11 Metrics for a great customer support tool
Someone I recently worked with asked me “what are the most popular metrics you recommend we follow in our business?” Over the years, I’ve noticed a few metrics that you NEED to keep an eye out for in order to have a successful business.
I know you hear this often enough, but I have to say it: every business is different and one size fits all is not what I or anyone else would recommend.
However, there are fundamentals to measures success against for retail, subscription based businesses, service business, financial sector and even healthcare.
I have comprised a top 10 list for you to either easily scroll through or read in a bit more detail.
Ticket Channels
Where do your customers reach out to you most from? Is it via emai? Chat? Phone? Social Media or Messaging apps? Your app (via the SDK) and/or your website? A form, right? Don’t tell me you’re the coding buff and you use the API…
Omnichannel is the way of the masters nowadays. Especially since Covid, users have been pushing the limits of how brands need to support them. There is no room for “we don’t do that, you can only find us here“ type of support. Well, sure it is, if you want to lose the people you tell that to.
But you’re smart, you don’t want to do that. You want to keep them by your side. How do you do that with limited resources? Well, you set correct expectations. “Hey, we take longer via Email because we need to read your request, ask more questions and go figure, it takes a bit longer. Hop over to our chat system or categorise your request using this form“.
No one expects you to be perfect, but everyone expects you to deliver. It’s common sense that you cannot support every channel out there. You have to have a few channels that you do well on. What I mean is, for example, your agents do really well on the phone, via chat and form requests. These have to be TOP.
How about the rest? Well, until you scale and actually have money to invest in supporting other channels, you want to look into how you can automate replies to these lower resources channels that you don’t support in the best way. E.g “Dear client, on Instagram, we have 2-4h responses, but we’ll be with you“.
You want to streamline all your support requests into Zendesk and automate tickets coming from all your channels and set the right expectations. E.g We take this long on a particular channel, however, on Facebook we take less, our business hours are 9-6, someone will be right with you, we are experiencing a high number of requests but we’re working hard”.
I hope this makes sense.
2. Agent efficiency
How efficient are your agents? How many tickets are being handled by each agent? Why are some of them taking so long? Are they being fair to their team and dealing with the same number of requests? How well are your departments doing? How many tickets do they solve on a daily basis? How about on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis? Who is your best performing agent? It might be that your team could function well on incentives, whoever reaches their target gets a bonus.
However, while holding someone accountable is normal, so is holding yourself accountable. Have you made sure your agents are happy in their working environment? Happier and more engaged staff perform infinitely better at their job and are less likely to want to change their job. You have to be realistic about keeping the people that are the forefront of making your clients happy, to be themselves happy. I talk about agent happiness in a dedicated piece here.
3. First reply time
What is your first reply time? If your first reply time is longer than 3h, you might want to look into reducing that number down. Clients don’t like to wait and nobody does for that matter. Why should they? They paid for your product/service and they expect it to work, and if it doesn’t, they want to you fix it for them.
I won’t go into the technicals in this post, but if you want to understand the fundamentals of how first reply time works in Zendesk, I cover that in this article. Give it a read, I’ll wait for you.
Now that you understand how it works, it is important to understand that this is one of the most important metrics for your Customer Satisfaction. Failing to have a good first reply time results in frustrated customers and a likelihood of receiving a bad satisfaction rating.
There’s many reasons as to why your first reply time is off and I go over this in greater detail in another post I wrote on the matter here.
4. Resolution time
This is one of the hardest metrics as it encompasses most of your support setup. The approach I recommend is starting to ask yourself a few questions.
How long does it take for your agents to solve a request? How many touches do tickets need until they are dealt with?
What is the full resolution by time brackets and where do you solve most of your tickets?
Why do some requests need longer to solve and considerably more touches? Is the product not well documented? Is the communication with clients confusing?
You ideally need 2-3 touches to make sure you get a positive score on your customer satisfaction. I will not speculate on the ideal resolution time as it’s the lowest possible or it shouldn’t exist in the first place.
5. Requests by Team
How are your teams doing? Do you have a tier based support where the bottom level deals with the more general types of requests while the higher levels deal with the more complex issues?
Do you offer support in multiple languages? Do you have external teams dealing with some types of tickets?
Do you triage your tickets from a main bucket and assign requests based on the type of requests you receive? Bare in mind this means a lower first reply time.
Do you have some of your request types automated to automatically be routed to the appropriate teams? A hybrid of this and triaging tickets is usually the best approach.
Also, you need to have a ticket ownership in mind, meaning who is responsible for tickets? Is it first agent that replies to the ticket, or is it the agent that solves it?
Whatever the case, in order to manage team performance, you need to have your teams well defined so that you can keep the accountable and measure their performance.
6. Good/Bad CSAT
It’s great if you have a View/Queue designated for requests that have been responded to. This way you can quickly turn a negative experience into a positive one. It’s quite common that only 18% of users respond to your CSAT survey.
In order to increase that number, you might want to look into seeing if you’re asking questions with specific results in mind. First thing you can control is when you’re sending the survey, it might be that you’re sending it too soon or a bit too late. Ideally it’s 10 - 24h after the interaction. You also want to keep in mind the hours of the day when you send the interaction. 12noon seems to be the sweet spot when you get most answers to your survey back. Before you go out there and fix your Zendesk automation to fire at that hour, keep in mind that you get more responses, but not necessarily the positive answer you’re expecting. Zendesk writes an interesting piece about this here.
If your user base reaches out with multiple requests per week, you might want to look into restricting the CSAT survey from firing only after 7 days have past since the last one was sent. I’ve written an article on it here.
I’m not sure you use the feature, but Zendesk allows end-users to choose 5 reasons why the experience was negative. You can tailor these 5 reasons based on what you think is most relevant for you business. You can report on these 5 reasons as well.
Before I forget, I want to share a quick NONO which I always advise against: some clients exclude potential bad satisfaction ratings to avoid messing up their global satisfaction score. I’d say it’s better to hear all kind of feedback, especially negative, as it’s the only way to fix what’s broken.
7. Request types
Do you have your requests well categorised? If you do, then this is arguably one of the most important metrics in your system. Based on this number you can make operational, functional, product, roadmap, content, sales, onboarding and whatever process you can think of, you name it, you will be able to make all sorts of decisions.
Is it a billing request, technical, onboarding, accounting etc request?
I’m sure you know about this, but keep your request types custom field up to date. Feed into it from all your channels, make it mandatory for end-users when they use the form, make it mandatory for your agents to use it before submitting a ticket to Solved. Automate so based on different keywords, options, tags etc different options are chosen for the request types.
Use this custom field to create internal processes and escalations. Use it to enrich your Knowledge base or your template replies to be able to use AIs to automatically reply to requests based on past experiences. Be ahead of the curve.
8. Region
If you’re a company operating in more than one locations, then this custom field is the one that will dictate how well your business is doing in new vs old locations, how well your staff is trained and if the resources available are sufficient.
9. Special use cases - that can be transformed to sales Leads
Welp, this is more “you know best what this means for your business“ territory. As the name suggests, you want to have a way of flagging potential leads with a tag or whatever you like. You can then export these users and engage your sales team.
As a quick suggestion, you can potentially even set a business rule that if the tag “sales_lead“ is present, automatically send an email with the contact to your sales team’s email address.
You can obviously use Zendesk Sell for your sales funnel and keep everything in one place.
10. Guide Knowledge Base
You want to see the shape your Knowledge base is in. You’d want to update it frequently and keep it tidy.
What are the most popular articles? If there’s an article which is being google the most, maybe make that article a promoted article so it stands out for your user base more.
A well documented product is key to self service. It is the doorway to an efficient support system, it is the launching pad for applying intelligence on. A well documented product can lead the way for AIs to learn and support clients in a modern way. Leave the repetitive tasks to the machines, and focus your displaced agents on selling more of your product.
Save company money.
11. Number of agent replies
What is the number of replies solving a ticket needs? Is it more than 3-5? Find out why, because no one likes back and forth. Neither your agents, neither your clients.
The number of replies unearths a poor team training, a poorly documented Knowledge Base, a bad process documentation and most of all, product fails.
I hope the above helps.
What other metrics are vital for your business?