How to Measure Customer Support Success

February 28, 2023

Discover How to Measure Customer Support Success with Easy 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 and customer satisfaction scores. Improve customer experience, and you’ll gain loyal customers and 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

“A satisfied customer is the best source of advertisement”

― G.S. Alag

These benefits can directly impact your customer satisfaction metrics and revenue.

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

If you’re looking to improve the customer journey, you’ll first need to measure existing customer satisfaction, then create a program designed to boost support to a higher level and increase customer retention rate. Do that, and your business will thrive.

Measure Customer Satisfaction

Customer service metrics create 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

Furthermore, when you measure customer service success you identify where you need to make changes to customer support to boost satisfaction levels. Your customer effort score helps you build customer loyalty, improves customer interaction and retention, and increases profitability—critical steps in growing your business.

Meet 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 the 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 over a period of time:

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, customer surveys will reveal customer service performance and 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. Also called customer loyalty, this KPI measures customers’ stickiness. The more customers keep coming back, the more sales you make.
Net promoter score — Customers happy with your service will always tell other people about your support and recommend your brand to others. This KPI measures the rate at which customers tell others about you and your company. If this KPI is high, you’re doing something right.
Conversion rate — If your customer support is epic, the associated KPI will be high. This customer support metric tells you how often customers interact with your company and then buy your products. It’s a critical KPI to track if you want to grow your business and increase customer satisfaction over time.
Average resolution time — Another critical metric to track, the average resolution time indicates how quickly your customer support agents resolve customer issues. Good customer service representatives keep this resolution as low as possible by resolving problems quickly and ensuring excellent customer experience.
Active customer issues— If your team is resolving problems quickly, you won’t have many issues to deal with at one time. Just like the average resolution time, this key metric needs to be low. If you have a high number, you have a higher-than-usual volume of complaints and dissatisfied customers, your customer support 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 customer service team is dealing with issues quickly, efficiently, and effectively.

These KPIs are just some of the valuable insights 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 numbers 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 their customer service experience.
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 channels – 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 and level of satisfaction, you need to generate customer feedback. Effective surveys can help you do that. Of course, numerous ways exist to execute surveys—from how you design the instrument to how you analyze the data.

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

Develop a plan (determine your goals)
Create a customer satisfaction survey
Choose your survey’s trigger and time period
Send out the survey questionnaire
Analyze survey responses and incoming survey data
Make adjustments; repeat the process.

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

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

But what if the surveys show the opposite—that your customer satisfaction level is low? Poor customer service needs to be addressed immediately if your goals are business growth and improved customer engagement. A great place to start is your call center.

Improve Your Call Center’s Customer Satisfaction

Your call center is the business card of your business. So, if you have unhappy customers and lower levels of customer satisfaction, your customer service agents aren’t doing their job properly and 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 for your call center improvement efforts:

Show your team what you consider exceptional customer service, 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 team members that go above and beyond in the name of customer happiness. Also, help 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 matter. Have team members use their first names, employ personal information where appropriate, and congratulate customers on their birthdays.

Use these five principles 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 the level of service they receive or the average response time to their demands, 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 also sets the stage for you to grow your business.

Post Update: The article was updated on February 28th, 2023, originally published on February 5th, 2019. It has been completely revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.