics.com to learn more about how our ITOA services can give you the insights you need to maintain integrity in CSAT and other SLAs.

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