How to Measure Customer Support Success

February 5, 2019

Discover How To Measure Customer Support Success With This Tips And A Six-Steps Process

Want to grow your business?

Who doesn’t!

But to do it, you need to delight, retain, and increase your customer base. In other words, you’ll need to boost customer satisfaction. Do that, and you’ll expand your business.

Increasing customer satisfaction does several things—all of them good:

Builds customer loyalty
Generates repeat business
Improves word-of-mouth advertising and online reviews
Pumps up sales and profits

“Satisfied customer is the best source of advertisement”
― G.S. Alag

These benefits can directly impact the growth of your business.

But increasing customer satisfaction isn’t as easy as it sounds.

To do it, you’ll first need to measure existing customer satisfaction, then create a program designed to boost support to a higher level. Do that, and your business will thrive.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction is Job One

Measuring customer satisfaction first creates a baseline record of how well you’re meeting customer expectations. Measuring satisfaction also helps you:

Identify attributes critical to customers
Create and sustain statically valid metrics
Generate measures you can compare with competitors
Prioritize and execute corrective actions
Reveal where improvement is needed

The last benefit tells you where to make changes to customer support to boost satisfaction levels. That, in turn, builds customer loyalty, improves customer retention, and increases profitability—critical steps in growing your business.

Measuring Up to Customer Expectations

A critical step in measuring customer support (check out this free customer support worksheet for measuring success) is determining key performance indicators (KPI)s. They provide targets for your workers to shoot for and direction for your improvement effort. The trick is finding the right KPIs. You want KPIs that fit your needs.

Below are seven KPIs you might consider using when measuring your customer satisfaction:

Overall satisfaction with support — You want this rating as high as possible. The best way of measuring it is by sending out surveys regularly. Over time, they’ll tell you how you’re doing month to month, quarter to quarter, year to year.
Customer retention — If customers are happy with your support, they’ll keep coming back again and again and again. Also called customer loyalty, this KPI measures customers’ stickiness. The more customers keep coming back, the more sales you make.
Net promoter score — One huge benefit of retaining customers is they tell other customers about your support and recommend it to others. This KPI measures the rate at which customers tell others about you and your company. If it’s high, you’re doing something right.
Conversion rate — If your customer support is epic, this KPI will be high. It tells you how often customers interact with your company and then buy. It’s a critical KPI to track if you want to grow your business.
Average resolution time — Another critical KPI to track, this metric indicates how quickly your support team resolves customer issues. Good support teams keep this resolution as low as possible by resolving issues quickly.
Active customer issues — If your team is resolving problems quickly, you won’t have many issues to deal with at one time. Like average resolution time, this rating needs to below. If you have a high number, you have a higher-than-usual volume of complaints, your team is slow at resolving issues, or your product needs updating.
Employee productivity — Different companies measure this KPI in different ways. Regardless of how you measure it, this KPI is a critical factor when it comes to customer support. It means that your team is dealing with issues quickly, efficiently, and effectively.

These KPIs are just some of the metrics you’ll want to consider in your effort to measure customer support success. Additional KPIs to consider include employee turnover rate, brand attributes, complaint escalation rate, and cash flow.

Once you’ve determined your KPIs and measured customer satisfaction, you’ll want to take one more step to grow your business. You’ll want to compare your ratings to those of your competitors.

The question is: How do you stack up against your competitors’ numbers.

Unfortunately, this information is rarely public information.

What options are there?

Here are a few ideas you can use to gather competitive data:

Check online reviews – See what existing customers are saying about your competitor’s products and service.
Trade shows and Networking Events – Use these events as an opportunity to learn about your competitors.
Analyze their advertising – What message is your competitor putting forward in their advertising? What is their value proposition?
Follow them on social media – Companies work hard to connect with their target audience on social media. See what messages they are sharing and how people respond.

How to Measure Customer Satisfaction

When measuring support, you need to generate customer feedback. Surveys can help do that. Of course, numerous ways exist to execute surveys—from how you design the instrument to how you analyze the data.

But you need to execute your surveys correctly to get the most out of them. Below is a six-step process for doing that:

Develop a plan (includes determining your goals)
Create a customer satisfaction survey
Choose your survey’s trigger and timing
Send out the survey’s questionnaire
Analyze incoming survey data
Make adjustments; repeat the process

Following these six steps when executing customer surveys and they’ll provide the data you need to determine customer satisfaction.

Survey results may show your customers think highly of your company’s customer support, which is great. Keep doing whatever you’re doing.

But what if the surveys show the opposite—that your customer satisfaction level is low? You’ll need to remedy that if you want to keep making a profit. A great place to start is your call center.

Improving Your Call Center’s Customer Satisfaction

Your call center is the ‘face” of your business. So, if it isn’t doing the job, you lose customers and business. When today’s customers don’t get the service they expect, they bolt. That won’t help your business grow.

Below are five basic principles on which to base your call center improvement efforts:

Show your team what you consider good customer support, then set clear expectations for them to achieve it.

Make sure your team understands the business from your customer’s perspective. Help them do that with training and education.

Celebrate successes when they occur. Reward those team members that go above and beyond. Also, make team members understand you’ll accept nothing less than a culture of excellence.

Keep customers’ needs foremost in mind. Use technology, for example, to minimize the need for customers to repeat who they are and what the issue is.

Make sure your customers feel like they’re the only ones that matter. Have team members use their first names, employ personal information where appropriate, and congratulate customers on their birthdays.

Use these five principals as the foundation for your remedial program. They’ll help you boost customer support where it’s needed.

Conclusion

Customer satisfaction is critical to growing your business. If customers aren’t happy with your support, they’ll go elsewhere. Make no mistake about that. Customer defections, however, can shrink your profitability.

To remedy that, you’ll need to improve customer support success. Measuring satisfaction is the first step in doing that. It will pinpoint where customer support is lacking and where to make changes. Improving customer service not only boosts profitability, but it also sets the stage for you to grow your business.