Category: customerexpectations

How to Measure Your Customer Support Success

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

There’s only one way to ensure progress, and that is through evaluation of your customer support success. If you aren’t actively and continuously measuring your company, you cannot claim to be successful or even seem successful in today’s business industry.

When it comes to customer support, the same logic applies, but the stakes are even higher because of the importance all organizations place on their customer support structure.

One way to evaluate the success of your company’s customer support is through key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs can allow you to keep track of your progress regarding the goals you’ve set for yourself, which can be broad or narrow but revolve around your customer ideology.

This blog post will look at what success really means, which factors determine customer support success, and how you can measure it.

 

What Is Customer Support Success?

To measure customer support success, you need to understand what it is that you are calling success. Simply put, you must have some parameters of success that you want to meet.

When anyone starts a business, they establish a customer service team to resolve customer complaints or queries. However, developing a unique approach to customer service is important for every organization to benefit from having customer service in the first place.

According to Kolsky, 75% of companies reportedly measure customer engagement without defining what it is. Having the CS department as a routine part of running an organization is not enough to thrive or even survive today’s SaaS market. Companies need to have concrete goals behind their customer service measurement.

 

How You Can Measure Customer Support Success Within Your Organization?

1.     First Response Time

When it comes to customer service, we are always fighting against time. Speed is our friend, and in today’s fast-paced market, if you do not have a quick customer support response, you can lose the customer forever. Customers want a fast response on all the platforms, whether a direct call, live chat, or even an email.

A CS team must keep improving their first response time. According to Statista, 12% of Americans rate their number one frustration with customer service as “lack of speed.”

2.     First Contact Resolution

First contact resolution (FCR) is the count of customers that have their issues resolved by the customer service on their first ticket. A high FCR means more customers are getting timely solutions to their problems or queries, pointing to the customer support success in providing the customers with great support.

To find your FCR score, divide the number of cases resolved in the first contact by the total number of tickets and multiply the score by 100.

Similarly, you can estimate the tickets that are not getting resolved despite multiple contacts and use the score to investigate what is causing these issues on a broader level. The FCR score can be used to guide training in the CS department.

3.     Customer Satisfaction Score

A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures the basic level of customer satisfaction. All companies can create flexible and creative approaches to measuring this score according to their product and brand.

However, customer satisfaction with customer services is integral to ensuring that your customer services are on track with the goals and beneficial to the customers.

The CSAT score can be measured by asking a simple question: “How satisfied are you with your customer service experience?” You can create a standard three-point, five-point, or even ten-point scale for a more in-depth review of your services.

Continuously measuring this score can help you track deficiencies in the CS structure and know which strategies are more effective to measure customer support success.

4.     Net Promoter Score

In the SaaS market, online reviews and forum discussions significantly impact a company’s sales. Having a good CS team and strategy also ensures that you get positive reviews because of good customer support.

However, word of mouth is still a huge factor in success, and nothing is stronger than personal recommendations of your product or service.

Loyal customers of any organization are open to recommending your product to other people, and this can be used as a customer support success measuring tool by the CS team.

Asking the simple question of “how likely are you to recommend us to your friends or family?” or, more specifically, “how likely are you to recommend our customer service to a friend who might be having issues with our product?” can help determine customer success.

The answer to these questions can categorize all customers into promotors who love the service and would recommend it, neutral customers who have had satisfactory experiences but do not hold strong feelings towards the service or the company, and detractors who are customers that have had a negative experience and would share that negative experience with their friends or family.

A net promoter score (NPS) aims to shift as many customers as possible towards being promotors, and tracking their journey with the company is essential. Asking the promotion question in surveys or during customer interaction is vital to maintaining a good customer base.

5.     Retention Rate

Building customer loyalty is one of the organization’s most important CS goals. However, establishing a long-term relationship with clients, one that is based on trust and confidence, is no small task, but the rewards are also unmatched.

The customer retention rate can be calculated by using the following process:

  • – Define a time limit for your goal
  • – Note the number of customers at the start and end of that period
  • – Subtract any new customers that you acquired
  • – Divide the remainder by the number of customers at the beginning
  • – Multiply this number by 100.

 

The Bottom Line

Customer support success may seem impossible to measure when you don’t even know what you term “success.” But with some inner reflection, looking at customer retention, churn rates, and brand image, you can realize what it is to you.

Once you do that, KPIs are here to help you take the next few steps. Remember: Customers are the bread and butter of your business, and if you’re constantly losing them and can’t identify why, you won’t have a business.

Fortunately, KPIs like the NPS, CSAT, and FCR can help you find out whether your company has successfully retained customers. If it has, good for you! If it hasn’t, the scores provide you with a way to improve your current customer service processes.

It’s a win-win either way.

5 Steps to Improve Customer Support

Posted on by Supportbench

Every business seeks to improve customer support for customers who are the best and most valuable to the brand.

And every business has a second set of customers who are the best and most loyal to the brand but who might also be a bit less valuable.

Your best way to capture and retain both sets of customers is to invest and improve customer support.

Customer support works for both types of customers, but there’s one thing that separates them: A great customer service culture. And it can go a long way toward improving your bottom line.

You can have a killer customer support culture in your company without getting fancy. If you look at your customer support data from the analytics side of things, you’ll see there are a lot of actionable skills and behaviors that your team has that could be scaled up.

But we often hear business owners say, “I can’t afford to train my customer support team” – which is often the underlying belief of most small business owners.

The cost to improve customer support and training a remote team is often very low, but having a basic training program built into the organization from the beginning is the only true path to customer support success.

When new customers come through the door, it can take an extra minute for a support representative to kind of nurture them into a loyalty brand advocate. So, you don’t want to set up a support team that is ignorant of products and services and can’t then reinforce a user-friendly brand experience.

Instead, look at the bulk of your inbound communication as a customer onboarding process. You’re going to want to prepare and train your people to come to your consumers as experts in your brand and in your products and services – but a great customer service culture starts well before those people become members of your team.

Every support representative brings some kind of unique attributes that make them uniquely suited to help your customers. And with real customer experience leadership the organization can scale insights up into employee behaviors, communication, knowledge management and improve customer support.

A unified customer support framework can dramatically increase both customer success and revenue growth. You don’t have to hire people at every individual level for the support organization to be successful.

Luckily for you, there are platforms like Supportbench to help you grow your brand and scale your team in a way that gets results. Even “shy” teams can be refactored to deliver a better experience – and then scale up as needed. Now is the perfect time to get training right.

A lot of high-growth companies are growing their customer support teams, but they’re also ramping up their engagement platforms to support a growing customer experience.

Your business can succeed while never losing its long-term focus on customer satisfaction and value to your customers.

The road to a customer-centric company begins by better understanding the interests and values of your customers and making every interaction with them feel more relevant. Following an agile, iterative approach to customer support can help you change how and where you support your customers to support that effort.

Here are five tips to foster a winning customer service culture:

1. Listen to your customers

Listen for and actively invite feedback from your customers to understand what’s important to them and uncover opportunities to improve how you provide service. Have your customer success team play active listening to customers as you work with them to understand the performance of your products and services, identify and solve recurring challenges that may be preventing customers from reaching their goals, and better predict the next level of conversations and service visits.

2. Understand the business and your internal infrastructure

Employees, product, and business teams all have different operating requirements and goals. People are passionate about their products and services; sales teams are very motivated to increase bookings.

Sellers are incentivized to make a sale and keep their commission as an indication of product success. There are many factors that come into play that affect your service team’s success that vary from the needs of your product management team to employees’ affinity for technology and customer success resources.

Before you can help your customers, you need to first build up your customer support team to adapt to the needs of your organizations.

3. Don’t be too rigid

There are many good reasons you want to offer the highest level of customer support you can, but you need to implement a plan that works in all departments. Start by hiring for who you want to be.

When you have your ideal customer, go for it!

But not all companies want to attract customers that way. Help as many as you can, but remember that your customer success team isn’t set up for fixing problems.

Be flexible and have a plan that uses a consultative, “we’ll explain your problem to you” approach instead of a one-way mode where they’re filling in every single need the customer has with solutions.

4. Use metrics to guide your conversations

You’ll quickly discover that there are many metrics to keep in mind when working with your customer support team. Talk to your customer success team about what metrics matter most for them so they can improve customer support.

Develop a communication plan to identify bottlenecks that could limit speed of resolution. Build those metrics into your employee performance and evaluation plans to improve customer support.

5. Focus on quality

The easiest way to take a task off your plate is to eliminate it completely. If there’s something that you’re spending your time on that isn’t worth it or could be done quicker, start by reducing the frequency of that conversation. Make a plan to track all feedback and help sell solutions instead of solve every customer ’s issue.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

What is excellent customer service?

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Excellent customer service is defined as service that treats customers with a friendly attitude and tries to resolve their problems or question as efficiently as possible. – Reference.com

Continue reading “What is excellent customer service?”