In today’s era of online reviews and word-of-mouth reputation building, the quality of customer service is more important now to company success than ever before. While products themselves, of course, should always be of high quality, the emphasis on customer experience is more pressing than ever — and modern support is a fundamental part of that.
According to Forbes, companies lost $75 billion in 2018 due to poor customer service — a whopping $13 billion increase from 2016. With growing customer demands and harsh competition, companies must constantly optimize their support in order to keep up. But what specific changes should they make?
Improving the quality of your customer service is not as difficult as you may think. Even small adjustments can make a massive positive impact on the overall experience of your customers. And the best part? Many can be implemented without any significant disruptions to your budget.
Small changes = big results
When most C-Suite executives think of transformation or disruption, it’s common to assume that they’ll need to rebuild entire infrastructures or tear apart budgets from top to bottom. However, this is a misconception — there’s absolutely no need to disrupt an entire organization to get better results.
In fact, this concept has actually come to be known as the theory of marginal gains. Designed by Sir Dave Brailsford, the theory states that incremental improvements in any process will sum up to a significant improvement when added all together. For business execs, this means that by focusing on one small area of customer service and improving it even by just 1%, the cumulative effect can have enormous impacts.
The first step is to monitor and assess the efficiency of all of your processes and determine which area could be improved upon, even marginally. In customer service, one of the immediate points to look at is the average backlog size or the amount of tickets that are open at any given moment — but there’s also much more. Customer happiness ratings are a logical aspect to focus on — if customers are happy, you are doing a great job. But sadly, customer satisfaction isn’t always easily measured.
Metrics that matter
These days, we collect tons of data — but analyzing it and utilizing it effectively is the true challenge. Many companies struggle to understand why certain metrics matter and what purpose they serve. In turn, they end up monitoring things that, while measurable, are not necessarily meaningful. With a plethora of data and metrics to look at, how do you know what should be prioritized? Customer happiness and retention are two of the best places to start.
One crucial KPI to begin with is the first response time, or how quickly a support request is acknowledged by the business. This is an important initial step that shows the customer that their issue is being looked into and that their request matters. Another KPI to prioritize is time to resolution and the actual interactions between the agent and customer. Once a company starts working to boost these two simple metrics, its overall performance starts improving too. A popular way of measuring this overall performance is the Net Promoter Score, which evaluates a customer’s feelings about a company versus a single interaction with the brand.
Using this methodology, it’s much better to prioritize team metrics over individual ones. Individual metrics can be problematic — for example, customer service agents racing to reduce their time to respond rate could sacrifice quality in the process, and also result in team members competing with each other. Instead, support agents should perform and be measured as a team for better results.
Improving quality without increasing costs
The key to getting better business results without breaking the bank is maintaining a customer-centric approach above all else. This means that all levels of your organization should recognize its importance and create processes for efficient resolution and give agents the tools they need to work with speed and quality.
By taking measures to put the customer first in all aspects of your business, you can come up with some original resolutions. For example, you can implement new features into your support interface, such as easy screen captures that will allow even non-tech-savvy users to easily display and understand what’s going on. Automating certain processes, such as autoresponders or canned responses, you can immediately reduce first response time and guide the customer to different points of action for higher satisfaction. Offering customer support through new mediums such as social media platforms is another easy way to make support more accessible than ever before. Optimizing your website for user-friendliness and accessibility across all devices is another crucial tool in today’s age.
Above all, listening to customers and asking for feedback can improve your services at no cost. The data you gather should feed into product development and the constant improvement of your business. If you see that a particular issue is coming up more often than others, you should make an effort to focus on that one — whether that means including that issue in the FAQ section of your website, or training employees to be ready to address the issue with customers on a regular basis. In fact, one of the most common issues preventing successful customer support is the lack of product knowledge by company employees, something that can easily be improved through continuous internal training and workshops.
With so many easy ways to update and improve customer services without overhauling your budget, there’s no reason to delay it any longer. Focusing on a customer-centric approach and picking out specific ways to optimize this strategy can have a deep impact on your ROI and overall customer satisfaction. Suddenly, your customer reviews might look a lot different than they do today!
