Monitoring customer feedback and employee performance helps you spot issues and reinforce strengths.
SmileBack’s automated reporting feature removes the guesswork so you can become proactive rather than reactive to insights.
As a result, you’ll empower your team to collect and act on feedback effectively, build stronger customer relationships, and drive retention.
Table of contents
- How to generate reports and leverage automation
- How to use automated reports to improve customer and employee satisfaction
How to generate reports and leverage automation
There are two types of reports you can generate in the SmileBack dashboard: one-time and automated.
The end-result is the same, but generating a one-time report is a manual process whereas automation allows you to set and forget it. We’ll dive into how to automate reports in detail at the end of this section.
Reports can be grouped by client, agent, and segments (e.g. teams or boards within ConnectWise PSA). Client reports can include data from any combination of CSAT, NPS and Project Surveys.
If you’re generating reports for clients, for example, you can choose one, a few, or all of your clients at once.
To make the reports look professional and presentable, you can brand them with custom colors and logos.
For example purposes, we’ll choose Adaptabiz only:
The last choice you’ll need to make is how far back to pull report data from. By default, it’s set to 90 days, but it’s best to choose a timeframe that aligns with your goals and processes:
For example, if you review reports every Monday morning at a team meeting, you’d want to choose the “Last week” option.
We’ve stuck with 90 days for our example. After you hit “Generate report” a button will appear that says “Click here to download your report”. Here’s what the final product looks like:
On page one, we see CSAT metrics over the past 90 days with individual comments nested underneath. If you chose to include NPS or Project Survey results, they will show up on their own pages.
How to set up automated reports
Automating reports is an incredibly straightforward process. Not only will you save time, but you’ll be able to proactively review and address feedback to improve client relationships, enhance team performance, and decrease churn.
When you stay on top of how your clients are feeling, and your employees are performing, you can uncover issues and fix them before they grow.
On the flip side, if clients enjoy their experience and employees do a great job, you can learn about and celebrate wins in real-time to build meaningful relationships and boost team morale.
To automate reports, follow the same steps outlined above, but instead of completing the “Download report from” section, focus on the left side of box where it says “Automate report”:
Create a custom report name, choose how often you’d like to receive it (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.), and add the relevant email address(es).
After you hit “Save automation”, you can review it in the “Saved Reports” section of the page:
Reports are sent out on Monday mornings in your selected time zone. If you select weekly and are in the EST time zone, they’ll arrive early morning every Monday. If you select monthly, they’ll arrive on the first of the month. Quarterly is the first day of the quarter, and so on.
Here’s what the email looks like in your inbox:
It doesn’t get much more straightforward than that.
How to use automated reports to improve customer and employee satisfaction
Automated reports remove the need to gather information manually. When you have detailed, insightful information at your fingertips, you’re in a position to improve at speed.
Here are a few ways you can use automated reports to enhance your operation:
Build more meaningful customer relationships
Collecting CSAT, NPS and Project Surveys data helps you dig beneath the surface to discover what’s going well and where you need to improve your processes.
But simply running the surveys and collecting feedback isn’t enough. When you automate reports, you can review what your customers are saying and feeling over a week, month, quarter, or year to ensure you’re staying on top of business objectives and priorities.
A great use case for automated reporting is to set up quarterly reports that get sent to your account managers. If an account manager is responsible for Adaptabiz, for example, you can send the report to them once a quarter before their recurring quarterly business review (QBR) with the Adaptabiz executives.
They will then have a comprehensive view of the relationship over the past 90 days so they can have a meaningful conversation with their clients at the meeting.
For example, on this test report, we can see that nearly every comment is positive.
Although the account manager likely already knew that the relationship was on solid ground, they can now walk into the QBR with supplemental data to prove the quality of service.
Additionally, they can address the one neutral comment (the yellow face in the image above) by explaining why that issue occurred, how they handled it, and what they’ve done to ensure it won’t happen again.
Once you’ve shown a report like this to your client at a QBR, you can include their email on the automated report list if they’d like to see it ahead of time.
However, make sure that you only add them to your report list after you’ve walked them through it in person at least once. Otherwise, they may be confused about what information they’re getting and why. Treat it like part of your onboarding sequence and prep your client ahead of time.
In all, automated reports take the guesswork out of QBRs and the headache out of data gathering.
Improve employee performance and boost team morale
When you know how your agents are performing you can help fill in gaps, celebrate successes, and incentivize and motivate them to keep up the good work (or improve).
A great way to keep tabs on employee performance is to automate weekly agent reports that get sent to managers first thing Monday morning.
The manager can then review each agent’s performance metrics with them individually or as a team.
For example, in the test agent report for “vripley” we see that out of two reviews over the past week, one was positive and the other was neutral:
The manager can discuss with their direct report what happened in the neutral situation and why the client wrote, “I don’t think the engineer really knew what he was doing.”
Whether an individual agent issue, process hiccup or simply a misunderstanding, the situation can be discussed and a plan of action can get underway.
Of course, if you have systems in place to review client feedback in real-time, perhaps with a ConnectWise PSA integration, you’ll have already seen and dealt with these comments as they came in.
But reporting gives you a chance to reflect on issues and wins, without the same sense of urgency. Retrospectives help you better understand what happened and how similar situations can be avoided (or repeated if they were successful) in the future.
To further empower and incentivize employee performance, you can also create a leaderboard and gamify performance. While gamification shouldn’t be the primary reason driving your team to work hard, it can work to add an element of fun into the mix and promote a positive workforce culture.
Use the automated reporting workflow to run a better operation
Automated reports are the too-good-to-be-true feedback workflow you’ve been waiting for.
They show up in your inbox in a predetermined cadence and shine a spotlight on client sentiment and team performance.
In five minutes or less, you can set up recurring reports that lead to stronger client relationships and better team performance.
If you want to chat with us more about setting up automated reporting, book a follow-up call with our team.
