If you carefully analyze flourishing companies, you’ll notice a common factor contributing to their success – exceptional customer support.
As experts often say – “customers are the kings,” delighting customers with best-in-class support services is always recommended to beat the competition and stay ahead of the curve.
But, how do you know the customer support offered is best-in-class or needs improvement?
If this question resonates with you, establishing KPIs for customer service operations is the answer you seek for.
Without setting up Key Performance Indicators, it is highly impossible to measure and improve your customer service, in other words delighting your customers.
Therefore, the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) associated with your customer service goals must be carefully conceived, set up, communicated, and managed for best results.
Establishing customer service Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and relentlessly tracking will yield impressive results.
Concrete data analytics from the customer service helpdesk tool will lead to improved decision making, address gaps in service and help you achieve your overall customer service and revenue goals.
A successful helpdesk system needs to generate essential customer service metrics, for continuous improvement, including but not limited to the following:
The number of tickets raised for each product line: Tracking the number of tickets raised per product line against sales, customer demographics, etc., will reveal many things about creating knowledgebase articles that are simpler and self-explanatory to help some particular customer demography.
Tickets as a proportion to sales will tell you if the curve is improving over time.
Average Handling Time (AHT): If your customers choose phone as a channel to raise their issues or queries and tickets are raised by your agents on behalf of the customers, the average handling time of such calls is an important measure. You can measure every agent spends on raising tickets vs. resolving issues.
Tickets by channel: With omnichannel ticketing, it is essential to study the trends of where the tickets are originating from: phone, in-person, web portal, mobile app, chat, email, social media, etc. If you find that some channels are growing more than others, it is vital to strengthen your technology resources and focus more on those channels to make raising tickets smoother for the customers.
Expert agent groups: It is essential to measure how the helpdesk tool automatically assigns tickets to expert groups and whether those areas of expertise should be grown or shrunk in proportion to the changing volume of tickets and builds trust in customers as they will be happier dealing with experts for that quick response rather than being shunted around.
First Contact Resolution time: Time to resolve the ticket after the customer opens the ticket for each issue and compares it with industry standards, or comparing it with your business’ past performances to ensure continuous improvement.
SLA adherence: Every right helpdesk product would come with a facility for you to set up internal Service Level Agreements for each ticket based on issue criticality. If agents breach the SLAs, the supervisor will receive a report for corrective action.
Knowledge base reference: The number of references made by customers to knowledgebase articles needs careful monitoring. If the customers do not raise a ticket after referring to the knowledgebase, that is a case of self-service. The goal of any sound helpdesk system is to drive customers more and more towards self-service. Tracking individual knowledgebase articles will help you understand their popularity, how easy they are, and practical they are.
Average ticket resolution time: The average time taken to resolve tickets, though a very generic measure, gives you a crucial understanding of the performance of your helpdesk agents. In general, you should schedule training for all agents taking longer than this average time and focus on improving their performance.
Customer feedback scores: Regular feedback from customers on how satisfied they are with their ticket resolution is an essential measure of the success of your customer service initiative. This survey should cover the agent’s customer empathy, knowledge, speed, FCR, and response accuracy. Constantly improving feedback surveys is an important customer service goal.
Monitoring the channel customers are more inclined to leave feedback helps evolve future customer service strategies.
Agent time tracking: It is crucial to monitor how individual agents spend their time; is it more towards ticket resolution, or are they burdened with internal reporting processes that distract them from their primary customer service goal.
This measure can lead towards the introduction of more and more automation of agent’s internal tasks.
Individual agent performance: It is critical to compare the time taken by all agents against the best agent’s performance. Use the data and recording from your best agents to calibrate the performance of average or below-average agents. A healthy culture to promote constructive competition is celebrating the best performance on the floor as often as possible.
Ticket cost: Each ticket has a cost associated with it. A raised ticket has to be researched and resolved, sometimes by an individual agent and sometimes by effective collaboration with other teams. The longer it takes and the more staff it involves, the more expensive it is to resolve the ticket.
Monitoring this and brainstorming alternative solutions for the customer to seek self-service could save your company a lot of money and resources.
To arrive at the cost, break down the cost per agent minute and find out how many minutes every agent spends on each issue. This metric should improve with time, especially if your training efforts are beginning to bear fruit.
Customer escalations: Lesser your customer complaint escalations, superior is your agents’ performance.
Monitoring this will pave the way for improvement with time and training. But, on the other hand, customer escalations will have a direct negative impact on your revenues and brand.
It’s all about the customer. All the metrics should point to constantly improving customer satisfaction. Each KPI by itself may not be an indicator of anything substantial, but when viewing holistically together, they should point to improved customer service, which means enhanced revenues.
It’s essential that while the individual agents are focused on improving their performance metrics, the supervisors and management should focus on aligning KPIs with their overall customer service goals. If you’re looking for a helpdesk system that will boost your customer service and delight your customers, try DeskEngage now.