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Customer Support Metrics to Focus on From Day One

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Vaishali Gopi

Any business’ reputation, regardless of whether it’s a start up or established, is determined by the level of customer support and satisfaction that it provides. Happy customers help the business flourish. In order to achieve this, the business is required to build strong customer support metrics and focus on them from day one. The relevance of building a strong customer support metrics is important. A good and strong set of customer support metrics can help the business in understanding the customer support dynamics that whether the business customer support is meeting the customer needs and wants or not. It also helps the company in improving its customer support system by providing insights into the shortcomings and suggesting changes. This will help in elevating the cost effectiveness of the business and impact on the customers.

The question that arises in this regards now is that how will a business develop a balanced set of metrics for customer support. This can be achieved by the businesses in three areas where customer support metrics is the most useful. It is the combination of these three aspects that determine a successful set of customer support metrics. The three areas are:

  1. Productivity- This is the most elementary means for customer support metrics. Productivity determines the understanding and extensive amount of work that is being done in the business. It is that element that helps in understanding the work that is being done to monitor and cater customer support. Precisely, there are 3 productivity methods that all businesses should monitor from the first day. First is the number and load of issues and complaints of the customers that are logged in the company’s database every day. It is imperative to note and log not just the average number of issues that are filed in the company by the customers but also the specifications of each issue. This will help the company to gain a better understanding of the behavior of the customer and their needs. Second is the number and amount of issues that are resolved on a daily basis. A log of the number of issues resolved in the business in one day will help determine the efficiency of the company and how well it’s working towards catering to the needs of its customers. A comparative analysis of the issues logged and issues resolved by the company will give a total outlook of the company’s work ethics in customer support. The third and final element of productivity metrics is time actively spent on resolving the issue. Keeping a tab on the time it takes to resolve an issue conclusively helps the company in determining the efficiency of the customer support and whether it needs any changes.
  2. Performance- This is the second element for customer support metrics. Performance means performance of the company and its customer support workforce. It defines the time that it takes to resolve and issue and how to systematically organize it. This element focuses on the time efficiency of the company in delivering customer support. There could be several customer support processes that require measuring but there are 2 primary elements that need to be tracked from the first day. First is the response time of the customer issue. Customer support is found to be good and efficient when its responds to its customers within a stipulated time. The frame between the time when the customer contacts the company with an issue and the customer support team responds to that issue is crucial. If the customer does not receive a response or an acknowledgement of its grievance then he will not be satisfied with the company customer support system. This is why it is important to keep a fast-track response time. Second is the resolution time. It is not necessary that all issues will require same amount of time to be resolved. Some problems may be highly complex which would require more time to be resolved than others. But the key is to keep the customer informed and make sure to deliver the desired solution in time. If the customer does not receive a solution within a reasonable time or within the time he was promised, then that would reflect badly on the company.
  3. Quality- The third element of customer support metrics is the quality of support that is given. This determines the impact that the company has on the customer. The fundamental logic behind keeping a customer support is to assess whether the customer is happy with the services provided by the company and if not, then how that can be resolved. Quality metrics are ones which help the company in assessing the success rate of the company’s customer support. There are 2 basic quality metrics elements that a company should measure. First is on-hold time, which means that often the customer that is online with the support staff is put on hold and kept like that for several minutes. This should be avoided. Second is first call resolution which means that a customer query must be resolved in the first call itself. If the query cannot be resolved at the same time, then the customer support must give a probable time by when the issue would be resolved. The burden of calling back and following up must not fall on the customer.
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Vaishali Gopi
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