Customer Support Metrics You Should Be Tracking
While providing great customer service is critical, tracking the right customer support metrics is just as important. When you pay attention to your company's customer support numbers, you can identify what you're doing right and what you need to improve upon. You can find out where to tweak your process through customer reviews and surveys, but sometimes working with metrics is better. According to Bufferapp, tracking metrics provides a view of customer satisfaction with support that is honest and free of any influencers. The data compiled when creating the metrics can be used to create baselines and goals for the future.
1. First response times
When a customer has an issue, how long does it take you to respond? The amount of time that elapses between the moment your customers reach out to when they are first helped needs to be as low as possible. Customers don't like waiting for a solution to their problems because it usually means putting whatever they're doing on hold. The concept holds especially true in the B2B sector. If customers run into an issue, you're not helping make their job easier if you're slow to reply. This brings satisfaction down, and eventually your customers may decide to find a different company who can provide them with a better solution to get more work done.
"Make sure you're contacting your customers with updates to show them that you're working to resolve their issue."
Even if you can't fix their problem right away, make sure you're contacting your customers with updates to show them that you're working to resolve their issues. Most customers don't expect you to be perfect, but they do expect you to respond to their issues and resolve whatever is going wrong in a timely manner. A high-quality B2B customer service software solution can help you manage tickets as they arrive in the most efficient manner possible by automating portions of the ticket management process and by providing answers through an internal knowledge base.
When you track this metric, you can easily see how many minutes, hours or days it takes to respond. Additionally, you'll be able to see what customer service reps are responding quickly and which ones are struggling to do so. According to Business2Community, knowing who is a fast responder and who isn't can help you identify where customer service team managers need to focus their training and guidance. Measuring time to first response can also help set new goals for the future and improve your customer satisfaction.
2. Overall problem resolution time
While responding to your customers quickly will help with customer satisfaction, their patience will likely run thin if you don't quickly identify a solution to their issues. Also, it's important to make sure a solution was really found. If your team provides the customer with an answer and then a week later the same customer comes back with the same issue, it wasn't resolved the first time. This should be factored into the resolution time that you're tracking. For this reason, ensure you're keeping track of why the customer is calling in.
A customer support software solution can ensure that all of your customer service information is collected in a central repository so no matter who is helping the customer, reps can see the history of any tickets created in the past. The availability of past customer information will not only improve the support the customer gets, but it will help you more accurately track problem resolution metrics by identifying if the issue was actually resolved.
3. Abandonment rates
This metric measures the number of customers who don't even get helped by a service agent. Abandonment rates are often linked to long first response times. When you track this metric, you can see at what point in the process customers decide to end communication. According to Business 2 Community, this metric can be helpful because it shows you what part of the process may need work. If it takes customers a long time or several steps before they can send a message or talk with a support rep, then you may want to consider revising the process so that it is more streamlined and customer-friendly. Utilizing help desk software can help reduce the amount of time and steps it takes for customers to get the answers they need, thus decreasing your abandonment rate.
