“We give amazing customer service!”
Of course you do. So what. So does your competition. You can win with what you measure, and it’s a rare instance that your company will deliver mind-glowingly fast and selfless service, but also have a product/service lacking depth and functionality, and also is at a price 3x the competition and you still win. Enter - the realities of critical support. And, support starts well before the sale. I’d define customer support activities as “any interaction with your company that influences a sale that happened or might happen” So what’s your letter grade executing on five out of the five below? Customer Effort - How difficult are you to do business with? If you’re not already asking your customers how much of a pain it is top achieve what they are trying to achieve, it’s time to start. You can do so, today, for free - with a service like Delighted. The entire premise of this measurement is the customer’s ability to answer “Acme made it easy for me to achieve what I was trying to today”. This is a measure which acts A) as a source of truth and B) tells a story over time. Humble yourself to get the details. It’s best used around a specific interaction or moment in your customer journey, but can be holistic, too. Check out CES, or customer effort scoring - there’s a warehouse full of opinions on the topic. Turnaround Time, or SLA (Service Level Agreement) - How fast are you ? This can be tricky - you have a sense of what you need to accomplish, and so do your customers. Do they line up? Have you asked them explicitly? In a recent engagement, I learned an important lesson - your sales team, customers, executives and data all disagree on the right timing. Open a discussion today, and prepare for opinions to surface. I’ve found that data and feelings need to become unified in this situation. Consider quoting: too slow, and you miss a lot of transaction opportunity. Too fast, and you either over invest in technology or people, and eat operating margins. Capacity Across all Channels Customers don’t interact in a binary manner these days, and wish to float across email, web tools, phone, chat, and self-service options. The best in class experience is where there’s as close to zero interaction with humans in your business possible. The more technical and configurable, the less likely technology touch solves all, which drives a specific desire to align people to problems. You should be looking at all channels of volume, and structure a plan against both history and forward-looking budget. If you fail to consider one or both, you will experience a service gap. Cost Per Resolution The ultimate measure of efficiency is to drive down the transaction cost of solving a problem at the same time as keeping #1 and #2 in balance. Say what you will about the novelty of balanced scorecarding, but there’s a well-founded time and place to anchor turnaround time or resolution success against the cost of running your team. When considering this, also don’t give in to the temptation to remove or adjust costs. In reality, software, management, travel for training, etc. are all in the loaded cost of running your group. P&L Expenses divided by # of resolutions in total is the fair and balanced way to calculate this. Whether you’re at $2 or $12 - there’s something to be gained here. “Internal” NPS We frequently go to great lengths to appease customer demands (and should) but there’s a great wealth of support teams who work internally for sales and success partners to delegate transactional responsibilities to. As a result, there’s bound to be channel conflict within the business depending on the size. Humble yourself and your leadershjip team to survey internal business partners if this is not a practice you take advantage of. When you ask your peers and colleagues if they would pay for your team’s service privately or recommend to a friend or business associate, the answers may surprise you. Comments are closed.
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