There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your business’s overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow. Tracking the overall state of the experience you give your customers is like monitoring your business' blood pressure, its importance cannot be understated.
Customer experience is the customer's perception of your company from every touchpoint in their lifetime of interactions with your company.
Generally, a touchpoint occurs every time the customer interacts with the company or its products, some of which include your social media channels, customer service personnel, mobile apps, brick-and-mortar stores, etc
Technically, you do not have a sustainable business model if you do not have a strategy in place to retain your customers. Today we deep dive into the key metrics every business should track and why it is important.
Customer support is basically making sure customers are successful in solving whatever problem they came to your business to help them solve
Customer service metrics are performance indicators used for tracking, measuring, and analyzing the efficiency of the interactions you have with your customers at every touchpoint and the best part is that these indicators are actually from your customers' point of view, not yours. Hence there's no room for biases or assumptions, only facts based on the data. Anything that cannot be measured, cannot be managed, or improved therefore tracking these metrics will help you understand what steps to take.
Without Accurate Customer Data, You're Going To Make Smart Assumptions Rather Than Informed Decisions.
Below are 5 Key Performance Indicators To Measure The Success Of Your Customer Support Strategy:
1. Customer Satisfaction Score
On a scale of "I am never buying from this business again" to "Oh my goodness, I love it !!" How satisfied are your customers? You can assess this metric by sending out customer satisfaction surveys that ask customers to rank their recent support experience on a scale of 1 to 5 or as "good" or "bad".
Customer satisfaction scores are a very straightforward way to know where you stand with your customers and how they feel about your brand. It gives you quantitative insight into the state of your customer support strategy.
2. Customer Satisfaction Survey
Unlike customer satisfaction score which is more quantitative data, customer satisfaction surveys are more geared toward gathering qualitative data. Customer satisfaction survey helps you gain more context because they include open-ended questions that prompt customers to give more details about their interaction with your business. For instance, if your customer satisfaction score was 5 stars, your customer satisfaction survey can ask why it was 5 stars. It helps you identify areas of improvement to know what you can do better, what you should stop doing altogether, and/or what you should start doing.
3. Resolution Time
Resolution time refers to the amount of time it takes for support personnel to completely attend to or solve the customer's problem. Resolution time really matters because customers don’t only want their problem solved, they also want it solved in a timely manner. When monitoring this metric, it is important to study the patterns across various support tickets and understand why certain complaints or support personnel take longer to resolve the issue. This way it is easier to get to the root of the issue and make improvements and adjustments.
4. Net Promoter Score
Net promoter score measures customer loyalty and satisfaction and tells you how likely a customer is to recommend your product or service to someone. A high net promoter score indicates that you have exceeded or at least met your customer satisfaction to the extent that they can be ambassadors of your brand. You can track this metric by asking buyers how likely they are to recommend your brand to others on a scale of 1 to 10. The photo above portrays the domino effect, and that is exactly the kind of influence net promoter score has on your brand. If all your customers are happy enough to recommend your business to others, even if you have 90 customers, now that is 180 more people assuming they each speak to just one person about your brand. And the opposite is also true. If your customers have a bad experience and they all give the people they know negative feedback about your brand, then that is 180 people who won’t patronize your products/services.
5. First Response Time
This metric measures how long it takes for someone from your company to initially respond to a customer support ticket or request. A longer first response time may be an indication that the support tools, processes, and people need to improve. A good rule of thumb is to let your customers in what timeframe they should expect to hear back from you, you can tell them you typically respond within 12 hours, a day, 2 business days, etc This is particularly helpful during the peak seasons in your industry. In most cases, waiting isn’t the problem. Waiting in uncertainty is what creates frustration. Let your customers be certain about when they can expect to hear back from you.