How to Maintain Accurate Customer Support Reports and Metrics
With more companies discovering the value of customer support, and how it’s now a profit center and no longer a cost center, company executives are placing a higher value on support metrics. Data is king in modern business, with more decisions being driven by analytics than ever before.
So, if you’re a customer support leader, how can you maintain accurate reporting and metrics in your customer support software? Here are some of the best tactics…
**Disclaimer: Make sure your support software matches your industry! This article is best suited for support leaders utilizing B2B customer support software.
Create accurate labels – When you’re configuring your support software, it’s essential to allocate time for creating fields that make sense. In general, you’ll want fields for the following at a bare minimum…
- Channel (email, phone, etc.)
- Department/Group (development, accounting, etc.
- Ticket status (open, closed, etc.)
That’s really just the tip of the iceberg and fields can vary greatly by company. Talk to your executives, understand what metrics they need to see, and define fields or custom fields to fit their requirements.
Create (and USE) relevant ticket tags – These can help at quickly tracking ticket volume for certain topics to determine what resources need to be allocated where. For example, if a specific feature created a problem but is fixed, you can click on the feature tag to see all tickets related to the issue. This makes following up with customers about the fix much easier. However, ticket tags are only effective if your agents utilize them properly. Train them to always tag tickets accordingly to prevent additional work in the future.
Correctly configure CDI (Customer Distress Index) weights – Some customer support software solutions have a Customer Distress Index (CDI) that provides a 0-100 score indicating how happy a customer may be with your business. This score can be manually configured by providing weights to specific values. For example, if ticket resolution time is of high importance to your customers, you can weigh this more strongly than total number of tickets or another value. This score can be a great asset in building and maintaining positive customer relationships.
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Make sure every agent has their own software subscription – Sharing accounts in customer support software is highly discouraged and can really create a mess with reporting and metrics. It’s difficult to tell who is truly working on what, often creating internal chaos. In addition, sharing accounts discredits key agent metrics that can be used for internal evaluation and review. Providing agents with their own software subscription is essential for accurate reporting.
Configure product and inventory information to list all versions – This can take a little bit of time, especially if you have a lot of customer-related products and inventory, but it’s usually worth the effort. Companies who break down products by version find it valuable because they can pinpoint issues to a specific iteration of a product, saving time across the entire company and eliminating guesswork.
To summarize, maintaining accurate reporting and metrics in customer support software is much easier when you prepare in advance. Create accurate labels and tags right from the start, then use them appropriately to keep your information relevant. Take the time to properly set up your CDI, products and inventory, and individual users so you can get extremely granular with your data and find the high value insights your business needs. A customer support software system with excellent built-in metrics and reporting is worth keeping around because of the value it provides to your entire company.
