4 steps to uncovering the right metrics for customer service

Businesses are often surrounded by more data than they can handle. The trick is figuring out what is worth your time and attention and then identifying the information that is actionable. In other words, figuring out what to do about it.

Most marketing and sales departments are already driven by customer service analytics, from the monitoring of campaign results to tracking the velocity of leads through a pipeline. As a result, businesses usually have the tools needed to make informed decisions in these areas.

But what about customer service? How can you reorient customer service around analytics and integrate data into strategic decision-making?

It starts by taking an honest look at the quality of your current customer service, evaluating where you fall on the spectrum of good vs. bad support, and determining what constitutes “good support” for your industry and organization. While there are an overabundance of ways to measure and track support, it’’s important to find the right metrics, and the right metrics are different for everyone.

These four steps will help you identify your “right metrics” and create a data-centric customer service program.

1. Assess your current position
Think about how your customer service fits in with the big picture of your business. What are your current customer service goals and how do they stack up against your organization’s core values and strategic direction? Highlight the biggest problem areas/strengths of your customer service team and establish benchmarks.

2. Define your key components
List the ways you could measure and track the progression of service relative to your new targets such as FCR (first call resolution), abandoned calls, CSAT (customer satisfaction), etc. Identify the systems that are (or could be) tracking these metrics to determine how you can best access them. Next, use the insights you uncover to make adjustments or additions to your current customer service goals so that they become data-centric.

3. Build a culture of analytics
It’’s time to involve your customer service team——make sure to get the change agents on your side and have these key players lead by example. Together, determine an implementation strategy to develop an actionable list of requirements and best practices. This is critical to establishing a culture of analytics within your team———helping to better manage data assets and data health, which increases the quantity and quality of reporting.

4. Monitor your efforts
It’’s important to empower others to monitor their own success, and that means finding the right tools. From a simple distribution of ad-hoc reports to team utilization of a dashboarding tool, providing real-time information to your service reps will encourage self-development. A visual indicator of actual performance against benchmarks will provide the insight needed to set new goals for improvement and develop “good” customer service.

From big picture visualization to the valuable insights derived from regular reporting, these four steps will help you rein in all that data to provide better customer service and add considerable value to the larger organization.

Today’s guest post was the result of a mind share between Marcus Wong and Kate Thomas, self-proclaimed data geeks at Keboola, one of GoodData’s most experienced implementation partners.