Gauging the health of your customer service operations is tough, especially as you add more channels. When you start with just email, it's a bit easier.
Gauging the health of your customer service operations is tough, especially as you add more channels. When you start with just email, it's a bit easier. But as email volume skills up and you add chat, phone, social media, and other channels, it can be challenging to know if your team is doing an excellent job of keeping customers happy.
It's possible to measure the health of the CS operation and the happiness of customers easily if you use a few simple metrics and then segment which channels and types of tickets you measure during your analysis.
At HelpFlow, we run 24/7 live chat in customer service teams for over 100 stores that have built a robust process for managing customer service operations over the past six years. In this post, I'll break down how we measure and make decisions in a customer service operation with multiple channels and a wide range of tickets.
#1 Measure the Right Metrics
You can measure a ton of different things in customer service, but there's only a few that matter to gauge the health of the customer service operation and the happiness of your customers. We went deep into this in another post, but here are the basics.
By measuring the six metrics, you can get a good understanding of how happy customers are and how effective the CS operation is.
Tracking the metrics is relatively easy, but the insights you get will be confusing and somewhat useless if you simply measure the entire customer service operation as a whole. Instead, it's important to segment your measurements by channel at a minimum (i.e., email metrics, chat metrics, phone metrics, etc.).
The metric you track can typically be the same between channels or slightly repurpose for the specific channel you are measuring, but the general intent of the metric will remain the same. For example, in chat and email, you might use first response time. For phone, you would use answered time. It measures part of the customer's experience.
As part of segmenting the channels, it's important to have different standards of success depending on the channel. For example, in live chat, it's incredibly important for first response time to be <10 seconds. But with emails, that number can be more like 1-2 hours and still wow customers.
Measuring these metrics and segmenting by channel will enable you to optimize the operation of the channel level. But there's one more layer to consider here...
Tracking the metrics is relatively easy, but the insights you get will be confusing and somewhat useless if you simply measure the entire customer service operation as a whole. Instead, it's important to segment your measurements by channel at a minimum (i.e., email metrics, chat metrics, phone metrics, etc.).
The metric you track can typically be the same between channels or slightly repurpose for the specific channel you are measuring, but the general intent of the metric will remain the same. For example, in chat and email, you might use first response time. For phone, you would use answered time. It measures part of the customer's experience.
As part of segmenting the channels, it's important to have different standards of success depending on the channel. For example, in live chat, it's incredibly important for first response time to be <10 seconds. But with emails, that number can be more like 1-2 hours and still wow customers.
Measuring these metrics and segmenting by channel will enable you to optimize the operation of the channel level. But there's one more layer to consider here...
Even within one channel, such as email, certain types of tickets will cloud your data and insights if you don't segment them out.
In segmenting down to the ticket type level, you were able to deeply optimize customer experience in the effectiveness of your agents at each channel level. By using a proper tagging process or categorization process in your helpdesk, this metrics tracking process is relatively simple to use once it's set up.
All customer experiences are not equal across channels or even within the same channel for different ticket types. If you're not tracking the metrics above at all, and obviously start with that. Even if you already have a robust metrics tracking process, start segmenting by channel and take a step to see the deeper insights you get.
If you want to see more examples of how to optimize your customer service process, check out these other posts we done the past.
HelpFlow can drive sales by having our team of human agents available on live chat 24/7 to predict and save abandons before they happen, proactively reach out and engage with visitors via SMS and email after they abandon, and by answering visitor questions live on your website to convert visitors.
Learn MoreHelpFlow can drive sales by having our team of human agents available on live chat 24/7 to predict and save abandons before they happen, proactively reach out and engage with visitors via SMS and email after they abandon, and by answering visitor questions live on your website to convert visitors.
Learn More