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 effective action 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’re 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’ll 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 solved. It lets you keep track of the agent performance and resourcing needs daily. It could be simply done by comparing the number of queries solved to the total number of open queries.
Considering resolution areas
Estimating the most well-known resolution area can feature which areas of your product or service are creating the most need for customer support. It’s quite efficient in telling how well your employees are performing for that specific zone, for which you’ll 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 customers’ issues is directly proportional to their satisfaction. That’s 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. spectrum internet customer service 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 are.
Resolution time metric
Resolution times are something beyond the speed of the 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. Though 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 is a great metric that could be utilized to find out the reason behind the low satisfaction of any customer(s).
Tickets reopen
A ticket reopening is when a ticket’s status reverses from being solved to open again. It usually happens when managing complex help issues that don’t have a simple fix. Too many tickets revive demonstrates the specific areas where agents need additional training or there’s something in the product or service that customer support isn’t 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 reopened tickets.
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 out 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.