How to measure your customer support team’s performance? Keep these key indicators in mind.
Customer support is often used interchangeably with the term customer service, and is positioned by many companies as a contemporary version of the latter. While both terms encompass several aspects of customer care such as troubleshooting, assistance and helping customers make the best choice for themselves, it differs slightly in meaning.
Today customer support has evolved to refer to a host of customer services which allow clients to make efficient use of a product or service. It includes supporting and providing assistance with the selection, installation, training, maintenance and continued use of the product via different communication channels such as phone, email, live chat and social media support.
Great customer support is about going beyond providing guidance and resolving problems. The aim is to train your customer support reps to engage with every customer with a view to driving renewals and establishing brand loyalty.
To develop a high performing customer support team, it is essential to identify individual and team strengths and weaknesses, so that you can continue doing more of the positive things, while minimizing the bad.
Let’s look some useful customer support metrics which can help to analyze your team’s performance.
Ticket volume
A simple way to track how well your customer support team is doing is to identify the number of open tickets in your queue over a period of time. It is a measure of how many people have contacted you across email, phone, chat support or social media over X number of days.
You ideally want to lower this, as a high number of incoming requests probably indicates that your customers have reasons to contact you with questions or concerns about your product or service.
Average Response Time
The average response time is the average speed with which you respond to a customer query. Leaving the customer waiting without an acknowledgment or response will impact their experience, and could affect brand loyalty in the long term. To calculate this, note:
Time of first response - time of customer request = Response time (number of minutes hours/days)
Average Resolution Time
How quickly and efficiently are you able to resolve customer queries? Customer support managers should keep track of how long their team is taking to handle each case. The aim should be to lower the Average Resolution Time and implement a strategy to minimize this in case you find a high Average Resolution Time. To calculate this, use the following formula:
Total of all Resolution Times
________________________ = Average Resolution Time
Number of closed cases
Net promoter score
If a customer is pleased with their customer support experience, they are more likely to use your brand and recommend it to others (promoter). Conversely, a negative experience with your brand will lead them spread negative reviews and thus hinder growth (detractor).
A net promoter score guages your customer’s experience and loyalty on a scale of 1 to 10. It can be tracked by collecting answers in response to a single question posed in a follow-up email or at the end of a chat query: ‘How likely are you to recommend our brand to a colleague or friend?’
Customer satisfaction
An obvious but indicative way to identify if your customers are happy with your product or service is by capturing their responses via a follow-up questionnaire or survey. To ensure take-up, you could even offer a small incentive like a 10% discount code off their next purchase or a month’s free subscription.
If you choose to conduct a feedback survey, ask them to rate their satisfaction with your company or brand. (5 - very satisfied; 1- very unsatisfied).
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores are usually determined on a scale of 0 to 100%, so to identify your CSAT percent, put in every satisfied customer into the following formula (say every satisfied response is say 4 or 5)
|
# of Satisfied Customers ———————————— # of Satisfaction Survey Responses |
X 100 = % of Satisfied Customers |
Social media monitoring
Companies are increasingly relying on social media channels to reach their customers online, and this only makes sense given that 81% of the US population use social media in 2017. With many customers choosing to interact with companies on the go, both for its quickness and convenience, you can’t ignore social media support.
Unlike earlier where references would stay within your friends or family circle, positive or negative feedback can be broadcasted to millions in moments, an alarming capacity to harm (or benefit) your brand. So it might be helpful to keep your eye on your prefered medium of choice (where your target audience lives) to monitor both positive and negative feedback.
Some free tools you can use:
HootSuite: The free version allows you to choose three social networks across which you can set up multiple keywords to track (you could choose your company name, product or company’s marketing #, for instance).
Social mention: A comprehensive real-time social media and analysis tool which rates your influence on strength (number of time mentioned), sentiment (positive or negative mentions), passion (repeat mentions) and reach (number of users mentioning you).
Google Alerts: Log in with your Google account to create an alert for your chosen keywords and receive notifications when your brand is mentioned across the web
Track different metrics to understand your team
Make sure you focus on metrics that give your team the most insights and information about your team’s performance. To get a holistic view of the strengths and areas of improvement of your customer team, it is helpful to track a range of support metrics so that you have enough data to perform a detailed analysis.
This will go a long way in ensuring your customers are regular and satisfied users of your product or services boosting customer success, and eventually, business success.
