Measuring business performance particularly on the three customer-facing units – marketing, sales and customer service is extremely important for every type of business. Luckily, all three are measurable as there are numerous strategies to give you data, stats, and metrics. Taking them into account effectively will positively affect the organization’s primary concern. Same as sales and marketing with customer service, you keep an eye on the performance and in case you are not reaching expected goals and targets, you need to make some changes to the strategy. Is it necessary to measure your customer support performance? In simple words, if you are unable to measure it, you will never be able to improve it.
Tickets Solved
Most of the organizations set a daily target for their support team to hit and the most important metric in all of the customer service is to measure the number of tickets closed. It lets you keep track of agent performance and resourcing needs daily. It could be done simply by comparing the number of queries closed to the total number of open queries.
Considering Resolution Areas
Estimating a well-known resolution area can feature which areas of your product or service are creating the most need for customer support. It is quite efficient in telling how well your employees are performing for that specific zone, for which you will need to take measurements like time-to-resolution and CSAT (customer satisfaction) evaluations. It is also recommended to analyze the content of tickets to recognize specific areas where the product needs improvement. Accumulating those indications will not only make the product team grateful but will also make significant enhancements overall.
Evaluating Reply-Time Metrics
Speed is the most basic need in customer support; the time required to react to customer’s issues is directly proportional to his satisfaction. That is probably the main reason behind big companies investing so much on their team to take care of the queries as soon as possible, for e.g. Mediacom support has recently transformed their system to ensure maximum customer satisfaction.
Speeds consistency can be accomplished by offering SLAs (service level agreements) to customers. However, keeping a track of reply/response time metrics are important to guarantee the achievement of those agreements. Reply-time metric incorporates first-reply time, average reply time and the quantity of the replies on a ticket. Reading and contrasting the three of these together uncovers a significant marker of how effective your customer support team is.
Resolution Time Metric
Resolution times are something beyond the speed of your operator-based help. For instance, FCR (First Contact Resolution) shows when a single interaction deals with a client’s need but if there are several FCR tickets, it could demonstrate that a large number of tickets may be better for self-administration. However, a speedy resolution does not always indicate high quality, but it can surely help managers evaluate if the agents are spending the right time on tickets.
Resolution Effort Metrics
This metric shows everything that occurs between an operator’s first touch on a ticket until the ticket is eventually closed. The perfect example of a resolution metric would be the handling time. Handling time is the amount of time an agent takes while working on a single support inquiry. A time tracking application can simply be used if you have a hard time measuring it otherwise. This great metric could be utilized to find out the reason behind the low satisfaction of the customer.
Tickets Reopen
A ticket reopen happens when a ticket’s status reverses from being solved to open again. It usually happens when managing complex help issues that do not have a simple fix. Too many tickets revive demonstrate the specific areas where agents need additional training or there is something in the product or service that customer support is not fit for fixing all alone. Metrics of these incorporate the total number of tickets being reopened, the average number of them and the percentage of the total number of reopens.
Next Issue Avoidance (NIA)
Next issue avoidance is a metric utilized by a growing number of customer service departments that empowers employees to anticipate any future issues. It also assists with featuring a connection with customer support that makes clients feel confident and empowered to use it as adequately as possible. By reading and analyzing the data from a large number of tickets, associations can predict customer’s next inquiries and dispose of the tremendous number of future ticket openings. It can be measured simply by looking at the number of inquiries being requested for the same product or service area. It is smart to practice it next to first contact resolution; it could be an alarming situation if both turn out to be bad. However, your employees can improve during the first touch with the customers.
Conclusion
Measuring the performance of your support team is as important as it is for the Sales team. Numerous metrics can be used to highlight the overall performance of your team that can help improve the organization overall. That in turn, results in building up a company with better revenues and a reputation for always willing to improve.