Measure These Metrics To Monitor Your Customer Service
Getting to know your customers is vital when meeting their needs.
Great customer service is the key to keeping your business happy and encouraging growth. Happy customers who feel they have been treated well and given helpful assistance will be more than willing to recommend you to their friends, providing valuable word of mouth marketing. However, monitoring your customer service is essential to knowing how your business is performing, when customers are not satisfied or need your help.
As recent as a few years ago, many companies were not monitoring their customer service performance, even though the quality of that service can affect customer loyalty. Today’s customers have increased power over businesses though, so good customer service is of vital importance.
The simplest way to get an insight into your customer service performance is by measuring insightful metrics. You can do this by creating surveys for your customers. After they have completed a purchase or have enjoyed your service, it is reasonable to ask them to complete a questionnaire. But there is more to it than that; you can evaluate customer service internally by monitoring the following metrics:
- Monitor Your Reps
Often by intuition and observation we know who the best members are in a team. But it is even better to be able to measure their performance with quantifiable measurements. For example, you could determine how many cases a particular rep has not addressed in comparison to the time passed since receiving a query. This provides some measure on a rep’s responsiveness and feeling of responsibility towards the customers. You could also measure the number of tasks a rep is performing in order to answer a customer’s query, showing engagement and effort. Another quantity to measure is how long it takes a rep to answer a query initially – this will make a huge impact on the customer’s opinion of the company.
- Assess Your Team
Making a customer happy is a team effort. Keeping customers happy and solving their problems might take more than one person, so teamwork is key. To get an overall idea of your how your team work you can measure how many hours each team member puts into resolving a query, and assess whether this efficiency changes over time. As a measure of efficiency, you could also monitor how many queries are resolved in one response. Monitoring the number of queries received over time periods can provide insight as to whether you need to reshuffle your team member’s working hours to meet demand.
- Get To Know Your Customers’ Experience
Which customers are happy and which ones will jump ship? The answer to this is broadly based on their experience of your customer service. You want to do everything possible so that each and every customer has a good experience in dealing with your company. The customer service monitoring metrics to use here are found in individual cases: query creation date, effort level in resolving, last communication log. You can also look into which customers have more queries than others, prioritizing cases which have unsatisfied responses from customers to prevent them from leaving. Simply adding a quick “customer satisfaction score” to be answered after every query dealt with can give you great metrics. It can also tell you how many of your existing customers are likely to recommend you.
- Listen To Reviews
This should be perhaps the most obvious metric to measure: what are customers saying about your products? Are the products causing any problems, are they not doing what it says on the tin? One such metric is to monitor which product queries are solved quickly, and which ones are more complicated and require closer attention. This lets you know which aspects of your product are really problematic and are costing your customer service team lots of hours and creating complicated situations. You can also measure the backlog of queries in relation to the problems customers experience with your product. This can give you valuable insight into what aspects of your product need to be fixed.
Overall customer service monitoring is a great thing, but it has to be done in a consistent and meaningful way. The metrics you choose to measure need to give you a realistic insight into a situation, and they need to be comparable to be able to analyze trends. Monitoring change is as important as gathering data. Only this way will you know you’re on the right track!