The best way for a company to determine its customer support performance is by tracking metrics. While other methods of determining customer satisfaction, like surveys, are great for getting a feel for users’ experiences, hard data can’t be beat when it comes to knowing whether you’re objectively meeting requirements and doing the best you can do as a company to make customers feel valued, satisfied, and willing to return.
Why is this hard data so important? There is a tendency for those with complaints to be the most vocal, and customer feedback can be very subjective, not providing the most accurate view into whether your customer support department is doing its job. This can ultimately have a negative effect on customer engagement and repeat business.
Business success in any field is dependent on customer satisfaction, and every person working in a company is responsible for some aspect of that customer satisfaction.
Whether a data analyst or customer service representative, the road to customer retention passes through every department. It’s critical, then, to track customer support metrics to ensure that each customer that contacts the company — or comes in contact in any way — is being treated in a way that will ensure they return.
With a data-driven view of customer support and satisfaction, you can create quantifiable, usable information that can then be used to troubleshoot, solve problems, identify roadblocks and implement fixes, all on a path to the ultimate customer support experience.
Essential Customer Support Metrics
1. Ticket volumes
Ticket volume is a metric that will immediately help you understand how many customers require assistance. By measuring the total number of tickets in your support system, you’ll get an initial understanding of where any problems lie. Is there a spike in the number of tickets upon a particular product release? There may be an issue with the documentation; it could simply need to be more precise, or it may actually have errors. Additionally, how quickly are tickets being resolved? This leads to a second metric.
2. Ticket backlog
While certainly tied into volumes, the backlog volume is a separate metric, since it is less a measure of the first-tier issues — customer problems with a product — and more a measure of how the team is handling those issues. Are tickets going unresolved because the customer support team is understaffed, or is there a problem that’s too difficult for the Tier 1 team, with too many tickets being pushed to higher tiers? All of these metrics can help determine not only if there is a problem, but where it lies.
3. Ticket resolution time
Once again, it’s essential to know the average time for a ticket’s entry into the system and its resolution. Today’s customers have high expectations when it comes to problem resolution, and tools like chatbots and text service messaging have increased those expectations to a desire for near-instant resolution. Your database can determine the median response times and, if they are lower than benchmarks indicate they should be, allow you to put a plan into place to improve the flow.
4. First response time
Response is not the same as resolution, and both are important metrics to track. While resolution indicates a problem has been solved, response simply means the ticket has been acknowledged — and that metric is often the most important to customers. There’s an old saying, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.” A quick response time lets the customer know you’re aware of their issue and that you are working on it. If, when tracking metrics, you see that average response times are much longer than you might find acceptable, you may well find other problems down the line as well.
5. Customer conversions
How many customer interactions does each person on the team have each day? Each department should have a benchmark, which will, of course, vary depending on the department. When you have that baseline determined, you can then visualize where expectations are being met, and where they are falling short. Particularly in sales, customer conversions are a benchmark that will determine whether the team is living up to expectations.
6. Customer churn
No one wants customer churn, but every business experiences it to some degree. The problem is when the churn becomes too high. Why are customers leaving? Are there too many problems with the product, or are they unhappy with the level of service? Is there another product out there that is going after your customers? While tracking the volume of churn is the first step, tracking the reasons can actually help with customer retention in the long run. If you find one specific reason customers are leaving, you can immediately implement a solution around that issue, helping mitigate the churn and retaining the customers.
How Can DashboardFox Help?
Whatever customer support metrics program you are into, DashboardFox is ready to help you with its BI tool.
Cost Savings -- In many cases, we are up to 80% less expensive than our bigger industry competitors. You don’t have to spend unnecessary amounts of money just to get a single job done. You might find other tools charging you several add-on fees for every specific feature not included in your package, on top of the annual subscription. This can be a hassle, but not from us.
With DashboardFox, you will get everything you need in one single payment, from the BI platform down to the different features you need to you for your reports and other tasks.
Again, no annual subscriptions, just a one-time payment scheme.
Timing Saving -- We can help you save your time. In any industry, time is money, and it is very important to finish as many tasks as possible in a short amount of time. Customer support metrics is not an exception. DashboardFox allows you to create much-needed reports and dashboards much easier. You do not need to hire a team of people to manage DashboardFox as it is designed to be much faster, more efficient, and less time-consuming to use.
VIP Support -- We have a dedicated team to help you. This is the biggest asset that we offer at DashboardFox -- someone is always there to help you. We can offer you the best solutions and innovations to make your customer metrics work even better. With DashboardFox, not only you are getting the software but also all the help and support you can get, so that you can maximize it to your benefit.
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DashboardFox is always ready to answer your questions to see if this is the right software for you (which actually is, most of the time). Click here to contact us or you can also request a live demo right here.