Customer service cannot exist as a secondary support function in today's world of business. Providing excellent help to your clients when needed is crucial to your business' success. To ensure this success, you must track your customers' overall experience with your business. Tracking this can improve performance and even identify employees' specific development needs. We've listed a few customer service metrics that can take your company from being an average shop to a rising industry leader.
1. Reduce Ticket Volume
You need to know that observing ticket volume is like walking a tightrope. An accruement of tickets can be seen as positive development. It can be positive since it would appear that your customer support system is not only reachable but that your clients are happy to engage with your company. But receiving support tickets typically shows that your customers are experiencing issues. This is never a good thing as it can lead to client frustration. Bearing this in mind, make it a goal to minimize the number of support tickets submitted to your team.
2. Resolve Tickets Efficiently
It's always important to make a good first impression and consider that your customers will remember their first contact resolution with your business. Now, when a ticket is submitted to your team, you will want to study what the average number of replies is. This metric shows you how many replies it takes to resolve a customer's ticket and you'll want to keep it below two replies. Your team should aim for this goal to reduce customer stress. But you can you also use this metric to pinpoint issues within your team that need to be remedied.
3. Provide Quick Responses
Resolving tickets efficiently and your team's average first response time go hand in hand. The average time your team takes to respond to a ticket lets you know how long it takes for a customer to receive a reply to their support request. It is common sense that your team should respond as quickly as possible to a ticket and you will study if your team is responding appropriately. A good rule of thumb is to respond to emails within 24 hours but for any other forms of contact your team should respond in under an hour.
4. Solve Problems Immediately
As we just mentioned, you'll want your team to analyze and solve a problem quickly and with great efficiency. There is where First Contact Resolution Rate (FCRR) comes into play. FCRR is the resolution of a customer's issue in a single interaction. Hopefully, most of the issues your clients present to the customer support team will be solved in this manner, as this will greatly improve client retention and new client propagation. Resolving an issue through an initial phone call or email shows your clients that not only does your team care but that they are effective at their jobs.
5. Provide Preferred Communication
As a business you want to cater to your clients and providing access to their preferred communication methods is very important. As an operational customer service metric, this will have organizational implications. You must research your client base to see how they preferred to communicate with your business. You have many options with it comes to communication channels.
Use phone support, email, Live Chat, or an online knowledge base. This will have mixed success depending on the vein of your unique business.
6. Deliver Superior Solutions
Efficiency is key to building a great customer support system, and you'll want to make sure that your team is ahead of the curve competitively. You can achieve this goal by measuring the average time needed for ticket resolution. As we said, a rushed job on a ticket is no good at all, but you don't want your team to lollygag either. To test the quality of your team, you must install a superb QA system. This will show you if your employees provided adequate solutions to all your clients' requests.
7. Track Resolution Rate
Your resolution rate is another useful metric. The resolution rate depicts the percentage of issues your customer service team resolve from the total client support tickets submitted. It should not be a big surprise to you that you must monitor this metric with close attention. To achieve this, you must once again enact a strong QA. Do this to be sure actual solutions and not patronizing platitudes are being delivered to your clients. If you are witnessing high resolution rates, this means that your team is being highly efficient.
8. Gauge Customer Satisfaction
Many companies may say that the most important metric of customer support is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction and revenue growth are tightly intertwined. The happier your customers are, the more likely they are to return to you and sing your companies praises to those in their social circle. You can measure customer satisfaction through short surveys. It is customary to have your clients fill one of these surveys out after a conversation or ticket resolution so you can capture the customer's experience in real-time. This is a very simple tool that can provide invaluable data for your business.
9. Customer Experience Rating
Today's consumers are more likely to spend their money with a company that provides an excellent customer experience. Rather than advertisements or product claims, customers remember their experiences - good and bad. They'll remember using your product and interactions with your employees.
Customer experiences are constructed upon several building blocks, but the keystone of these experiences is your staff. Your staff's ability to be patient with clients and emotionally connect with them is crucial to constructing an amazing client experience. The amount of upselling/cross-selling which occurs are great indicators that your clients are having a positive experience with your business.
10. Record Up-sells and Cross-sells
Upselling and cross-selling are excellent customer service metrics. Since sales and service departments have merged in many organizations, you'll want to pay attention to these numbers. When your employees ‘upsell,' they are convincing your client to choose a higher-priced version of a product. When you team engages in ‘cross-selling,' they are persuading your clients to buy complementing products besides their original purchase. These techniques are excellent metrics as they illustrate that your team works well and is providing such an excellent experience for clients that it inspires them to spend more money with your company.
11. Use The Net Promoter Score
If you want to hear directly from your clients, then you must implement a Net Promoter Score (NPS) form on your website or even on a product. You can even send surveys to your clients via email or mailers. This tool asks your clients one or two questions - more specifically if they would recommend your product or service to others. Satmetrix, the creators of NPS, an average score is five but they noted that the best expansion occurs for companies whose NPS is in the 50–80 range. So as you can see, the higher the score, the better.
12. Measure Customer Retention Rate
Any business owner will admit that customer retention is crucial, especially since repeat customers are more likely to spend money with your company. While you should always try to gain new clients, it is easier to continue selling to a solid client base. As you may have guessed, your customer service team is key to customer retention. The customer relationship doesn't end with a sale. Your service staff must answer any questions the client has from that point on. A rise in client retention is positive, but if there's a decline, you must connect with your team to identify problems.
If you want your service standards to excel, then you must have a critical eye and be able to identify and improve problem areas. These ten customer service metrics we've listed above will help you get a clear picture not only of your existing service quality but how to enhance it. When you have compiled these data to see how you compare to industry benchmarks, you will have the ability to make a cohesive plan for your service teams. Implementing these metrics will encourage your business' growth and client retention.
