You can’t improve what you don’t measure. It’s a common enough phrase, but say you want to improve your customer support. What do you track?
Outsourcing customer support can be great for your cash flow and your time, but one of the first things about a successful outsourcing program is to have key customer support metrics or indicators that tell you how well you’re doing so you can get where you want to be.
You can quickly measure customer support metrics that matter with a single support request and after that, combine it to report on the whole performance of your staff members as well as separate customer support representatives. Ensure you leverage the most important customer support metrics to keep track of your current state of affairs and the ways to improve. Let's further review crucial factors that you may add to your strategy.
How long does it take from when the customer calls in to get to a live person? Is there a wait time? Is there a lengthy phone tree? If someone sends an email for support, how long does it take to get back to them? When something is wrong, we want it solved yesterday. Getting to someone quickly is the first impression someone will have of your support team. Keeping that response time low is the first step to keeping your customers happy.
Just like speed in response time, fixing the issue immediately while you have that person on the phone or within 24 hours of an email means happier customers and top-level customer support capacity metrics.
If you can’t fix the issue on the first contact, how long does it take for the ticket to be resolved? Tracking the overall average, but breaking down the issues into types of problems (bugs, user error, bad hardware) can give you more information about which areas of your customer support or product can be improved to lower the overall resolution time.
Tracking the number of issues each day/week for several years can tell you a lot about your user base and product iteration. Breaking that total number down by the number of issues over the number of current customers/products sold tells you whether your help page is helping, whether your product is too complicated or if you have issues with bugs/hardware. If you see the number of a certain type of problem increasing, it may be time to implement a bonus training program for new customers. Or maybe you needed to do more testing before you launched that last iteration.
Those after-call surveys are incredibly helpful customer support performance metrics. If you choose not to implement that, we recommend sending a follow-up email a few days after resolution to make sure the problem was solved and getting feedback on the resolution process. Many customers will ignore the email (just like many people opt out of the after-call survey) but the feedback from the ones who answer will give you otherwise unattainable insight into your resolution process.