Tag Archives: Customer Survey

The Metrics You Need To Use To Produce Good CX

Have you ever had a bad tasting dish that caused you an aversion from that food altogether? While you might know the food you don’t like, you probably don’t know the specific ingredient that ruined the taste of the whole dish. It becomes nearly impossible to figure out what caused that food aversion and might lead to additional issues in the future if unexplained.

To put this analogy into customer experience terms, a well-set plate of an exquisite looking dish cannot be credited as delectable if all ingredients do not compliment each other well. Even if only one of them tastes bad, the whole dish suffers and a customer will lose his appetite. Customer Support Teams are just like that. All the individual ingredients must be flavorful so that in the end a delicious dish could be presented.

Trying to figure out a specific issue might be very difficult, but don’t worry! There are several ways to assess the performance of each individual in your team. With the right CX Metrics and KPIs, you can detect where there is a need for improvement or which individual is putting in a complete effort and is dedicated to offering exceptional customer service. In addition, by using tools like journey maps, you can analyze and understand other customer pain points that need resolution.

However, before you get started, it’s important to understand which CX metrics are right for you. Check out this list of some of the most popular customer support metrics and select the ones that make the most sense for your business.

1. Average Resolution Time

One method of evaluating how well the customer service representatives are performing is to record the average time it takes for them to resolve a customer complaint permanently.

This is an accurate measure of productivity as this metric determines whether the agent is good at resolving customer complaints and can deal with them quicker rather than building on to the problem and dragging it for longer.

Just follow this formula to calcuate the Average Resolution Time (ART)

ART = (Total Reply Time) / (Total Number of Requests) 

2. The volume of Requests Handled

First, you would want to know the total of some of the requests that were addressed to your agents in a given period. This way you can assess the workload and work performance of the organization itself. Seldom customers call to praise the product or service. More often they contact the agents to complain.

So, to appraise the performance of the customer service agents, you must keep a track of how many requests are correctly addressed and how productive your agents have been. The higher this number, the more efficient and diligent your agents will be.

While it is possible to calculate this without a CRM, using the right CRM system can make this calculation significantly easier.

3. Conversation Reply Speed

Ask yourself this question: after how long did my agent take to respond to the follow-up questions raised by the customer?  The speed at which the customer service representative responds to any sequential concerns presented by the customer after the initial response determines the productivity and performance of the agent.

If you take too long to respond, the customer would get annoyed and probably leave a bad review or would no longer engage in business with you.

4. Requests escalated

Escalated requests are important for a couple of reasons.

Employee Training – This is an important metric that you keep a track of. If a request is escalated to a superior, then it means that the agent has failed to address the concerns of the customer. You may believe that this is the endpoint that every customer service agent should dread and avoid at all costs.

So, this metric precisely determines if a representative is good at his job or not. The higher the number of these requests, the more probable it is that the agent is not qualified or competent enough to cater to customers’ requests or needs.

Product Gap – multiple issues of the same type that get escalated often point to a product gap. In this case, the issue is not with the CSR but potentially with the sales or customer success function. Here, the customer was promised certain functionality and the product simply did not deliver.

Options here include retraining other departments or depending on the gap, working with the product team to understand what the client actually needs and coming up with a solution that works. The latter will definitely drive an increase in a clients customer experience.

5. Number of Complaints Regarding a Customer Service Representative

It is highly likely that a single individual is unable to entertain the concern of all customers. Some people are just not naturally drawn towards resolving customers’ issues and this can gravely affect their performance.

So, by evaluating this metric you can judge whether an individual is cut out for this job and is he/she able to address customers’ issues properly or not. We talked a bit about empathy in my round-up of the top CX posts in September and I’d urge you to read that post for more information and detail.

It is important to understand that a single complaint is sometimes not relevant. Rather, what leaders need to look for is a pattern of behavior.

6. Time Taken to Offer Initial Response

If you aim to offer the best customer service, you must keep a meticulous record of your initial response time. The higher this number goes, the more irritated the customers will get.

Representatives must be on their toes when it comes to addressing customers’ concerns. The customers must be instantly put through to the right person or the respective department, so they don’t have to wait unnecessarily. Measuring first call resolution is one of the most important KPIs for customer service teams.

7. Customer Service Rating

This metric is the best indicator of how well your individual customer rep’s performance has been. This number shows how the customers viewed and marked the performance of the agent.

This rating can be garnered by customer feedback, comments, or a star-rating. Companies generally use customer surveys to understand how customers perceive their teams. Another great indicator for companies that continues to gain in popularity is the NPS score.

8. Sales made after Contact

The objective of the customer service team should be to address customers’ concerns, so they are satisfied with the product or service and continue to increase the sales of the organization.

So, if the agents are performing well, or are providing related cross-sells or upsells of the product then the sales would increase, and more revenue will be generated. So, this metric takes effective customer service as a determinant that affects sales.

9. Rate of Successful Resolutions

This rate is a major defining factor in the performance of each customer service agent. This rate shows how well individuals have performed and how successful they have been in resolving customer complaints and issues.

Having an agent who doesn’t handle many requests but has a significantly high successful resolution rate is worth having in the team.

You can calculate it by employing the formula:

Resolution Rate= (Resolved requests) / (Support Requests)

Conclusion

You can only deliver exceptional customer service if you know exactly what your customers are expecting from you and you don’t have to be a mind-reader for that. Stay close to your customers and make them feel heard and valued. Just track the above-mentioned metrics periodically and this way you would be able to appraise the performance of your customer service agents and the experience offered to your customers.

The Difference Between Customer Experience and Customer Feedback

In every business, the most important factor to satisfy to be able to become successful is the customer.  They are the very reason why businesses are willing to spend millions, just to get the attention of the customers.  The purpose here is to convince the customer to patronize their products or services.  And to achieve that, businesses strive to provide good or excellent customer experience and harvest good customer feedback.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience to me is the interaction, between the customers and the business itself, through its people, logistic, system, and management.  This is the result of all the collective efforts of the whole team, against the experience of their customers.  This includes:

  • How the staff welcomes the customers.  This is a very important factor in business.  The first time a customer step in your establishment/office, they already think of getting something from you.  They already expect that they will be treated with kindness and that the business put value in their presence.  So, if the staff was so welcoming to them, they will be sure of a good customer experience in your resort.
  • How the staff addressed their concerns.  Another way to be able to provide a good experience is being able to address all your customers concerns. Such complaint as leaking, not cold AC, no hot water, etc.  If you are able to address their concerns fast, they will have a good experience.
  • How the staff provides support. Support from staff is a welcome gesture from the new guests.  Supporting your customers in many little things will give your business a good start.

Providing Excellent Customer Experience

Since customer experience is important, here are a few tips, on how to make sure your customers will have one good experience:

  • Familiarity with your products/services. This first step is the most important.  Customers will always appreciate when the staffs answer their questions about the products.  Sometimes, a customer’s doesn’t know the location of some items. 
  • Be friendly. Be friendly to anyone that enters your establishment.  A simple smile and greetings will make a difference.  You need to do that to get good feedback as well.  Do not be judgmental towards anybody’s looks.  Treat everyone as equal being as they are the same customers and paid the same amount of money.
  • Training. Training is equally important to provide your customers with good customer experience.  If your staff is trained on standard customer service, there is no reason your customers will not have a good customer experience.
  • Respect.  Respect your customers, and you will also get respect.  And the respect you showed your customers, will then convert into profit.  Customers when you show them respect, they will not forget it.  This will remind them of your resort/hotel when they plan to visit your place again.
  • Be responsive. Some staffs in many businesses are not so responsive when customers are asking for any details.  But, being able to respond accordingly to their queries will make them feel important.

What is Customer Feedback?

Customer feedback in my own opinion is the result of the customer’s interaction with your business.  It is written by customers, to be able to show their gratitude for the service offered or they provided feedback to allow customers, to get share their experience of a certain product or services.  They also bring this customer feedback to give businesses to work for improvement.

The importance of customer feedback on the business

  • It improves products and services. Customer feedback will result in improvement in products and services, because, through it, you will know, the defects of the product. You will have time to make improvements and adjustments regarding their services.
  • Helps to know how customers react.  This will also help you to know how your customers reacted to their experiences in your business.  Getting their feedback, positive or negative, is still beneficial to your business.
  • Shows that you value their opinions.  This signifies that you value what is important to them.  This will change their impression on your business.  This will give them the impression, that they are valued in your business.
  • It makes you aware of the capability of your staff, in dealing with your customers.  Most often, the problem lies in your staff.  They cannot promote your products and services that lead to poor customer feedback.
  • It helps you make adjustments in the operation and management of your business.  Once you get negative feedback, you just have to look at the entire system.  If you need to re-design the system, do it.  If you only need to put some adjustments, then be it.  Then, try to get more customer feedbacks until you have perfected the system.
  • It will be a factor in future business strategies.  Running a business is done in stages.   Getting feedback from customers will make you decide to proceed to the next stage or fixed the current stage before going to the next level.

Poor customer experience will always result in poor customer feedback.  The best way to give your customer the best experience in your business is to make him at home and comfortable, while they are in your establishment. 

Giving them the importance and being attentive, to their every need’s, will always result, to their satisfaction.  Once they are satisfied, they will always want to provide customers feedback.

The success of every business lies in the execution and the customer’s satisfaction.  Failure on this regard will affect the profitability of a business. Unless it is fixed, and customer service is given utmost importance, business is destined to fail.

A customer’s feedback is just the mirror of how you deal with your customers. Don’t be afraid to get customers feedback, as it will help you redefine your business. 

The Voice of the Customer

There are many ways of learning what is essential in your business.  However probably the most powerful and least practiced is that of Customer Feedback.  Having the greatest widget in the world is useless if your customers don’t want to buy it and if it doesn’t resolve a perceived need.  Getting that information from your customers can be accomplished in a variety of ways though and it pays to ensure that you are doing as many of them as possible.  (One point to note – conducting a survey is important, but if you don’t actually do anything with those results, then you shouldn’t have wasted the time or the money in gathering that information!)

Customer Feedback Is Critical

In order to drive continual customer service improvements, companies need to focus on obtaining the information from their clients, analyzing that information and acting on that information.  Remember, as stated earlier … if no action is taken – don’t bother!

Capturing Customer F

Capturing what your customers want can be done via a variety of different means now a days.  Web and surveys are common as are physical surveys that are mailed out to customers.  Depending on the size of your business and your customer base, there are many large organizations that can assist in gathering, collating and analyzing this information for you, but if you are just starting out a simple spreadsheet with the feedback that you’ve received from your customers is a great starting point! 

Listen to them NOT just in your surveys but also in your daily interactions with them via your support and customer service teams.

Another great way to get information from customers is via focus groups.  Often used at the beginning of a product stage to determine WHAT customers want, it is just as effective afterwards to determine HOW you are performing and if you are meeting or exceeding expectations.

Another point to note – DO NOT over survey your customers.  It is quite common for different parts of the same company to send out different surveys to the SAME customer.  While it is obviously important to that division, the information that is returned will not be as useful as the customer will NOT be providing an unbiased response. 

It is best if all survey’s are done via a centralized team or department and then the results of that survey shared among the company as a whole. Customer feedback collected through surveys, e-mails, phone calls, online chat and other channels can be combined into a single instance, integrating both structured and unstructured data into a central platform and enabling companies to extract maximum insight from the information collected in a cost-effective and timely manner.

Analyzing the Data

Customer feedback is subjective.  It always will be and this needs to be understood by the group running the survey and appropriate steps taken.  Another very significant point is that when survey’s are sent out it, it is essential that steps are taken to “tie” the response to a specific issue so that you are able to make the most use of this information.  In addition, decisions via survey should never be taken unless the sample size is large enough.

Solving the Issues

Once you’ve determined what your customers want, prioritize those issues based on the 80/20 rule (Pareto principle) and let your clients know what you are doing to resolve the issues.  What your plan is, how soon you expect to have the issue resolved and what the benefits to them would be.  There is no harm in sharing a commonly perceived error with your existing users … THEY ALREADY KNOW IT’S THERE! … and if they see that you are going to take steps to resolve the problems they will understand that their best interests are in remaining with you.  Remember that these are already your customers – you just want to treat them the right way and sharing information with them is a simple and effective way of doing this.