Different industries with niche expertise strive to offer unique solutions to a saturated landscape. One of the crucial efforts in building an authoritative presence in your field is to provide services worthy of making your business stand out against the fierce competition. But even with a data-driven and compelling approach to your marketing, sales, and other supporting roles, the key to unlocking your growth as a company is within your customer services.
In every business, customer service serves as the lifeblood that keeps everything alive and kicking. Without satisfying customer needs, most brands will fail to hit their target and miss their opportunity to improve their value to the market. Support teams don’t only pick up calls so you won’t; they also improve the customer experience and impact their buying decisions, all of which help create a stronger sense of brand loyalty.
The Role of Customer Services in Boosting Your Brand Identity and Enhancing Relationships
Seeing as the quality of your customer services can make or mar your reputation and entire marketing pipeline, it goes without saying that tracking your support’s performance matters in more ways than one. But gathering data isn’t the problem when it comes to refining your supporting roles — it’s about honing in on the right performance benchmarks to effectively bridge the gap between your customer services and business.
When you’re on top of your customer service’s conduct, you can identify areas that need strategic improvement. This begs the question: what are the key metrics your company should consider for your customer service?
Five Crucial Customer Service Metrics You Should Look Into
- Customer Request Volume
The first factor you need to break down when assessing the quality of your customer services is to look within your team’s capabilities. You can immediately identify if there are laps in your customer support, allowing you to make operational changes that can impact the rest of your customer service.
With that in mind, focus on tracking your customer request volume in a specific period. This can reveal critical pointers in your production from the weight of your team’s workload, whether you have enough people to manage your customer support, and if your request volume increases or decreases over time.
Putting the spotlight on your team can unveil hidden pain points affecting other aspects of your customer services, so considering your customer request volume should help you understand how to improve your distribution of resources.
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
The more steps customers have to take to get answers to their queries, make a request, or have someone address their concerns, it totals into a confusing customer journey that ultimately leaves them with a poor experience. In that regard, customer satisfaction increases when they don’t have to put in too much effort to get attention.
With 73 percent of customers thinking that the “first contact resolution” has a significant impact on their satisfaction and your brand’s first impression, setting your sights on the average number of replies per customer request proves to be pivotal to your support team’s growth.
A high CES is indicative of a bottleneck in your team deliverables and workflow since it means the service requests are not directed to the right person or that your team is accumulating a backlog due to a lack of support.
By focusing on this metric, you can enhance the customer journey, ensure everyone has an easy time navigating your services, and derive greater insight into what your support team needs to deliver the right responses.
- First Response Time
As mentioned above, your “first contact resolution” can pave the way for happier customers since the faster your team resolves your market’s issues, the higher your reputation grows. Responding to customer feedback, questions, or problems promptly can make them feel cared for, plus it also gives your team more time to develop tailor-made solutions.
A negative experience with your product can quickly be resolved if your support team manages to nip their pain points in the bud, allowing your business to turn setbacks into an opportunity to prove your brand’s efforts into improving customer relationships.
Keep in mind that different communication channels vary in expectations regarding your first response time, so social media platforms may demand live chat support for prompt responses, while e-mails can extend the waiting time within the day.
- Average Time to Resolution
Knowing your first response time unfolds your support team’s average response time, which measures the efficiency of your customer service efforts. Beyond the prompt response, your team should also deliver resolutions within a satisfactory timeframe since it leaves little-to-no room for your customers to feel discontent with your business.
You can calculate your average time to resolution by dividing your total resolution time by your total number of requests.
While a speedy resolution is appreciated, it’s crucial to provide quality solutions that have long-lasting benefits to your customers. After all, there’s no point in trying to save face by churning out quick fixes that don’t necessarily address your customer’s unique needs and concerns.
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Now that you have a greater understanding of your customer request volume and customer effort score’s performance, you can lead up to the golden standard for every customer service: customer satisfaction. This is the heart of every business, the one that dictates whether your efforts reach the right consumers in ways that they can recognize.
You can essentially measure your CSAT by measuring the number of satisfied customers, dividing it by survey responses, and multiplying the result by a hundred. This results in the overall percentage of your CSAT.
The Bottom Line: Looking at the Right Customer Service Metrics to Understand Your Audience’s Needs and Provide Better Support
No matter your industry, customer satisfaction is a top priority. Whether or not your target market leaves feedback, ensuring your customers’ happiness translates into a strong, ongoing relationship wherein your audience trusts your brand above the rest. This means they’ll likely buy from your business again, propelling your business forward and allowing it to flourish as you scale through the years.
How Can CrewBloom Help You?
There’s no denying that outsourcing the right talents to support and grow your team can be challenging, especially with the distance and communication barriers involved. Thankfully, CrewBloom provides a platform for companies to connect with top-tier professionals who have an exceptional experience with remote sales and support roles.
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