Ville Kauppi – Surveypal

Conversational Analytics – Benefits and Use Cases

Ville Kauppi — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 12:39:33 +0000

Conversational analytics is an innovative approach that leverages advanced technologies to analyze and derive insights from customer conversations.

By tapping into the vast amount of data generated through various customer communication channels, you can deeply understand your customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points. This article explores the intricacies of conversational analytics, including its working mechanisms, analysis techniques, and the tools available to harness valuable insights.

Key Takeaways

Conversational analytics uses analytics tools and AI to analyze customer conversations and extract valuable insights.
It helps you understand customer needs, preferences, and sentiments and identify areas for improvement and strategies to enhance the customer experience.
Conversational analytics lets you personalize customer interactions, adjust real-time approaches based on customer sentiment, and promptly address concerns to improve satisfaction.
It also empowers you to gain competitive intelligence, make informed business decisions, improve sales conversions, and enhance brand health and reputation.

Conversational Analytics: Using Insights to Enhance Customer Experience

In a world where data is the new gold, businesses continuously seek innovative ways to leverage this valuable resource. One such way is through conversational analytics — a powerful tool that provides deep insights into customer interactions across various communication channels. We will dive into the immense potential of conversational analytics, discussing how it can help businesses understand customer behavior, enhance customer service, and tailor marketing strategies for improved outcomes.

Conversational analytics allows you to leverage insights from customer interactions to enhance the overall customer experience. By analyzing data from various communication channels such as phone calls, emails, and chat conversations, you can extract valuable insights to improve products, services, and processes.

These insights can help you identify customer pain points, preferences, and expectations, allowing you to tailor your offerings accordingly. Additionally, it can provide valuable conversation intelligence, enabling you to pinpoint trends, patterns, and sentiments in customer conversations.

You can use this information to optimize customer service, personalize your marketing messages, and enhance customer satisfaction. By leveraging conversational analytics to its full potential, you can gain a competitive edge by understanding and meeting the needs of your customers more effectively.

What Actually is Conversational Analytics?

Frequently, businesses employ conversational analytics to analyze customer interactions and extract valuable insights for enhancing their overall operations. You can identify patterns, trends, and customer preferences by analyzing these conversations, allowing you to make data-driven decisions that lead to sustainable growth.

Conversational analytics analyzes conversational data, such as customer interactions through voice calls, chatbots, or social media platforms, to gain insight into customer experience and sentiment.

How Does Conversational Analytics Work?

Examining the underlying technology and methodologies that extract insights from customer conversations is essential to understanding conversational analytics. Conversational analytics utilizes advanced techniques such as natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze customer conversations in real-time.

As a thought-provoking portal into your customer communications, conversational analytics tirelessly gather abundant data from various sources. These sources span voice calls, chat logs, and countless social media engagements. Here are three critical elements of how conversational analytics function:

Data collection
Conversational analytics platforms gather data from various sources, including voice calls, chat transcripts, and social media interactions.
Language understanding
NLP algorithms enable the system to understand and interpret the meaning of customer conversations, including sentiment analysis and intent recognition.
Insights generation
Through AI algorithms, conversational analytics extracts valuable insights into customer preferences, behaviors, and needs.

By leveraging these technologies, conversational analytics provides actionable insights into customer conversations. Now, let’s delve into the next section to explore how to analyze these conversations in more detail.

Analyzing Customer Conversations

Analyzing customer conversations involves extracting insights and patterns from the data collected. This analysis provides a comprehensive understanding of customer sentiment, allowing you to identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance customer satisfaction.

Analyzing customer conversations offers a wealth of information, such as recurring issues, common questions, and areas where customers may get stuck in the sales or support process. By understanding these pain points, you can make targeted improvements to products, services, or operations, ultimately leading to an elevated customer journey and loyalty.

Additionally, analyzing customer conversations can help you identify emerging trends, new customer demands, and opportunities for innovation. You can proactively adapt your strategies and offerings to meet evolving customer needs and preferences by staying on top of customer conversations.

Utilizing Analytics Tools for Insights

With the rising importance of data-driven decision-making in today’s dynamic business landscape, organizations increasingly leverage powerful analytics tools to inform their decision-making process and fuel strategic initiatives to drive growth and optimize performance. Here are three ways in which these analytics tools can provide actionable insights:

Sentiment Analysis
Businesses can identify patterns and trends in customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction by analyzing the tone and sentiment of customer conversations. This helps you drill deeper into your interactions with customers to understand how they feel when they engage with your brand.
Topic Modeling
Analytics tools can identify the main topics discussed in customer conversations. This helps to understand the key issues or concerns customers raise and take appropriate actions to address them.
Customer Journey Analysis
By analyzing the entire customer conversation journey, you can identify bottlenecks or areas of improvement to optimize processes and provide a seamless customer experience.

Applying AI and Machine Learning

Applying AI and machine learning techniques can further enhance the accuracy and efficiency of conversational data analysis. AI and machine learning algorithms can be trained to understand and interpret natural language, enabling them to extract meaningful information from conversations.

By analyzing patterns and trends in conversations, these techniques can provide valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and sentiment. Conversational analytics powered by AI and machine learning can also improve the accuracy of sentiment analysis, allowing you to understand satisfaction levels and identify areas for improvement contextually.

Furthermore, AI and machine learning can automate the process of conversational analysis, saving you time and resources. Integrating AI and machine learning into conversational analysis can significantly enhance its capabilities and provide you with deeper, more accurate customer intelligence.

Benefits of Conversational Analytics

Conversational analytics has revolutionized how businesses connect with their customers, offering many advantages that propel companies toward success. Here are three key benefits businesses can harness from this technological innovation: actionable insights, enhanced customer experience, and improved operational efficiency. Let’s explore these compelling advantages to understand how they can drive your business forward.

Actionable insights
Conversational analytics gives businesses deep insights into customer interactions, allowing them to identify trends, patterns, and preferences. This helps to optimize marketing strategies, improve product offerings, and enhance customer service.
Enhanced customer experience
By analyzing customer conversations, you can better understand customer needs, pain points, and preferences. You can use this information to personalize interactions, provide more relevant recommendations, and deliver a seamless and tailored customer experience.
Operational efficiency
Conversational analytics can help identify inefficiencies in customer support processes, enabling operations streamlining and resource allocation improvement. By analyzing conversation data, you can identify areas for improvement, automate repetitive tasks, and enhance overall operational efficiency.

Enhancing Customer Experience

One key aspect of enhancing the customer experience is personalizing customer interactions. In fact, 76% of customers expect personalization. Conversational analytics can significantly contribute to achieving this goal, specifically through an informal analytics tool.

You can gain valuable insights into customer sentiment by analyzing real-time conversations and adjusting your approach accordingly. This could mean that you use the customers’ preferred communication channel or provide recommendations based on historical data such as purchase history, etc. This proactive approach not only improves customer satisfaction but also helps in building long-term relationships.

Identifying Brand Insights

By meticulously examining and interpreting conversational data, you have the opportunity to unearth a treasure trove of brand insights, which can provide a valuable foundation for shaping your marketing strategies, fine-tuning your customer approach, and ultimately bolstering the power and appeal of your brand.

Three Critical ways in Which Conversational Analytics Helps in Identifying Brand Insights

Understanding customer sentiment
You can gain insights into customer perceptions, preferences, and emotions toward their brand by analyzing customer conversations. This information can be used to identify areas where the brand is excelling and areas that require attention.
Identifying emerging trends
Conversational analytics allows you to stay ahead of the curve by identifying emerging trends and topics of interest among your target audience. This insight can inform marketing strategies and help companies align their brand messaging with customer expectations.
Leveraging customer feedback
Conversational data is a valuable source of customer feedback. Businesses can gain insights into customer pain points, suggestions, and overall satisfaction levels by analyzing customer conversations. This feedback can enhance the brand experience and improve customer retention.

Gaining Competitive Intelligence

Conversation analytics solutions analyze conversations’ content, sentiment, and context to uncover patterns and trends. By understanding customer preferences, pain points, and competitor mentions, you can identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to outperform your rivals.

Leveraging conversational analytics enables you to respond to market changes and enhance your competitive edge proactively. Furthermore, it empowers you to align their offerings with customer needs and improve sales conversions.

Improving Sales Conversions

Businesses can boost sales by leveraging conversational analytics to gain valuable insights into customer interactions and tailor their strategies accordingly.

By applying speech and text analysis, you can extract meaningful information from these conversations. This data is crucial when identifying patterns, optimizing sales processes, and personalizing customer interactions. With conversational AI, you can automate follow-ups and provide real-time recommendations, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Tracking and Managing Brand Health

Effective brand tracking and management involves gaining insights into customer perceptions of the brand and ensuring alignment with the company’s strategic goals. Conversational analytics is crucial in tracking and managing brand health by analyzing customer interactions, feedback, and sentiments across various channels such as social media, customer support conversations, and online reviews.

This way, you can identify trends, measure brand sentiment, and track the impact of marketing campaigns on customer perception. This data-driven approach enables you to make informed decisions that impact how customers perceive your brand.

Understanding the importance of tracking and managing brand health, let’s now explore the various use cases of conversational analytics.

Use Cases of Conversational Analytics

One of the critical use cases of conversational analytics is analyzing customer feedback to improve product quality and performance. With the help of conversation analytics technology and conversational analytics software, you can perform:

Sentiment Analysis

Conversational analytics can analyze customer feedback and sentiment to understand how customers feel about a product or service. This information can help you make necessary adjustments to your offerings.

Competitive Analysis

Analyzing customer conversations, you can gain insights into how their products or services compare to competitors. This can help identify market gaps and develop strategies to stay ahead.

Voice of the Customer Analysis

Conversational analytics can help you embed the Voice of the Customer into your business. This information can be used to tailor products and services to meet customer expectations better and create a customer-centric organization.

Optimizing Customer Service

The key to optimizing customer service lies in providing timely and personalized assistance. Conversational analytics can play a crucial role in achieving this goal. Contact centers can analyze customer interactions across various channels, such as phone calls, emails, and chat logs, to gain valuable insights by leveraging conversation intelligence. These insights can help identify customer pain points, improve agent performance, and enhance customer experience.

Conversational analysis insights can not only help your efforts to deliver proactive support but also, preemptively anticipate customer problems and prevent them from ever arising.

Additionally, chatbots powered by conversational analytics can provide immediate and consistent support, reducing customer wait times and increasing satisfaction while boosting customer service performance and reducing support costs.

Personalizing Customer Experience

To truly enhance satisfaction, you must strive to deliver personalized experiences consistently. Personalizing the customer experience is crucial for building stronger customer relationships and increasing loyalty.

By using conversational analytics, businesses can gain valuable insights into customer preferences, needs, and behaviors. This information can then tailor interactions and provide better customer experiences that resonate with customers.

Product Innovation

Product innovation is the lifeblood of business growth in today’s competitive market. By harnessing the power of real-time customer feedback, conversational analytics, and market trend identification, businesses can drive innovation, stay ahead of the competition, and meet evolving customer needs. Let’s explore how these topics shape product innovation.

Real-time Customer Feedback

Conversational analytics software allows you to analyze customer conversations in real-time, providing valuable insights that can be used to identify areas for product improvement and innovation.

Identifying Market Trends

Businesses can gain insights into emerging market trends, and customer demands to guide product development strategies and stay ahead of the competition.

Enhancing Conversation Intelligence

Conversational analytics enables businesses to understand customer sentiment, emotions, and intentions during conversations. This more profound understanding of customer needs and desires can inform product innovation, ensuring you develop products that genuinely solve customer problems and simplify their everyday lives.

The Future of Conversational Analytics

As technology advances at an unprecedented pace, the future of conversational analytics becomes increasingly exciting and filled with possibilities. The potential for even more sophisticated and accurate insights is just on the horizon, waiting to be harnessed by businesses and individuals alike.

We can expect three key developments to shape the landscape of conversational analytics in the coming years. These developments will enhance our understanding of customer behavior and preferences and pave the way for more personalized and targeted interactions. Let’s have a look at them!

Enhanced Algorithms

The future of conversational analytics will see the development of more advanced algorithms that can analyze and interpret complex conversations in real time. These algorithms can extract deeper insights from conversations.

Business Process Automation

With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), conversational analytics will become a powerful tool for automating various business processes. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can handle customer queries, gather data, and provide personalized recommendations while continuously learning and improving.

Integrations with Other Technologies

Conversational analytics will increasingly integrate with other technologies, such as natural language processing and machine learning. This integration will enable businesses to gain deeper insights from unstructured data, automate repetitive tasks, and enhance customer experiences.

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, conversational analytics can significantly benefit businesses by providing valuable insights and streamlining processes. It captures and analyzes data from various communication channels, such as phone calls, emails, and chat conversations. This data is then processed using advanced algorithms and natural language processing techniques to extract essential information and identify patterns and trends.

By analyzing customer interactions, conversation analytics can help businesses understand customer needs and preferences, identify areas for improvement, and optimize customer service strategies. Furthermore, analytics enables enterprises to track and measure key performance indicators, such as customer satisfaction and response times, to ensure continuous improvement.

Ultimately, conversation analytics empowers businesses to make informed, data-driven decisions, enhancing customer experiences by tailoring interactions to individual needs and preferences. This, in turn, paves the way for sustained business growth by fostering strong customer relationships and loyalty and allowing for the identification and capitalization of new opportunities in the evolving market landscape.

Remember, conversational analytics is your co-pilot in customer interactions, ensuring you’re always on the right path.

Happy data-driven decision-making!

Frequently Asked Questions

Conversational analytics analyzes customer conversations, whether they are calls, chats, or emails, to extract valuable insights and information.

Conversation analytics can provide valuable insights that can help companies improve the customer experience, enhance agent performance, identify trends, detect compliance issues, and gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and preferences.

By analyzing conversations and interactions between customers and the brand, valuable insights can be gained regarding customer sentiment, satisfaction, and overall brand perception.

This data can help identify improvement areas, measure marketing campaigns’ success, and make informed decisions to enhance the brand’s reputation. Conversational analytics provides a comprehensive understanding of customer opinions and preferences, enabling businesses to manage their brand’s health proactively.

By analyzing conversations, businesses can identify common pain points, objections, and buying patterns, which can be used to optimize sales strategies and conversions.

Leveraging conversational analytics lets companies personalize their approach, tailor their messaging, and enhance the overall customer experience. This data-driven approach empowers businesses to make informed decisions and drive revenue growth.

Analyzing conversations between businesses and customers provides valuable insights into consumer preferences, needs, and sentiments.

These insights help businesses identify patterns and trends in customer behavior, allowing them to make data-driven decisions to improve products and services.

Conversational analytics enables businesses to personalize customer interactions, tailor marketing strategies, and optimize sales processes, ultimately increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Utilizing analytics tools for insights in conversational analytics provides numerous benefits. It enables organizations better to understand customer preferences, behaviors, and needs.

Businesses can uncover valuable insights that can drive decision-making and improve customer experiences by analyzing conversational data. These tools help identify patterns and trends, enabling organizations to identify opportunities for improvement and optimize their communication strategies.

Additionally, analytics tools provide real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities, allowing businesses to track performance and make data-driven decisions to enhance conversational interactions.

Conversational analytics is crucial in product innovation by providing valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs.

Through the analysis of conversations between customers and chatbots or customer service representatives, companies can identify patterns and trends that can inform the development of new products or improvements to existing ones.

Conversation analytics can be used in various scenarios. Some everyday use cases include monitoring customer interactions in contact centers, analyzing customer feedback, detecting fraud or compliance issues, improving sales and conversion rates, and optimizing marketing campaigns.

Speech analytics is a subset of conversation analytics that analyzes spoken conversations. It involves converting speech into text and applying various analytical techniques to extract insights.

Conversation analytics can help contact centers monitor agent performance, identify areas for improvement, measure customer satisfaction, and detect compliance issues. It can also provide insights into customer preferences and trends, helping contact centers deliver a better customer experience.

Conversational AI uses artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, to enable honest and intelligent interactions between humans and computer systems.

A conversational analytics tool is a software application or platform that explicitly analyzes conversations. It typically offers sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, trend identification, and reporting capabilities.

Conversational analytics software uses advanced algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze and interpret conversations. It can extract keywords, sentiment, and other relevant data from the discussions to provide valuable insights.

Conversation analytics can provide valuable insights at various customer journey stages. It can help identify touchpoints where customers may have issues or concerns, measure customer satisfaction, and offer personalized recommendations or solutions based on previous interactions.

Conversation intelligence refers to using conversation analytics to gain a deeper understanding of conversations and extract actionable insights. It involves analyzing conversation data to identify patterns, trends, and opportunities for improvement.

Your Guide to Average Handle Time

Ville Kauppi — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 14:22:18 +0000

The Average Handle Time is a critical metric in the contact center industry that measures the average time it takes for an agent to handle a customer interaction, including talk time and any post-call work.

AHT is a vital indicator of help center efficiency and can affect customer satisfaction, agent performance, and overall business profitability. In this post, we will explore what AHT is, why it matters, how it is calculated, and some tips on how to optimize it. Whether you are a contact center manager, agent, or simply interested in learning more about key customer service metrics, this post will provide valuable insights and practical advice to help you better understand and manage AHT.

What is Average Handle Time?

Average Handle Time (AHT) measures the time required for a customer support team to respond to their customers on average. If used correctly, AHT can give lucrative outcomes because it helps professionals and managers measure customer service performance on immediate support channels such as live chats and calls. Moreover, businesses can use these metrics to measure the effectiveness of non-immediate channels such as emails. The data points to measure average handle time include:

Talk time
Hold time
Call initiation
After call work

The AHT revolves around the concept that you can make your customers happy by quickly responding to and resolving their queries.

The Importance of Average Handle Time

The Average Handle Time is crucial since it’s a great indicator for assessing the efficiency of your contact center and its general level of client satisfaction.

Here are the top reasons why your Average Handle Time matters so much:

Higher Customer Retention Rates
Increased Customer Service Productivity
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Opportunities for Upselling, Cross-selling, and Positive Word-of-Mouth
Reduced Customer Service Costs

Higher Customer Retention Rates

Optimizing ticket handling times is more about providing an incredible experience and encouraging people to return to your business than answering calls more quickly.

Recurring customers increase your business value by 1,000% throughout their lifetime, according to 61% of SMBs, who report that more than half of their revenue originates from them. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend acquiring new clients; you will still lose them with a high churn rate.

Conversely, cutting churn by 5% can boost sales at your business by 75%.

Increased Customer Service Productivity

You can reduce time-consuming tasks like call transfers and hold times by determining the appropriate AHT for your business. The operational performance increases when bottlenecks in the workflow process are removed, allowing your agent to handle more calls.

Want to learn other techniques to improve customer service productivity? Here are tips for you.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

According to a 2021 TCN poll, 59% of customers claim that their top gripe with call centers is that they waste their time waiting for a response. It’s interesting to note that long average handle times make customers feel worse than not having their problems fixed.

According to Ifbyphone research, 15% of callers hang up after 40 seconds of speaking with a customer support representative. According to a TCN study from 2021, 34% of callers hang up after a maximum of 6 minutes on hold, while 26% do so after 2-4 minutes.

Based on the above, it is easy to discern the correlation between AHT and customer satisfaction. Additionally, when you are able to look at your data and determine your optimal average handle time you will be able to provide your agents with a stronger framework of dos and don’ts to manage customer requests more successfully.

More Opportunities for Upselling, Cross-selling, and Positive Word-of-Mouth

72% of customers tell six or more friends about their excellent brand experiences, according to research by customer success specialist Esteban Kolsky. Conversely, 13% of your unhappy clients will go out of their way to discourage 15 additional prospective clients from doing business with you.

Happy customers who experienced speedy resolutions can share their positive experiences others thus creating positive word of mouth.

Additionally, customers who receive qualitative support are more willing to consider buying more products or services from your business.

Reduced Customer Service Costs

Any attempt to optimize your Average Handle Time will immediately impact your overall customer service costs. The less time your agents spend handling requests, the lower your costs for providing support. The real challenge in reducing your AHT is ensuring you don’t compromise service quality while doing so.

How to Calculate the Average Handle Time

You can calculate your Average Handle Time with various formulas. But, the most effective technique is using the three building blocks. The three building blocks of AHT include conversation time, hold time, follow-up time and any additional work required after the end of the support interaction.

The Building Blocks of Average Handle Time

Let’s take a closer look at the building blocks of the Average Handle Time:

Conversation Time: The duration of each support request that your agents take is a simple piece of information to get. Include any interactive time when clients are entering data into a computerized system.

Hold Time: This figure should be straightforward to collect once more and is even more limited than conversation time.

Follow-Up Time: Follow-up time refers to the length of time it takes for a customer service agent to respond to a customer’s inquiry, request, or complaint after the initial contact has been made. Follow-up time can vary depending on the nature and urgency of the customer’s issue, as well as the company’s policies and procedures for responding to customer inquiries.

After Contact Work: After contact work refers to the tasks that the customer service representative performs after completing a customer interaction such as updating customer records, creating a summary of the interaction, scheduling follow-up tasks or appointments, sending out emails or other communications, and documenting any relevant information related to the interaction.

Average Handle Time Formula

Here is the formula to determine the average handle time for your business:

What is a Good Average Handle Time?

Leaders should use AHT to improve their processes rather than utilize it as a standalone service metric. For instance, regularly publishing in-depth articles on a knowledge base can reduce long call times.

Use a formula compatible with contact center industry best practices as your company examines AHT more closely.

You can use information from Talkdesk’s KPI Benchmarking Report released in 2021 to determine industry averages. However, it’s crucial to remember that the report doesn’t include follow-up time and cannot be factored into the calculation.

The average handle time split by the typical hold time is displayed per industry in the table below.

Industry	Average Handle Time
Finance	4 minutes and 5 seconds
Professional Services	3 minutes and 36 seconds
Healthcare	3 minutes and 28 seconds
Manufacturing	4 minutes and 13 seconds
Retail and eCommerce	3 minutes and 29 seconds
Telecom	2 minutes and 36 seconds
Media and Communication	3 minutes and 30 seconds
Transportation	4 minutes and 8 seconds

The handle time for all of these services is 3.63 minutes on average.

You can only come up with a good number when you combine your AHT data with metrics such as the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) or the Net Promoter® Score(NPS). NPS gauges how likely customers are to endorse your product or service. CSAT gauges a customer’s level of satisfaction with a given good or service. By examining the correlation between AHT and CSAT or NPS, you can improve productivity and grow customer retention.

How to Improve Average Handle Time?

Follow these strategies if you are looking for techniques to improve your Average Handle Time:

Train Your Agents

What does a new agent do during their first week on the job? You risk damaging your reputation immediately if they merely receive general company training.

Thanks to specialized agent coaching and training, you can customize your customer support function around particular inbound queries or customer segments. Make a list of all your products and market sectors, and then note how many of your employees have expertise in each. Do a gap analysis next to determine which areas require greater resources.

This method of training agents enables you to implement skills-based call routing for your queues. Clients then select their topic and are directed to the most qualified agent to address their problem.

Offer Self-Service Options to Deflect Incoming Contact Requests

You can deflect incoming calls by diverting customers to a self-service portal, such as a chatbot or a knowledge base. You can additionally divert the call to the right call agent according to their expertise through call answering machines. You can segregate the nature of the queries into different numbers. When the customers dial that number from their keypad, the answering machine will divert them to the right agent.

Implement Call-Routing Strategies

Ensuring that a consumer is immediately connected to the appropriate employee can decrease the average handling time in your call center.

For instance, you can direct a call from a consumer who needs a specific service to agents who are knowledgeable about it.

The routing procedure in a contact center should be fine-tuned to improve agent productivity and the client experience. Your teams can save productive time with shorter transfers or average call times. You can communicate with your customers on different channels using an omnichannel contact center.

Keep Your Internal Knowledge Base Up to Date

A knowledge base is a central repository for data that any employee in your company can use. It could include user-friendly FAQs, decision trees, visual aids, and movies. Well-informed agents can quickly provide the best answers.

Contact center agents won’t waste time looking for the necessary information because it is available on demand in the knowledge base. The centralized database and self-service tools shorten typical handle times and boost productivity.

Automate Workflows

Spending time directing consumers to the appropriate department may account for some of your prolonged interaction times. The average handling time for your customer may increase by needless minutes due to this overhead.

While it’s simple to point the finger at a client for making the wrong choice, solutions like interactive voice response (IVR) allow users to make the proper choice and avoid needless call transfers.

“Short call outliers” may also be present in your AHT. Customers who call in with these questions should expect a brief answer quickly. Consider including information about company hours and how to pay invoices in your IVR.

Empower Your Agents with the Right Customer Service Tools

Your team needs access to the best customer support tools for flawless customer service delivery.

When you provide customer support through many channels and with various tools, you invite delays and inefficiencies that negatively influence your average handling time.

For instance, you can reduce average handling time by incorporating tools that generate customers’ information. When agents have customer data and information, they can stop wasting their time by asking about their names and other information. Some tools save information on recurring customers, allowing agents to add the query to the system directly. Moreover, agents can check the address and contact details of the customers, saving them a huge time.

Agents can achieve speedy and first-contact resolution using real-time and historical customer data. Moreover, they can improve the reputation of the company.

Speed vs. Quality: The AHT Dilemma

Although reducing AHT benefits businesses, many companies ignore customer satisfaction. They focus on reducing the agent’s time to respond to the customers. But it results in poor support quality. As a result, agents cannot respond to customers properly.

Here are some ways to reduce AHT while maintaining the quality of each call:

Identify the Root Causes that Impact Your AHT

With 100% call coverage, the root reason for extended AHT can be found. Make sure to keep an eye on every exchange. Use speech analytics to discover frequent observable elements that affect AHT, such as hold-time violations, supervisor escalations, and dead air.

Sentiment analysis may occasionally enable you to identify typical client trouble issues. The call script for your agent can then be modified, or you can develop special standard operating procedures (SOPs) to deal with difficult callers and circumstances.

Businesses can find manageable solutions to large challenges using customer analytics.

Analytics decodes customer behavior, and this aids businesses in making wiser choices on management, pricing, and promotion.

According to McKinsey, companies that use customer analytics are 2.6 times more likely to have a significantly higher ROI and 3 times more likely to experience above-average sales growth than their rivals.

Consider AHT in Conjunction with Other KPIs

The difference between decreasing average handle time and increasing average handle time is significant. While a call center might make compromises to lower AHT, such as rushing consumers off the phone regardless of whether their issues are fixed, this would result in unhappy customers and other deteriorating call center performance metrics.

Offer Proactive Support

Any effective customer service plan must include proactive support since it allows you to give targeted, individualized support in advance using messenger-based channels. You can give clients the assistance they require before they contact your team by utilizing innovative tools like outbound messaging, advertising, product tours, and more.

Proactive support is an effective strategy to identify customers’ demands and offer relevant information saving a significant amount of agents’ time. You can use mobile forms and automation tools to identify problems and offer proper solutions.

Wrapping Up

A crucial indicator of contact center productivity, the average handle time reflects your team’s effectiveness. Lowering your AHT will increase customer satisfaction and agent performance immediately. Using the proper techniques, you can compute AHT automatically, assisting administrators, supervisors, and agents in receiving accurate reports without worrying about keeping track of time.

Agent Performance Metrics

Ville Kauppi — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 10:42:21 +0000

Many businesses suffer dwindling patronage because their contact centers do not provide high-quality services. Interestingly, call centers with poor service have something in common – they do not effectively analyze contact center agent performance metrics for actionable insights.

As the famous business quote goes, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” If you are not able to understand how your team performs on a daily basis, you won’t know where to begin with consolidating efforts to improve performance.

In this article we identify some of the most important metrics to measure.

Key Agent Performance Metrics

Statistics show that call centers handle about 200 calls daily, with each agent spending about 32 minutes out of an hour talking to customers. With a typical ontact center always a bee-hive of activity, it can be difficult to know how it’s performing without meaningful metrics.

Agent performance metrics are the data points that help you know how your team is handling tasks and achieving goals.

While there’s a wide variety of agent performance metrics, tracking them all is impossible or practical.

The key to success is tracking the right data. You need to know which metrics are important to you and your business and focus on those.

Some of the most important metrics to track are:

First Contact Resolution

First contact resolution (FCR) tracks the percentage of contacts resolved the first time a customer gets in touch.

First Contact Resolution (often called first call resolution) is one of the most straightforward ways to measure performance and productivity.

To get your First Call Resolution rate, divide the total number of customer issues resolved on the first attempt by the total number of issues received in a given period.

The industry benchmark for FCR is 70 – 75%. If your FCR is high, your contact center agents are addressing customer needs the first time around. It means your center will have lower:

Return contacts. Since customers’ concerns are addressed the first time, they will not need to reach out multiple times.
Transfer rate. The agent taking the call addresses the caller’s needs, so there’s no need to transfer the call to another agent.
Escalation rate. The agent addresses the customers’ needs the first time, so the customer will not need to request to speak to a supervisor.

Improving First Contact Resolution has many benefits. The FCR is at the core of a strong customer experience because no customer will want to contact you multiple times or be passed from agent to agent before their concern is addressed. So, FCR is one of the key metrics to track.

Coaching and training and contact agent empowerment are good solutions for improving First Contact Resolution.

Average Handle Time

Average Handle Time (AHT) is the average amount of time an agent spends on a customer issue.

Average Handle Time is the average time it takes from when an agent answers a customer’s call to when the agent hangs up the call and completes necessary tasks related to the call. Thus, average handle time includes hold times as well as after-call tasks.

To calculate the Average Handle Time for an agent, sum up the total amount of time the agent spends on the phone talking with customers and performing after-call tasks. Then divide the total by the number of calls the agent handled.

Average handle time is an important performance indicator because customers do not like staying on the phone for ages. However, AHT is a tricky contact center metric because striving to keep calls short can easily compromise the quality of service.

So, while AHT is a good indicator of contact center agents’ efficiency, evaluating AHT on its own is not the best practice. Instead, when tracking AHT, also track other metrics to ensure that your customer service is satisfactory.

While the average handle time for contact centers varies from industry to industry, a Cornell University study shows that the average AHT is around 6.5 minutes.

However, this does not mean you should have a set AHT and expect your agents to resolve customer issues in less or equal time to the set AHT. Instead, ask customer service teams to balance reducing AHT and fully addressing customers’ concerns.

First Response Time

First response time (FRT) is the average amount of time from when a customer submits a request to when an agent responds.

First response time and average handle time make up customer service time. Improving first response time is one of the ways to improve customer service productivity.

It’s easy to see why First Response Time is an important metric to track. Customers seeking answers will not want to wait for long periods before they get a response. For example, no one will want to wait for days before getting a reply to an email inquiry.

A “first response” has to be made by a customer service agent. So, auto-generated responses do not count when measuring the first response time.

The first response time is reported in a period – days, hours, or minutes. The average First Response Time in a period (say one day) is the total first response time in the period divided by the total first responses during the period.

A good first response time varies, depending on the contact channel. For example, good first response times are 45 seconds or less for live chat, 4 hours or less for social media, 3 minutes or less for phone calls, and 24 hours or less for emails.

Tickets Handled

“Tickets handled” is the average number of customer support tickets your contact center handles within a specific time frame.

The “tickets handled” metric refers to tickets your agents open and interact with within a period, but not necessarily the tickets that are resolved and closed.

Thus, “tickets handled” is an excellent metric to track because it shows whether customers are attended to. However, it’s best to pair “tickets handled” with the “tickets solved” metric to show how many of the tickets handled are resolved and closed.

Tickets Backlog

Tickets backlog is the number of unresolved tickets in a particular period of time. The tickets may or may not be open, but they’ve remained unresolved beyond the typical response time set for your contact center.

Many reasons can lead to tickets pilling up in your backlog. These include high ticket volumes, slow support agents, complex inquiries, etc.

This metric can give you an overview of your contact center’s performance. It can help you identify the need for more support agents, additional training, etc.

You should track ticket backlog and strive for a low ticket backlog, which indicates that customer requests are consistently being resolved.

Agent Utilization

Contact center agent utilization is the ratio of agent productivity to their capacity. It is the percentage of productive time spent.

Consider an agent that works on tickets (or on customer calls) for five hours in an eight hours work day. The agent’s utilization is 62.5% (5 productive hours divided by the 8 hours capacity).

Since agent utilization is the percentage of your contact center’s productive time, call center managers can track the metric to improve productivity.

Agent utilization rate provides insight into whether agents are overutilized or underutilized. High utilization means your contact center agents handle more tickets in less time.

However, too high an agent utilization can lead to burnout. Thus, properly managing utilization boosts agent engagement. For example, giving agents high utilization goals may make them feel pressured and unhappy.

Cost per Ticket/Contact

Cost per ticket is the average cost of resolving a ticket. It is calculated by dividing a contact center’s total monthly operating expense by the monthly ticket volume.

A contact center’s operating expenses include:

Salaries and benefits of contact center agents and indirect personnel (such as administrative staff, supervisors, executives, etc.).
Cost of technology and telecommunication services (such as software licensing fees, internet costs, etc.).
Cost of office supplies.
Part of facilities expenses, including rent, insurance, and utilities.
Team member travel and courier costs required to fulfill a ticket.

The cost-per-ticket metric will help you understand how your contact center costs affect your bottom line. Thus, you’ll be able to plan better with future budgets.

Cost per ticket is one of the metrics that measure agent performance/ efficiency. Consider two agents that perform the same exact service. If one has a cost of $5 per ticket and the other has a cost of $7 per ticket. The agent with the $5 cost per ticket is more efficient.

Cost per ticket is one of the most important contact center KPIs because a core objective of any business is keeping operating costs down without compromising service.

The more you pay to run your contact center, the less revenue you’ll make. The ideal position for a contact center manager is to achieve customer satisfaction with a low cost per ticket.

Contacts per Agent per Month

Contacts per Agent per Month is the average monthly inbound contact volume divided by the number of agents in the contact center.

When calculating this metric, the contact volume includes inbound contacts from all channels – calls, chat, email, contact forms, office walk-ins, etc.

The “number of agents” is your contact center’s average full-time equivalent agent. If you have two part-time agents whose combined work equals one full-time agent, you’ll count the two part-time agents as one.

Contacts per Agent per Month is a good indicator of agent productivity. Tracking this metric can tell you whether your agents are optimally utilized, your average handling time is poor, your scheduling is effective, etc.

Net Promoter® Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer satisfaction indicator that shows the percentage of people satisfied with your customer support service that they’ll recommend your company.

Net Promoter Score measures customer satisfaction and enthusiasm for your service. Calculating NPS starts with asking customers one question: “On a scale of 0 – 10, how likely are you to recommend this company?”

Customers are categorized into three groups:

Promoters (customers answering 9 or 10 on the scale). Promoters will actively recommend your company and drive your growth through referral flows.
Passives (customers answering 7 or 8 on the scale). Passives will not recommend your company but will also not cause damage through negative reviews.
Detractors (customers answering between 0 and 6 on the scale). Detractors will not recommend your business and may even actively discourage others via negative reviews and word of mouth.

NPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

NPS is a good metric to track because it is a predictor of business growth. A high NPS means you have a good relationship with customers and points to a positive growth cycle. On the other hand, a low or negative NPS means customers are dissatisfied with your customer service.

A low Net Promoter Score by itself paints a partial picture. So, performing a root cause analysis is important to identify the drivers of the low or negative score. For example, the customer’s dissatisfaction may not be with the agent’s performance but with a frustrating company policy.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures your customers’ level of satisfaction with your contact center service. It is an important metric because 66% of people care more about a satisfactory experience than price.

The Customer Satisfaction score measures customers’ sentiments toward your company. CSAT also predicts business growth because it determines a customer’s loyalty and lifetime value.

Calculating CSAT starts with a customer experience survey. Customers are asked to rate their level of satisfaction with the support service on a 5-point scale, where 1 is very dissatisfied, and 5 is very satisfied.

CSAT is calculated by dividing the number of customers rating their experience as 4 (satisfied) or 5 (very satisfied) by the number of survey responses.

Like with NPS, CSAT is more valuable when combined with root cause analysis to determine the drivers of poor scores.

For example, an agent could show the best professional behavior, but a customer may be dissatisfied with the service because the product cannot work as expected.

Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score (CES) is an indicator that measures your contact center’s ease of use to customers. The CES shows the amount of effort a customer exerts to resolve an issue.

Customer Effort Score (CES) is the third metric most commonly used to measure customer satisfaction (after NPS and CSAT).

Customers generally want a painless process when interacting with your brand. So, the easier the process of getting the help they need, the better customers will rate their experience.

Calculating the Customer Effort Score starts with a survey. Customers are asked to rate the ease of their experience on a five-point scale, where 1 is extremely difficult, and 5 is extremely easy. Thus, a high CES shows that your contact center provides an effortless experience, while a low CES shows that your support service is quite uneasy about using.

Customer Effort Score is a metric worth tracking because it is a predictor of future purchase behavior. Studies show that 94% of customers will repurchase from a low-effort company, while only 4% will repurchase from a high-effort company.

Like the other customer satisfaction metrics, CES gives the best results when combined with analysis to determine the causes of customers’ pain points when using your service. For example, do customers resent having to repeat information, repeatedly being transferred, etc.?

Tracking CES and taking necessary actions to remove obstacles would improve customers’ experience when interacting with your contact center.

The Final Word

Tracking contact center agent performance metrics is key to boosting customer satisfaction. Analyzing your customer service metrics shows you what efforts to consolidate and where you need improvement.

The metrics mentioned above are some of the best to track for contact center success. However, it is not necessary to track all of them. Instead, identify metrics that align with your goals and focus on them.

The KPIs and agent performance expectations need to be carefully evaluated. In many cases, customer dissatisfaction with a contact center does not lie with the agents’ lack of skill or knowledge but with factors such as internal policies, unrealistic service level agreements, etc.

10 Steps to Improving Customer Service Productivity

Ville Kauppi — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 12:42:40 +0000

What is productivity in customer service? Why is it critical for your company? How can you measure customer service productivity, and what can you do to improve it? If you’ve ever asked yourself any of those questions then you’ve landed on the right article.

What is Customer Service Productivity?

Customer service productivity refers to the efficiency with which your company can handle customer service interactions. It’s measured by several productivity metrics, such as Net Promoter® Score, First Contact Resolution, and ticket volume, etc. We’ll discuss these in more depth later.

Customer service productivity has a direct effect on your company’s bottom line.

By improving the efficiency of your support, you can offer better customer interactions. When you provide better support quality, customer satisfaction and retention improve. Positive customer experiences lead to better word-of-mouth marketing.

Beyond improving your service, boosting customer service productivity can mean lower costs. When you run a tight ship, you can get higher productivity levels out of your contact center staff. So, improved customer service productivity means better sales and reduced costs.

How to Improve Customer Service Productivity

How do you improve customer service productivity as a whole? At the macro level, you can offer customers better options while improving the efficiency of your operation. By considering your entire customer service apparatus as one, you can make sweeping changes that drastically improve productivity. Here are some of the best ways to re-shape your customer service:

Offer Proactive Support

You can reduce support costs by anticipating why customers may want to contact your customer service channels. By offering them guidance and support before they run into greater difficulties, you can shave off a lot of time spent dealing with common complaints. This is what proactive support is all about.

You can, for example, monitor customer accounts for potential issues such as error messages and reach out to them proactively to offer advice on resolving the problem before they need to contact your team.

Offering better training and educational resources and making customers aware of them when they purchase your products is proactive support. By identifying the most common stumbling blocks customers often face, you might decide to rewrite manuals or offer a drip-fed email course, for instance.

Beyond reducing the strain on your customer support team, proactive support makes customers feel better about using your products, increasing customer satisfaction.

Build a Self-Service Portal

Any time a customer can resolve their issues without requiring your agents’ time is a huge win for customer service productivity.

Customer self-service options are also increasingly popular with customers, too, with 81% of consumers stating they would prefer more self-service options.

Self-service options include:

Customer portals for accessing account information, viewing order histories, and managing subscriptions
Well-laid-out FAQ sections on your website so customers can quickly find answers to common queries
Comprehensive knowledge bases filled with more detailed information about your product and service
Chatbots that can answer basic customer queries and automate simple tasks
A community forum where your customers can discuss your offering together
Interactive voice response systems, where customers can offer information on what their call is regarding or perform simple tasks with voice commands over the phone

Increase Customer Service Speed

Increasing customer service speed is always a priority when improving your team’s productivity. Concentrate on two things here:

Customer Wait Time—How long customers must wait before talking to a customer service representative, and
Average Time to Resolution—How long it takes for issues to be resolved entirely

By analyzing customer wait time and average time to resolution over a certain period, paired with ticket data, you can:

Identify the requests that could be redirected to your self-service portal,
Push certain customer service interactions to the agents(s) best equipped to handle them, and
Create conversational flows that expedite the most common customer issues you’ve identified.

Ensure Service Consistency

Service consistency is highly important to customers. They expect the same level of service quality each time they reach out to you, regardless of the channel, time of day, or customer service representative they speak to.

To ensure service consistency, you must streamline processes and tasks. This ensures fewer moving parts and that everyone works from the same basic set of rules.

Train customer service staff based on their individual needs. Some staff will require more product training and others will need more soft-skills training, for instance. Individualized training ensures everyone’s blind spots get ironed out, providing a more consistent level of service across teams.

Give customer service agents easy access to all the information they need. Instead of everyone keeping their own binders full of product and process notes, use an internal knowledge base with up-to-date and easily accessible information.

This not only ensures every agent can answer any question a customer throws at them, but it also makes sure that the given answers are consistent across agents and other support channels. Beyond this, it’s useful for training new staff.

Facilitate contextual collaboration between agents. Each time customers use a support channel, they expect the agent they’re discussing the issue with to have a complete picture of all previous discussions. You can do this by using contact center software that records each customer service transaction and makes all information available on agents’ screens.

By giving agents no-nonsense, user-friendly contact center software, you make their job easier to perform. Average resolution times will drop, and customer satisfaction scores will rise. Agents will also feel more motivated to perform well, as they no longer have unwieldy software getting in the way of them performing their job.

Focus on Customers’ Preferred Communication Channels

Customers are more likely to be satisfied with your service if they can communicate using their preferred support channels (e.g., email, phone, live chat, social media).

For example, 52% of customers stated in a poll they found it frustrating they couldn’t talk to a human during an interaction, with 18% of them outright angry about it.

By communicating through the customers’ preferred channels, there’s also more scope for learning about the customer as they feel more comfortable using that channel.

Because customers are already used to using their preferred channels, there are fewer technical hurdles to overcome, too. They don’t have to learn how to use social media messaging if you offer support via email, for example. This can result in faster resolution times.

By limiting the time and effort spent on channels less popular with your clients, you can spend more on the communication channels they do use, improving productivity and efficiency.

Combine Ticket Data with Text Analysis to Get the Whole Picture

The correct data is critical to improving customer service productivity, but it’s sometimes difficult to see the woods for the trees. Measuring levels of customer satisfaction isn’t too difficult, but isolating the reasons behind high and poor customer satisfaction is more challenging because there can be many factors at play.

Text analysis is a powerful tool here. It summarizes and classifies vast swathes of text data, so you don’t have to wade through it yourself. You can get clarity and a deeper understanding by performing text analysis on customer feedback left for specific tickets or even on the whole conversation between your pre and the customer. The text analysis adds useful sentiment details to a ticket while highlighting the likely reasons for the low or high ratings. This saves a lot of time while eliminating guesswork.

How to Boost Customer Service Agent Productivity

No matter how good your team is, they’ll not be able to perform well without the right processes and tools in place. There are many things you can tweak to most off of your staff. Here are some of the first things to consider to improve customer service agent productivity:

Automate Mundane Tasks

Eliminating simple tasks that take up a lot of customer service agent time is a great way to improve efficiency. Customer service agents can perform their essential duties more productively without having to perform mundane, repetitive takes.

Look for some frequently asked questions that plague customer service and offer answers to these questions on your website. Customers who didn’t find these answers can be sent the details by customer service agents, limiting the time spent on these tasks.

Automate data entry, such as account numbers, so agents don’t have to do it. Intelligent interactive voice response systems can collect this data from customers directly over the phone without human interaction.

You can automate other tasks, too, such as sending follow-up emails to customers. Continually examine the processes your agents must follow, looking for parts that can be automated, so they no longer have to perform them.

Enable Skills-Based Routing

Skills-based routing, where customers are automatically transferred to the agents best capable of handling their queries, can boost productivity.

By immediately connecting customers to agents with the skills and experience to resolve their issues, problems can be resolved faster.

First-call resolution rates vastly improve, as there’s rarely a need for transfers or callbacks. The handling time of each call will be reduced, as a knowledgeable agent can solve issues without researching further. And skills-based routing allows agents to make efficient use of their skillset.

Allow Agents to Provide Feedback and Suggestions for Improvement

No one knows the challenges and frustrations of delivering customer support in your company more than the agents themselves, so make the best use of this vital source of information. By asking agents to identify areas for improvement, you can implement faster processes that help them perform their job even better.

Asking agents for feedback and putting some of their ideas into place is also empowering. They feel they have more agency, that the company cares about their input, and that their experience is valuable. This results in higher motivation and reduced employee churn, making for better overall efficiency and productivity.

Allow Agents to Handle Interactions on Multiple Channels from the Same Screen

Most companies recognize the value of offering multi-channel support. Customers can use the communication channels they prefer, and you can prioritize channels based on urgency.

However, when you allow customers to interact with your company through multiple different channels, they still expect you to be able to offer a consistent service.

When they can handle interactions on multiple channels from the same screen, agents can move between appropriate channels at will. For instance, a customer may initially phone for support, but the agent can email them software or documents, all from one screen.

Importantly, having all the interactions customers have had through all communication channels in one place means customer service agents get the full context of the interaction. They can make informed decisions based on your company’s history with the customer.

Teams that use tools to improve communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration can enhance productivity by up to 25%

Even if the customer uses a different communication channel in the future or speaks to another agent, all of the information available to the agent will be accurate and up to date.

With everything managed from one screen, it’s easier for multi-skilled agents to multitask. Agents can be put on high priority for calls but respond to emails in their downtime, for instance. Once again, this improves productivity as their time is used better.

Understand How Busy Your Agents Are

To measure performance on a micro or macro level, you need to know how busy each of your agents is. A strong metric here is occupancy rates, the percentage of time that customer service representatives are handling interactions with customers.

By measuring the occupancy rates of each team member and the team as a whole, you can calculate your team’s potential bandwidth. It can help you shift workload and responsibilities between team members to make the best use of their time.

Remember that everyone has a limit to how much work they can perform without burnout. Constantly pushing agents to give 110% will have detrimental effects on morale, motivation, and agent retention.

Most Relevant Customer Service Productivity Metrics to Monitor

Data is one of your most vital assets for improving customer service productivity. You can use metrics to find problem spots to work on and then further use metrics to find what works and what doesn’t. Here are some of the most useful metrics you can use to build better productivity in your customer service:

1. Net Promoter® Score

Net Promoter® Score (NPS) measures how likely a customer would be to recommend your products or services to friends or family. By asking customers to rank this likelihood as a score between 0 and 10 and grouping responses into three categories—detractors, passives, and promoters—you can compare average NPS scores from different customer groups.

By tracking NPS over time, you can identify the areas of customer service that are most dissatisfying to customers. By improving these areas, customers can be satisfied in fewer interactions, boosting customer service productivity.

2. Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that rates how easy a customer finds using your products, services, or processes. A higher customer effort score calculation means the customer found the process required less effort.

By identifying processes with a low CES, you find areas that require improvement. You can streamline these processes, ultimately boosting customer satisfaction and advocacy. By reducing customer effort, you can also reduce the number of customer interactions required, saving costs.

3. First Contact Resolution

First Contact Resolution (FCR) measures the percentage of customer support queries resolved the first time a customer contacts you. Customers frequently say that FCR is important to them, and improving FCR rates leads to better customer satisfaction.

High FCR rates typically go hand in hand with efficient working processes. Each extra time a customer is required to contact customer support or needs a callback eats away at your call center productivity.

Wherever you find low FCR rates, look for why the customer’s issue couldn’t be resolved on the first call. Did they get routed to the correct department? Did the agent have the information available to them to respond correctly to the interaction? Were there enough skilled agents available at the time to manage the call?

By finding the reason for a low FCR, you can fix the issue so that the next time a customer has the same problem, their query will be resolved the first time.

4. Average Handle Time

Average Handle Time (AHT) measures how long, on average, it takes to resolve customer requests. It’s an excellent metric for comparing the efficiency of different communication channels and testing new approaches in the contact center.

A low AHT means your customer service team can resolve issues quickly, so they have more bandwidth to help more customers, improving efficiency. Identifying high ART areas helps find elements slowing your customer service efforts.

5. Ticket Volume

Ticket volume, or case volume, measures the number of requests your customer service team receives. By accurately measuring ticket volume across multiple channels, you get a strong picture of how much demand for support there is.

You can delineate ticket volume by time of day and weekday to better ensure staff is available at the right time. Checking the ticket volume by communication channel allows you to designate the correct number of staff to cover each of them.

By cross-referencing ticket volume with particular issues, you find common problems that customers constantly contact customer support about. From there, you can build better proactive support or self-service options, reducing the volume of those issues.

6. Customer Satisfaction Score

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a metric that measures the satisfaction a customer expresses about a product or service. In our case, we’re typically most interested in how customers perceive the customer support they’ve received.

Brands have struggled recently with customer satisfaction, with 19% of US brands seeing a drop in customer experience scores in 2022.

Customer satisfaction at different customer journey stages can be measured and compared to find points where the process falls short. You can compare customer satisfaction rates across communication channels, teams, or individual agents. With this, you can find problem areas to focus improvement efforts on.

7. Customer Churn Rate

Customer churn rate represents the percentage of customers that stop doing business with your company. Every company will have some customer churn, but a high customer churn rate indicates a severe problem with your products or customer service.

Measure customer churn rate in tandem with other metrics to ascertain now only how many customers you’re losing but why you’re losing them. By identifying where and why you’re losing customers, you can make improvements to retain more customers.

A 5% increase in customer retention can result in a 25% increase in profits. If there are customer service reasons you have a high customer churn rate, you must make resolving these issues a priority or risk bleeding more valuable customers.

The Final Word

Boosting customer service productivity, the efficiency at which your business can handle customer service queries, is crucial to reducing costs while improving customer satisfaction rates.

You can improve customer service productivity by offering proactive support and building ways for customers to resolve their issues independently, such as a self-service portal. By increasing customer service speed and ensuring a consistent level of service, you can better serve the customer.

Customer service agents must be supported if you want their individual and team productivity to improve. Consistently ask agents for feedback on processes and carefully consider how to make their job easier. Automate mundane tasks and use skills-based routing to deliver customer queries to people best capable of resolving them the first time.

As with everything in customer service, data and metrics are key to finding and eliminating productivity drains. We’ve outlined some of the best customer service productivity metrics to monitor above so that you can get the absolute best out of your trained, experienced, and motivated agents.

The Importance of Customer Satisfaction

Ville Kauppi — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 09:28:00 +0000

Yes, product quality matters. Yes, a competitive price will get you far. But, the data has spoken – it shows that 66% of consumers care more about the experience than price. It, therefore, stands to reason that the success of your business depends on the overall experience and customer satisfaction you deliver.

While customer expectations are continually increasing, businesses shift their focus on the experience. Ultimately, consumers are drawn to brands that make good on their promises and provide exceptional experiences across the customer journey. In this brand-new world, businesses that prioritize the experience see higher brand awareness, increased retention rates, and higher order values.

So, are your customers happy? Will they buy again? Or recommend your business to a friend or family member? In other words, how are you performing in the customer satisfaction department? These questions are so important for the longevity of your business that you cannot just go ahead and answer them based on your gut feeling especially because acquiring a new customer is 5 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.

What is Customer Satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a measurement used to quantify how customers feel about their interaction with your brand, and it reflects the degree to which you have managed to provide a customer experience that meets expectations.

Why Does Customer Satisfaction Matter?

Many argue that satisfaction is simply the lack of, well, dissatisfaction. The logic here is that instead of aiming for satisfaction, companies should strive to delight the customer with the experience they provide. Still, focusing on customer satisfaction is the first step towards an elevated customer experience that promotes loyalty.

So, let’s drill down on this a bit more.

Either way, you look at it, satisfied customers are good news. And this is why:

Reduced churn

The only way to identify frustrated customers is by measuring satisfaction. If you can’t identify unsatisfied customers, you can’t foresee or prevent churn. It goes without saying that losing existing customers is bad for business.

Customer success

Research shows that growing companies are more likely to prioritise customer success. On that note, measuring satisfaction will not only help you identify frustrated customers but also those customers that find success when using your products. Prioritising customer success and tracking down how you are performing while doing so is a no-brainer if your goal is to grow your business.

Loyalty

Repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers. On top of that, consumers trust recommendations from friends or family when considering the purchase of a product. In other words, customer loyalty boosts revenue streams and brings new business solely by word-of-mouth. That means you can save your advertising money and put it to a different use. In the greater scheme of things, you can’t have loyal customers unless you keep them satisfied. And even though customer satisfaction does not guarantee loyalty, it sure is a good place to start.

Determining ROI

Increased customer satisfaction is an indication that the money you invest in improving the customer experience is money well spent. You can use CSAT scores to benchmark your performance and figure out if your CX strategy is panning out the way you hoped it would or whether you need to revise it. As a result, customer satisfaction is a fundamental customer experience KPI to track.

So here we are. Customer satisfaction matters because it helps you identify pain points, increase customer retention and improve the customer experience. It might be worth your time to start measuring it.

How to Measure Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction surveys are a powerful tool to help you crunch the numbers and tell you where you stand with your customers and the experience you provide them with. As a general rule, businesses use surveys to measure satisfaction and track whether customers perceive their experience with the brand in a positive or negative manner.

The responses to a customer satisfaction survey, such as Net Promoter Score ® (NPS) or the five-point Likert scale give you a number that points to the average level of customer satisfaction topped with an idea of customer loyalty.

2 Types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

While measuring customer satisfaction is important for reasons such as higher retention rates, improved customer experience, and loyalty, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and struggle to decide which questions to ask and which metrics to track. Before deciding what to ask in your customer satisfaction survey, you should be familiar with the different types of CSAT surveys.

In general, customer satisfaction surveys can be divided into two major categories:

Transactional CSAT Surveys

These surveys are designed to measure the level of customer satisfaction after a direct interaction at any point along the customer journey. For example, companies send transactional CSAT surveys post-purchase or after a customer has contacted support to resolve an issue. The purpose of these surveys is to understand how the customer feels about that particular interaction.

Overall CSAT Surveys

This type of survey has a more general scope and is concerned with how customers feel about your business in general. This includes the sum totality of all individual experiences and other factors that may affect customer perception in a positive or negative manner. Overall, CSAT surveys are not usually sent after direct interactions and can be lengthier and more detailed in nature.

Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

When thinking of which questions to include in your CSAT survey, consider

the type of survey you are sending: transactional or overall CSAT, and
what is it you are trying to achieve by measuring customer satisfaction

Questions for transactional CSAT surveys

When conducting transactional CSAT surveys, make sure you are focusing the questions around the actual transaction. Ask your customers to answer the survey questions solely based on their latest interaction with your company. Here are some example questions:

How easy was it to find what you were looking for on our website?
Please rate our online purchase process.
How would you rate the agent that provided you support yesterday?
How satisfied are you with the customer service experience in-store?

Transactional CSAT surveys will help you examine in detail one aspect of your business. Try to stick to one topic and deliver the question in a concise and easily understood manner.

Questions for overall CSAT surveys

Overall, CSAT surveys will provide you with general insights into how your customers view your business. You can use the same survey to get answers to questions that cover several topics such as product/service quality, customer experience, etc.

Overall, how easy is it to contact us?
Based on your experience with our product/service, how likely are you to buy again?
How would you rate the following aspects of our software?
- Ease of use
- Features
- Speed
What would you change in our product/service?

Popular Customer Satisfaction Metrics

Metrics such as the Net Promoter ® Score or the Customer Effort Score are often used when measuring the customer experience as they provide quick and benchmarkable insights on the health of your company and are good indicators of elevated customer satisfaction. Let’s take a closer look.

Net Promoter® Score

The Net Promoter® Score (NPS) measures the customer’s willingness to recommend the company to others by asking the following question:

Considering your overall experience with our company how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or family member?

The NPS is used to quantify the customers’ overall satisfaction with the company and their loyalty to the brand.

Customer Effort Score

The Customer Effort Score (CES) is geared towards measuring customer service satisfaction and as such, is more appropriate for support environments. To measure the CES, ask a variation of the following question:

How easy was it to solve your issue with us today?

The CES has gained popularity over the last years, and businesses prefer it over other metrics as it allows to quantify how successful the customer is when using their product or service.

The bottom line is that the questions you ask in your CSAT survey should stem from the information you want to get and the goals you aim to achieve. The most important thing to remember is that tracking metrics will not get you very far unless you analyze them and use the insights to improve your business.

The 12 Best Customer Service Software Platforms for 2024

Ville Kauppi — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 11:23:56 +0000

Customer service software is crucial to providing your customers with an exceptional customer service experience, which helps to facilitate business success.

According to Financeonline, “Customer service of the near future will move towards a direction where humans and computers work together to find solutions to customer issues.” As a result, using technology to improve customer service performance is a one way street.

However, figuring out what customer support tool best serves your organization can take time and effort.

You need to consider your current needs and find a tool that can handle them but is, also, flexible enough to scale as your business grows.

If you choose the wrong solution, the result will be dissatisfied customers and frustrated team members. Hence, it is vital to take time to consider your options so that you can make an informed decision.

If you are looking for a support platform to give new life to your contact center, we have compiled a list of 12 best Customer Service Software Platforms.

Let’s get started!

What is a customer service software platform?

Customer service software is a type of software that is programmed to help companies provide assistance to their customers. A typical package will include the following features

Support ticketing systems
Messaging & live chat
Help Center
Community forums
Reporting & analytics
Workflow Management
Appointment Management

Good customer service and responding to customers queries fast help customers develop trust in a brand. And statistics show that 68% of consumers spent more on a brand they trust than on brands they use but do not trust.

Hence the importance of customer service software solutions to business success cannot be overlooked.

The benefits of a customer service software solution:

Helps your team gather customer insights
Allows you to manage, organize and respond to all customer service requests
Facilitates efficient team collaboration
Helps you understand changes in team productivity, support volume, type and size of customers, and much more
Enables you to manage multiple teams of agents to support a large customer base without compromising quality of service using organizational features, automation, and third-party integrations.

12 best Customer Service Software Platforms for 2024

To help you quickly find the ideal tool for your team, we’ve compiled this list of the 12 best customer service software platforms for 2024.

Here we go!

1. Zendesk

Zendesk is easily one of the most comprehensive customer service software platforms on the market, used by over 169,000 businesses in 160+ countries, including big brands like Shopify, Uber, Slack, and Venmo.

The platform provides an all-in-one software package for customer service, sales, and CRM. It has a suite of tools that can be used to manage the entire support process.

Here’s a quick overview of its features, integrations, and pricing:

Features:

Messaging & live chat
Help Center
Voice
Community forums
Reporting & analytics
Answer Bot
Customer service software
Ticketing system software
Live chat software

Integrations:

Zendesk integrates with over 300 apps and systems, including Google Play Reviews, Salesforce, Dialpad, JIRA, Assembled, Shopify, etc.

Pricing:

Starting at $19/agent per month.

Free trial:

A free trial is available for any Zendesk software or support suite. But if you need a custom solution, contact the Zendesk sales team.

2. Genesys Cloud CX

Genesys Cloud CX is a customer experience and contact center solution that works to create proactive, predictive, and hyper-personalized experiences for customers in all interactions.

Genesys provides scalable customer service software support in three product tiers.

However, Genesys is very AI-focused; hence it might not be the best fit for smaller businesses.

Features, integrations, and pricing for Genesys Cloud CX are as follows:

Features:

Speech-enabled IVR
Voicebots
Chatbots
Tracking and reporting
Outbound scripting
Detailed records search
Knowledge base
API
Interaction analytics

Integrations:

Genesys integrates with apps and systems such as Google Workspace, Zendesk, Microsoft Azure, Jenkins, etc.

Pricing:

Genesys Cloud CX 1: $75 per month
Genesys Cloud CX 2: $110 per month
Genesys Cloud CX 3: $150 per month
Genesys DX: Contact sales for a quote

Free trial:

A 30-days – a 12-month free trial is available for Genesys CX. But you need to request your free trial, and their team will reach out to you.

3. ServiceNow

ServiceNow is a cloud computing platform helping companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations through omnichannel communication, work order assignment, case management, etc.

The platform offers advanced features like AI-support ticketing systems to help boost productivity and customer service management.

Let’s take a closer look at the ServiceNow features, integrations, and price points.

Features:

Collaboration Tools
Third-Party Integrations
Reporting & Statistics
Workflow Management
Task Management
Agent Interface
Alerts / Escalation
Appointment Management

Integrations:

ServiceNow integrates hundreds of critical business systems and apps, including SightCall, Talkdesk, Webex, Sprinklr, 3CLogic, etc.

Pricing:

Contact ServiceNow for pricing details.

Free trial:

Not available.

4. Hubspot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub is the customer service solution of the Hubspot platform. It is designed to simplify managing customer queries and improve client engagement for businesses of all sizes.

Here’s a closer look at the features and prices for HubSpot Service Hub customer service software:

Features:

Ticketing
Live chat
Chatbots
Conversations inbox
Reporting/Analytics
API
Third-Party Integrations
Multi-Channel Communication
Activity Dashboard

Integrations:

Hubspot Service Hub integrates with 1000+ apps, including BrightTALK Channels, Stitch, Wix, ClearVoice, WooCommerce, Zapier, etc.

Pricing:

Free plan available.

Paid plans start at $45/month.

Free trial:

Hubspot typically has a 14-day trial. However, concerning Hubspot Service Hub, they have a free forever plan.

5. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is an online cloud-based customer support software company offering intelligent solutions that help businesses deliver great customer service and stay productive.

An exciting benefit of becoming a Freshdesk user is that, through its Academy, you can offload some of the responsibility of training your agents on the system.

Here’s a quick view of the features, integrations, and pricing for Freshdesk:

Features:

Ticketing
Collaboration
Omnichannel Helpdesk
Automation
Self Service
Field Service Management
Reporting & Analytics
Customizations
Secure Helpdesk
Compare Helpdesk

Integrations:

Freshdesk integrations include Dropbox Business, Zoom Meetings, TeamViewer, Mailchimp, SurveyMonkey, etc.

Pricing:

Unlike other customer service software tools in the industry that come with steep pricing tiers and hidden costs, Freshdesk is priced reasonably.

Free- $0 (unlimited free agents)

Growth plan- $18/agent/month billed monthly or $15/agent/month billed yearly.

Pro- $59/agent/month billed monthly or $49/agent/month billed yearly

Enterprise- $95/agent/month billed monthly or $79/agent/month billed yearly

Free trial:

Freshdesk offers a 21-day free trial.

6. Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud is a cloud-based customer service and support platform that provides an integrated suite of applications for managing customer relationships.

The platform includes Salesforce Service Cloud Console, Cloud Lightning, and Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein.

Features:

Customer Complaint Tracking
Customer Database
Customer Experience Management
API
Help Desk Management
Lead Distribution
Live Chat
Real-Time Chat
Support Ticket Management
Third-Party Integrations

Integrations:

Salesforce Service Cloud integrations include InGenius, Quip, NICE CXone, Five9, Vonage Contact Center, etc.

Pricing:

Lightning Essentials- $25/user/month

Lightning Professional- $75/user/month

Lightning Enterprise- $150/user/month

Lightning Performance- $300/ user/month

All plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

Salesforce offers a 30-day free trial.

7. Talkdesk

Talkdesk is a highly recognized browser-based contact center solution helping businesses build stronger customer relationships globally.

With hundreds of customizable features, including automated workflows, live reporting, and more, Talkdesk makes for an ideal contact center solution for businesses of all sizes.

Let’s take a quick view of their features, integrations, and prices:

Features:

Auto-Dialer
Automated Routing
Blended Call Center
CRM
Call Center Management
Chat/Messaging
API
Customer Experience Management
Multi-Channel Communication

Integrations:

Talkdesk integrates seamlessly with apps such as Groove, UserVoice, Zingtree, Scorebuddy, Nimble, OnePageCRM, Intercom, BigCommerce, etc.

Pricing:

Starting at $75/user per month.

Free trial:

Not available.

8. LeadDesk

LeadDesk is a cloud-based contact center software platform for inbound sales, outbound sales, and customer service.

Here’s a quick view of LeadDesk features, integrations, and prices:

Features:

Auto-Dialer
List Management
Customizable Caller ID
CRM
Interaction Tracking
Call Center Management
LiveChat
API
Virtual Call Center

Integrations:

LeadDesk integrates with business apps like Giosg, Pipedrive, Plecto, Microsoft Power BI, and Zendesk Suite.

Pricing:

Instant- €89/license (from 2-5 licenses) billed monthly.

Essential- €99/license (starting from 5 licenses) billed monthly.

Advanced- €129/license (starting from 5 licenses) billed monthly.

Enterprise- Contact LeadDesk to request a quote.

Free trial:

30-days

9. Help Scout

Help Scout is a dedicated customer service platform built for growing teams to deliver top-notch customer service. When you sign up, you get access to an entire suite of tools such as shared inbox, knowledge base, and live chat software, all designed to help you create the best customer experience possible.

Here’s a closer look at Help Scout features and prices plans:

Features:

Auto-Responders
Customizable Branding
Feedback Management
Help Desk Management
Interaction Tracking
LiveChat
Reporting/Analytics
API
Third-Party Integration

Integrations:

Help Scout integrates with over 90 business apps that help keep your business in sync — from CRM, Analytics, Marketing, and other support tools, including Wufoo, Capsule, Userlike, BriteVerify, Geckoboard, Aircall, etc.

Pricing:

Standard- $25 user/month, or $20 user/month billed annually.

Plus- $40 user/month, or $35 user/month billed annually.

Pro- Company: $60 user/month billed annually.

Free trial:

15-day trial

10. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a cloud-based help desk solution offered by Zoho Corporation. It caters to businesses of all sizes. Zoho Desk collates interactions from various media (email, phone, chat, social media, a self-service portal, forums, and forms) and presents them in one place.

Integration with Zoho customer relationship management (CRM) facilitates feeding customer information into tickets logged in Zoho Desk, which enables service agents to know more about the customers.

Have a quick view of Zoho Desk features, integrations, and price plans:

Features:

Support ticketing systems
VoIP Connection
Customizable Branding
CRM
Interaction Tracking
Call Center Management
LiveChat
API
inbound Call Center
Customer Experience Management

Integrations:

Zoho Desk integrates with 550+ apps, including Zadarma, Google Analytics 360, Clearbit, Trello, Twitter, Twilio, etc.

Pricing:

Free – up to 3 users, forever!

Standard – $14/agent/month

Professional – $23/agent/month

Enterprise – $40/agent/month

Free trial:

15-days

11. Nice InContact

NICE CXone is a cloud-based customer experiences platform helping organizations of all sizes build extraordinary and trustworthy customer experiences that build deeper brand loyalty and lasting relationships.

Here is a view of their features and price:

Features:

Support ticketing systems
Workforce Optimization
Customer surveys
Live chat
Native integrations
Knowledge base
API
Customer Analytics,
Omnichannel Routing
Artificial Intelligence

Integrations:

NICE inContact integrates with business apps like SAP Customer Experience, Bullhorn ATS & CRM, Inbenta, NetSuite CRM, Oracle Service, Dynamics 365, livepro, etc.

Pricing:

Price starts from $100

Free trial:

60 days

12. Gladly

Gladly is a cloud-based customer service software solution used by various B2C companies across multiple industries, including eCommerce, travel, retail, insurance, hospitality, and travel.

Their customer service solution has a user-friendly interface that makes using it easy even if you are not a tech-savvy team.

Here’s a quick view of their features, integrations, and prices:

Features:

Reporting/Analytics
API
Third-Party Integrations
Chat/Messaging
Customizable Branding
Multi-Channel Communication
Live Chat
Alerts / Escalation
Inbound Call Center

Integrations:

Gladly integrates with business apps like Adobe Commerce, Messenger, Delighted, Tethr, Stella Connect, Playvox, Klaviyo, Typeform, Asana, etc.

Pricing:

Support Hero- $150 per user/month. 10-seat minimum & annual contract

Task User- $38 per user/month

Free User- $0 per user/month

Free trial:

14-day

Omnichannel Customer Service and How to Deliver it

Ville Kauppi — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 07:47:41 +0000

Omnichannel support has become the gold standard for success in the customer service world. Luckily, in terms of technology it’s never been easier to go down the omnichannel path. For many businesses, however, grasping the benefits of an omnichannel strategy is not as straight forward, especially when weighing the required investment against the results it yields – which can be hard to quantify.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the benefits of omnichannel customer service, we’ll guide you through the steps you have to take to implement a competent omnichannel strategy, and, finally, we’ll discuss ways to measure the outcome of your efforts.

What Is Omnichannel Customer Service?

Omnichannel customer service is a support strategy that allows customers to receive service across multiple channels integrated in the same system. This approach allows for a comprehensive view over the customer’s interactions with the company thus, delivering a seamless experience.

Telephone, live messaging, chatbots, email, video calling, and SMS texting are all potential communication channels for offering support, and the omnichannel strategy aims to offer as many channels as possible.

Clients could start their journey by getting answers from your website with an AI chatbot. Later, they browse your knowledge base for information on your products before downloading your free app to their phone. They get live chat support within the app, before later emailing your company after having discussed the details with their boss.

You arrange a set of phone calls, and after they’ve purchased your products, members of their team send you follow-up questions on social media, by email, and by text.

This is an example of omnichannel customer service in action. Though customers will undoubtedly have their preferred modes of contact with your company, being able to offer them seamless service across multiple integrated channels is the power of the omnichannel superhero.

The power of the omnichannel superhero is the ability to offer seamless service across multiple integrated communication channels.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel Customer Service

When evaluating omnichannel vs. multichannel customer service, omnichannel goes further than multichannel support to offer a completely unified experience for the client.

Multichannel communication is usually a company-first approach, where the company uses several channels to increase the chance that they’ll be able to get through to the customer with marketing and generate more leads.

When carried over to customer support without due care, this approach makes for a disjointed experience. Communication channels feel separate, with different messaging, and the customer often must repeat themselves.

Omnichannel communication should have the customer feeling that your business is always there to support them in the way they need. All your support channels should be connected and part of the same system.

If a customer comes into your store, phones your company, uses your mobile app, or talks to you via social media, they should feel that they’re dealing with the same entity every time.

Does Your Business Need an Omnichannel Customer Service Strategy?

An omnichannel approach to customer service has been shown to have tremendous benefits for customer retention and profits.

Companies employing an omnichannel engagement strategy see average customer retention of 89% compared to the 33% a company with poor omnichannel support can expect.
Two-thirds of people use multiple platforms to make purchases, with over 70% using numerous channels throughout the purchase journey.
Omnichannel strategies drive an 80% higher rate of incremental store visits.

The data is startling. Omnichannel strategys’ effects on customer behavior and retention make this approach almost mandatory for any modern business.

Next, we’ll look at why omnichannel customer service is so successful.

Omnichannel strategys’ effects on customer behavior and retention make this approach almost mandatory for any modern business.

What Are the Benefits of Omnichannel Support?

Personalized Customer Service

Successful omnichannel support gives customers a personalized service experience which makes them feel prioritized, valued, and more emotionally connected to a company that shows it recognizes them as an individual.

For instance, being able to talk to the same agent each time they call is something that over 35% of customers have stated is important to them. Being required to restate their queries each time they contact your company leaves a customer feeling that you don’t value their time.

Offering these types of personalized service is essential to standing out from the competition. It’s an effective strategy for small businesses as they can show customers why their more personalized approach can be a benefit. And it’s just as vital for larger companies that risk feeling impersonal because of the size of their client base.

Reduced Operational Costs

For many companies, omnichannel sounds like one of those things they’d love to offer if only they could afford it. But this approach, when implemented correctly, can be one of the most effective strategies to reduce customer service costs.

Most of the customer service channels you will want to add in an omnichannel approach are cheaper to handle than a phone call. Offering support via SMS is around four times cheaper than support over the phone. Email support is even less expensive to run, and social media costs next to nothing when you have the right procedures in place.

This all means that on a per-support-request basis, using an omnichannel approach can decimate operational costs.

Lower Volume of Inbound Contact Requests

Besides resulting in fewer support requests over the phone, an omnichannel strategy can reduce the number of contact requests you receive in total.

Making support information on your products and services publicly available online allows customers to take a proactive approach, finding answers to their support queries on your knowledge bases, FAQs, social media, or community forums.

This not only reduces the number of inbound requests you receive; it also offers customers a better experience as many prefer to solve quick issues themselves.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Omnichannel support allows customers to use the communication channels they prefer, instantly increasing their satisfaction with your service.

But it’s more than that. Your agents can have complete visibility of all the touchpoints the customer has had with your company. They can use this to improve first contact resolution rates, build customer trust, and avoid customers having to repeat themselves.

Agents love having this information available to them. Giving them the real-time information they need to offer excellent support can be a powerful motivator, increase agent engagement, and reduce attrition.

Reduced Customer Churn Rates

The omnichannel approach has massive advantages for customers, particularly in the way the right information is always available to them at the right time.

If you design it effectively by proactively considering when, where, and how clients will require further information on your products and services, you can make the entire journey for them faster and effortless.

Customers are simply more likely to stick around with a company when they know they can get support through the channels they prefer. Moreover, the service they receive is unified, strengthening your company’s brand and building loyalty.

Increased Sales Revenue

The omnichannel strategy can increase the sales revenue you receive from upselling and cross-selling. Preemptive texts and emails can “warm up” customers, so they’re more likely to pick up when you call. This speeds up resolutions, improves satisfaction, and results in more sales.

Omnichannel means there’s less of a distinction between sales and support because the customer gets the same level and style of attention each time. This can result in better levels of upselling and cross-selling.

Omnichannel support can, ultimately, lead to better customer experiences, particularly for long-term customers which means reduced customer churn rates and higher sales per customer.

How to Deliver Successful Omnichannel Customer Service

Know Your Customers

Every business has a separate set of customers, and each of your products has its own subset of clients. Each of these types of customers has its preferred way of doing business. They all have their own expectations of the service you will provide, and it’s up to you to surpass these expectations at every turn.

There’s no point in pouring massive resources into a communication channel that your set of customers won’t use. Some businesses operate almost completely via phone calls and in-person meetings, so the advantages of adding support via Facebook, for instance, will be minimal in the short term.

Focus your resources on the channels your customers are most likely to use first.

When you use an omnichannel support solution that makes it easy to add these additional channels into the mix, the expense will be very low and things can be set up quickly. It can, also, be worth offering customer service through less traditional methods for your industry even if it doesn’t get used much.

Appearances matter (to some people, anyway). Clients may consider your company more forward-thinking and flexible, for example, if you offer support through channels they might not personally want to use.

Create a Customer Journey Map

Map the journey your sets of customers use now. By checking the history of their conversations, you can see whether they’ve interacted mostly via your website, through texts, or through social media, for instance. Use these insights to gauge where your efforts will be best spent when expanding the channels you offer support through.

With the right software in place, you can get customer feedback and sentiment analysis at every step of the journey. This allows you to find the problem areas in your customer journey, which you can use as a guide to understanding where you need to improve.

Leverage Technology

All of this is impossible without the right data collection. Customer data, sentiment tracking, and performance monitoring must be central to your omnichannel strategy so you have precise metrics telling you what’s working and what isn’t.

Customer service technology with machine learning and AI can automate a lot of the work involved in tracking customer behavior. It can build you a report that demonstrates how each of the cogs in the system is performing—vital information for ongoing improvements.

Omnichannel Contact Center Solutions

Automation & AI

Smart AI and automatio can blur the lines between self-service and human service. Chatbots using natural language processing can perform the basic duties of taking customer data, routing users to the correct documentation, and gathering details of a problem before it’s sent to a live agent.

Chatbots offer another channel for support, and if they’re integrated well into your support infrastructure, they can be another pillar in your omnichannel strategy.

Customer Data Analytics

With said automation and AI in place, you now have an excellent way to gather customer data analytics. With every step of the customer service process being monitored and tracked, you can get incredible insights into customer behavior and which parts of your customer service journey need tweaking.

You can find which customer service channels to focus on, the sentiments customers have at different parts of the journey, and how engaged they are at each point. With machine learning, the system can test which responses have the best success rates, so service can be continually improved based on hard data.

Connect Key Business Software with Your Omnichannel Support Platform

Effective omnichannel customer service hinges on all your systems working together in unison. You may be able to offer multichannel support by using multiple separate systems, but you can’t offer a high level of service when any of your main interaction channels operate in a vacuum.

Integrated customer relationship management, communication, and collaboration tools are the backbone of omnichannel support. Evaluate all the tools you’re using, check which are operating separately, and replace them with a tool that is integrated with all your other software.

Create a Seamless Channel Integration

For a truly omnichannel system as opposed to simply a multichannel solution, you need all your support channels to be integrated. Customers expect a seamless transition from one channel to another. If they first contact you via social media but decide to reach out to your call center as a situation escalates, for instance, offer them an experience that suggests the same entity is handling the transaction all the way.

To facilitate this, you need customer data to be updated in real-time. As customers switch support channels, the same information is relayed to whoever is handling the query at that point.

Whenever possible, allow the same agent to provide service to the customer as they move across channels. If this isn’t possible, the agent taking over support must have immediate access to all the customer information and details of all the support they’ve received in the past.

This type of seamless channel integration is only possible when you use contact center software that’s designed with omnichannel support in mind. Using a single software solution eliminates double work and eradicates data silos.

Train & Upskill Your Customer Service Team

While we often look to technology to improve customer service, we shouldn’t forget that the team remains the heart and soul of the customer support experience.

Agents that understand more of the cogs of the system are better equipped to show empathy. If they know the typical customer journey, they can offer a better customer experience.

Cross-training agents in offering support via multiple channels can pay off in dividends when you take an omnichannel approach. Your customer care representatives will

Be able to handle more support channels, reducing downtime
Be more likely to be able to deal with a customer personally, all the way through their service journey
Feel better valued and important, improving agent motivation
Feel better supported and that there’s room to grow in the company

Upskilling agents by giving them more product and communication skill training improves the support you can offer. It also increases first-call resolution rates, as your highly skilled agents better know how to resolve issues the first time around.

Offer Self-Service Options

Self-service options for customer support are a win-win for companies and customers alike. Many customers prefer to resolve minor issues with products and services themselves. Perhaps they just need some minor details on how a product works or want to make a slight change to their plan. By offering self-service options, you’re broadening the ways customers can choose to perform these actions.

Some customer support self-service options to consider include:

Automated call center
Chatbots
Community forums
Knowledge bases
FAQ pages
Mobile apps

When customers choose a self-service option instead of a support channel that requires human interaction, this results in lower operating costs for your company.

Engage With Customers Through Social Media

Customers spend 20-40% more with companies that respond to queries over social media. That alone illustrates the value of social media to businesses.

Companies have long known the importance of social media to marketing, but many see it as separate from the rest of the business. An omnichannel approach brings social media in as a new channel for offering customer service support.

Beyond all the usual advantages of offering even more channels, responding to queries via social media shows publicly how dedicated your company is to delivering superior support. It offers another place for people to find previous answers to queries, too, lowering the number of inbound requests you’ll receive.

And you can leverage the massive resources of social media companies to deliver videos, guides, and responses, too.

Measure Support Performance

Measuring how each leg of your customer service infrastructure performs while you are making improvements to your customer support is how you can track what’s working and what isn’t.

A contact center is full of key performance indicators (KPIs) that give you a bird’s-eye view of how a particular person, team, support step, or system is performing. With omnichannel customer service, there are certain KPIs that can be particularly useful:

Number of touchpoints—How many touchpoints a customer needed to go through for the company to reach a particular goal.
Retention rate—Customer retention is a useful high-level gauge of how your company’s aftersales care is performing.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)—How likely a customer will be to recommend you to friends or family. Average NPS compared across different customer journey steps or support channels can be a pointer to where you should focus.
Traffic generation and visit rate—The amount of traffic you receive on particular channels will show you their relevance to your customers and how aware customers are that such support channels are available.
Cross-channel conversion rate—How well conversions are performing when customers use multiple channels.
Lifetime customer value (LTV)—The total revenue you get from a customer in his “lifetime”.

Each of these KPIs and more can be used to compare each step of the process. Automation and AI can generate these insights for you, highlighting where improvements can be made.

Analyze Customer Feedback Data

AI and automation provide useful insights into the customer journey by storing data on customer behavior and using them to gauge customer sentiment. Again, this can be automated, so the cost to the company is minimal.

Pooling customer feedback data together with data automatically gathered on customer behavior, customer engagement, support interactions, first contact resolution rates, customer demographics, and the quality of your customer care is how you’re able to see how to improve your customer-centric strategy.

New technology makes this process so much easier, so you can be miles ahead of the competition if you use AI reporting tools with machine learning.

Conclusion

Omnichannel customer service is more than just having multiple modes of communication available between your company and its clients. It’s about offering the same quality and style of service over all your channels, so customers feel confident they’ll get the same level of support no matter how they choose to contact your company.

The Omnichannel strategy can reduce operational costs and lower the number of inbound contact requests you receive. It results in more personalized service, improving customer satisfaction rates, reducing customer churn, and ultimately increasing sales revenue.

Putting an omnichannel strategy into place starts with evaluating your current customer journeys. You can then leverage technology in the contact center to offer seamless support across all channels. By integrating key business software, training your customer service team, adding self-service and social media support, and using advanced automation and machine learning, your customer service can run smoother than it ever has.

Finally, perform ongoing support performance measurement and analyze the data you get from customer feedback, allowing you to recognize how your omnichannel system should evolve to reach even greater heights.

How to Align Customer Service Strategy with Business Goals

Ville Kauppi — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 07:41:54 +0000

When you strive to align customer service strategy with business goals you end up maximizing Customer Success. Customer success refers to the efforts a company makes to proactively meet customer needs and ensure the longevity and success of its relationship with its client base.

Companies that prioritize customer success rely on relationship management to ensure the customer derives as much value as possible from their products or services with the intention to improve the customer experience, increase retention, and lower acquisition costs.

Customer Success starts with value-based selling and establishing an onboarding framework to inspire customers with the real value you can offer them. But it, also, continues in every interaction the customer has with your company. It requires regular engagement and real human connections, and every member of every team to work towards a singular vision of customer success.

In this context, customer service emerges as a focal interaction point where the brand can not only address customer complaints as they arise but also take proactive steps towards anticipating pain points and solving them before the clients even register them as issues. Making sure that your service strategy is in sync with your business goals is key for customer success to deliver on its promise – both to the customer and to the business.

Strategies to Align Customer Service Strategy with Business Goals

Appreciate the ROI on Customer Service

ROI (return on investment) in customer service is sometimes a little difficult to quantify. Support departments generate ROI through:

Improved retention
Increased sales
Expansion of business, as customers serve as a marketing channel, sharing their great experiences with others

There are also indirect returns from support, such as feature suggestions and bug reports.

Set Customer Service Goals that Reflect your Business Strategy

Too often, contact center goals are planned in isolation without considering what’s really important to the company.

Consider a luxury brand that prides itself on personalized service. Customer care goals designed to eliminate costs from the contact center can be at odds with the business strategy. Making efforts to shorten every call or upsell to every customer can in fact be detrimental to the company, as the customer service offered doesn’t align with the service the brand is selling.

Determine the Right Customer Service KPIs

Data-driven customer service management is central to all successful companies. Having the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor and keeping track of them effectively gives you crucial information on how each of the wings of your support is performing and how you can improve the service provided.

KPIs like average time to answer, average abandonment rate, and first c o n t a c t resolution (FCR) are staples in the call center. But every KPI must be considered carefully. Decide which affect your business strategy, and which best aligns with customer success.

Measure Customer Service Success

Some of the KPIs to help you do so include:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)—How likely customers are to recommend your service to others.
Customer lifetime value (LTV)—The average amount of money your business earns from customers over a specific period.
Customer churn rate—The number of customers you lose over a certain period of time.
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)—How satisfied a customer is with a specific feature, product, or interaction. Can be used at multiple touchpoints to find failure points.
Customer health score—How likely a customer is to grow, stay consistent, or churn. Can be used to measure which actions are causing customers to change their position on your company.
Expansion monthly recurring revenue (MRR)—The additional revenue customer support is generating through upselling, cross-selling, and add-ons.
Customer retention cost—The financial investment the company must make to keep each customer.

Again, you must choose your KPIs wisely so they align with your business strategy and brand. With the right customer service performance metrics, this is easier than you may think.

Indirect KPIs

Remember the indirect returns you get from customer support. For instance, you could consider measuring the number of feature suggestions added to the database, new sales leads that came directly from support, or the number of bugs reported on a software product.

These are invaluable for meeting the business strategy, but as they don’t directly affect support, they’re often considered secondary. Measuring these indirect returns in KPIs helps you find ways to meet the company’s business strategy. It also serves to better demonstrate the ROI you’re receiving from customer service.

Break Organizational Silos

Companies tend to split employees into distinct sections. Sales, marketing, product design, and customer support often work in their own vacuum, with few opportunities for them to interact and work together for a common goal.

These organizational silos are costly as they result in a lot of double work. Departments can work at odds with each other as they can’t understand the other departments’ challenges. Getting departments to work together can go a long way to delivering exceptional service.

Align Incentives and Goals Across Different Teams

In the spirit of ensuring interdepartmental collaboration to meet the goals of the company, it pays to align goals across all teams.

There are really three levels of goals you should define for your company and its employees:

Individual goals—The KPIs each individual should strive for
Team goals—The KPIs each team manager should focus on
Organizational goals—The KPIs all teams must strive to meet

This begins when you set clear organizational goals. Get together as a leadership team to discuss the business strategy, vision, and goals. These organizational goals should be clear and concrete—avoid vague statements, as they’ll be impossible to action into actual goals down the line.

Get buy-in from all department heads. Communicate the vision of the company and discuss the specific goals and benchmarks you believe will forward these goals. Listen to feedback and be willing to alter goals if required as you need 100% buy-in from your staff, but avoid weakening your objectives because of fear or doubt from individuals.

Communicate the company goals effectively to all levels. Employees that have clear goals are 2.8 times more engaged at work. Make it clear that you’ll support employees in meeting these goals, through onboarding for new hires, ongoing employee training, effective resources, and regular feedback sessions from managers.

Similarly, you can bring departments together by building incentive schemes that rely on multiple teams. Besides the usual departmental incentives, rewards, and awards, you can create company-wide rewards that incentivize departments to aid each other in meeting their collective goals.

Get Sales and Support on the Same Page

Sales teams should come to understand that their role isn’t simply to close a deal and never speak to the customer again. Their goal is to begin a fruitful journey for the customer. They must set correct expectations of the support the customer can expect to receive.

Customer care teams can gain from understanding the sales process. This way, they’ll know the experience the typical customer has gone through to reach the support stage, so they’ll be better primed to understand and help them.

Customer service reps can recognize the potential for upselling and cross-selling when talking with customers and flag them for follow-up by the sales team. They should continue to note key details about the customer, too, information that can be vital to the sales team when it comes time for the customer to renew service.

Inspire Collaboration Between Marketing and Customer Service

Similarly, marketing and customer service teams find themselves more closely linked than many expect. Customers happy with the support they’ve received are more likely to leave a positive online customer service review, making marketing’s job all the easier.

Customer support is also vital in relaying feedback from customers to marketing, so customer sentiment and branding can be evaluated. And by understanding the challenges faced by the support team, marketing will have a better idea of what to promise customers in the future.

Arrange Cross–Team Training and Discussion Sessions

To facilitate this better understanding between teams, cross-team training sessions can be arranged. Members from all teams will see the perspectives of other teams and be able to add their own input. Long-standing problems can be addressed, as in a heavily siloed company, problems in one department can fester as another department is entirely unaware of them.

This is especially important if you outsource support. It’s all too easy for outsourced teams to feel completely separate from the company. Outsourced teams should be given in-house-quality training, so they follow the same standards and meet the same KPIs as in-house teams.

So, these cross-team training sessions build cohesion between teams and allow for a better discussion of department issues that may otherwise go unnoticed.

The Role of the Customer Service Manager

It’s all very well stating these intentions in company memos, but without offering your customer service managers the tools and power to act, customer service will remain separate from other business functions.

Customer service managers must be able to hire the right employees. For better customer service, it’s best to hire problem solvers who are interested in helping others. The right employees can solve problems with little oversight, actively listen to customers, and be interested in the company’s goals.

A customer service manager must be willing to coach and train staff on improvements that can be made to better reach the goals of the company’s business strategy. Not only will this make them better customer support agents, but it also improves agent engagement, which in turn leads to better customer service.

Customer support team leadership is boosted when the manager remembers to use feedback from customers to understand how to better coach agents. Negative feedback is an opportunity for growth, whereas positive feedback relayed to the agent can be an enormous boost in motivation and engagement.

By setting and communicating team goals effectively, the customer service manager makes it clear to agents what is expected of them. These goals should be discussed with other department heads and carefully chosen to align with business strategy, rather than simply thinking of customer service in a vacuum.

Customer service managers must also ensure the tools available to agents are appropriate and allow them to help meet the goals of the company effectively.

Boost Agent Engagement

Agent engagement is vital to aligning customer service to meet your business strategy. Happy employees are 20% more productive than unhappy ones.

Employees that are engaged feel compelled to strive harder for the business goals because they want to, not because they’re forced to. They know that what they are doing is important and they feel motivated each day to do their best.

Motivating and retaining top talent through agent engagement includes:

Fostering a culture of belonging
Streamlining workflows
Empowering agents with the right tools
Supporting agents with coaching, training, and feedback
Incentivizing behaviors with gamification and KPIs
Rewarding and celebrating excellent performance

When taking steps to boost agent engagement, make sure they align with the business strategy of the company.

Share Customer Service Insights Across the Organization

The insights that customer service can gather and disseminate across the organization is some of the most valuable information the company has. It shows how customers are using the company’s products and services, what they like and dislike, and what could make them choose to buy more from the company or turn to a competitor.

This information is usually in all departments even remotely engaged in delivery business strategy, so it’s a shame that it’s often siloed away and only used to measure contact center KPIs. Sharing insights across departments is central to creating a more efficient organization.

A shared access to insights allows every department to better understand the customer and strive to meet their requirements. It also helps to cement customer care as a central branch of the customer experience for departments that sometimes forget about its importance.

Carry your Brand’s Voice in Daily Support Operations

The experience the customer receives from support should align with the experience they receive during other steps of the journey. It’s jarring if they were drawn in by your brand’s marketing and dealt with attentive sales staff who listened to their needs, only to be given support by a team that seems disconnected from the rest of the business.

The brand’s voice should shine through throughout the entire journey, including customer support. Otherwise, it appears more as a façade, and the customer can feel somewhat betrayed.

Build a Style Guide

How will agents know how they are expected to reflect your company’s brand without guidance? Create a customer service style guide. This outlines to agents the type of language your company uses in emails, marketing, chat transcripts, and blog content.

A voice style guide lets agents know what they’re striving for and gives them the confidence that what they are doing is correct.

Some things to include:

An overall expected tone (e.g., “professional, but not cold”)
Company terminology to use
Useful customer service phrases
Appropriate register (e.g., whether to use the customer’s first name)
Negative phrases to avoid
The use of emojis in written conversations

This style guide should be included in an onboarding toolkit for new agents so they internalize the style and tone you expect from them right from the beginning of their journey with your company.

Track Customer Feedback to Reevaluate Alignment

Setting this plan in motion is just the beginning. You must monitor how your efforts are working to improve customer satisfaction and Customer Success. Tracking customer feedback and deriving appropriate insights from it is a good way to do so.

Customer feedback goes further than offering information on how well you are delivering Customer Success. It’s also one of the earliest indications of places where your business strategy isn’t quite right. The intelligent use of customer support data and metrics can lead your business to new methods and opportunities.

Conclusion

Customer service should never be treated as a department distinct from the rest of your company. By aligning customer service with your company’s overall business goals, you can better deliver Customer Success, where you focus on the needs of the customer and how you can best help them achieve their goals.

If your customer service seems out of alignment with the rest of the business, you can right the ship by setting new customer service goals. Invest in customer service and offer your customer service managers the tools and space to build customer service teams that can deliver Customer Success.

Break the organizational silos of your company by getting sales, marketing, and support on the same page. You can do this with cross-team training, more collaboration, and shared incentives. Leverage customer data and customer feedback to make all departments stronger, all working together to meet a common goal.

How to Determine the Right Customer Service Structure

Ville Kauppi — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 08:52:34 +0000

The size and structure of your team significantly impacts the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service.

Support needs vary greatly depending on industry, business size, product, or service, so it’s natural for many organizations to find it challenging to choose the proper customer service structure that meets expectations.

In this article, we are discusing the most critical considerations to determine the right organizational structure for your support department.

Let’s get started.

Why bother with choosing a customer service organizational structure?

Aside from directly impacting the efficiency and quality of support you provide, your customer service structure can also be the difference between a satisfied client base and a frustrated one.

Nowadays, customers expect prompt, efficient, and personalized service that meets their needs. This was not always the case. In the past, customer service meant a hotline that directed callers to a support center where buyers could exchange items, file a return, or ask inquiries. But, with the advent of technology, the customer service landscape has changed dramatically.

Customers now have more channels to reach out to businesses such as phone, email, chat, social media, and even messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This proliferation of channels led to a change in customer behavior. Customers now expect businesses to be fast and available 24/7. Statistics show that people want customer service that meets them where they are and provides them with assistance.

They expect a response within 10 minutes or less, and
They are likelier to stay with brands that respond within a minute.

This behavioural shift has put a lot of pressure on businesses to revamp their support strategies. They need to adequately prepare teams to handle customer requests through different channels and structure them in a way that allows them to provide quality support across all mediums.

Customer service structure as an element of customer experience

At a glance, customer service may be part of your customer’s overall experience. However, this short interaction has the power to make or break your business, as shown in the data below:

After one unpleasant customer experience, around 61% of customers said they would shift to a different brand.
Around 80% of consumers indicate they prefer to conduct business with a competitor after having more than one negative experience.
91% cite excellent support as a reason for making another purchase, making customer service a significant factor in purchasing decisions.
95% of consumers say customer service is crucial for brand selection and loyalty.
People are 38% more likely to recommend brands with good customer service.

When you do not do customer service right the first time, you must exert effort to make it up to your customers. Otherwise, you would lose them for good, which is bad news, as acquiring a new customer means spending 5 to 25 times more than keeping an existing one.

Hence, every aspect of your business should be customer-service friendly, especially your support team structure. This facet has to be highly capable of handling client interactions, particularly in addressing issues or channeling customer feedback to the appropriate team leads.

Customer service structure as an aspect of company culture

The structure of your support team must allow openness, cooperation, and efficient communication to deliver superior assistance and keep loyal customers. It should also promote a customer-centric culture. That way, you can avoid the typical service mistakes that lead to churn.

Having a support team structure in place creates clear expectations for every person in the team, establishing a hierarchy that enables everyone to understand their roles and responsibilities and who to contact when they need assistance. This management approach can also provide these advantages:

More job opportunities for a variety of positions, from entry-level to management roles
Maximized efficiency and effectiveness, brought by increased accountability and collaboration
Smoother workflow due to established tasks and expectations per person
A proper hierarchy, setting a robust chain of command in place for an appropriate escalation of incoming requests and decision-making.

What factors affect the organizational structure of customer support?

Before we discuss the different types of customer service organizational structures, you first need to know and understand the factors that affect them:

The size of your business

The size of your business is one of the deciding factors when it comes to the structure of your support organization.

Start-up

You may not need a huge team if you’re still in the startup phase. With a small customer base, you can choose to outsource support or build a team with 3 to 5 people. However, as your business begins to grow, you will eventually need to hire customer service representatives (CSRs).

Though small, your support team structure must be lean and adaptable especially as you might not have the financial ability to employ many agents yet.

For this reason, your small team of CSRs must be proficient in various areas. In addition, this team should also have access to the proper tools and software to automate different elements of customer care, such as routing support requests, monitoring support channels, reacting rapidly to comments, and providing the material that helps enhance customer satisfaction.

Growing business

Once your business starts scaling, your customer service structure should follow suit.

You have to hire more people and divide your team into smaller groups so every cluster or sub-team can manage a specific area of interaction, such as phone support, social media care, or live chat. You also have the option to categorize them based on your customer’s journey stage.

Additionally, you might need to assign a customer service manager to lead and oversee the entire support operation — a step that guarantees that your team structure remains aligned with the goals and objectives of your company.

Enterprise

Now that you’ve reached the enterprise level, you need a more complex team structure to support a large client base. This type of business is also more likely to achieve global reach, so you must consider time zones when providing support.

Companies with this amount of resources must commit time and effort to develop an integrated support team. These organizations can structure customer service by utilizing geographic areas, distribution platforms, and buyer experiences comparable to mid-level enterprises. However, enterprise-level organizations must be more specific regarding methods and strategies as the number of people they need to respond to is much larger.

The industry you’re in

The hospitality industry, for example, is customer-facing and needs to provide support 24/7. On the other hand, a manufacturing company may have an operational team that provides support during regular business hours. There are certain customer service components that are heavily impacted by the industry in which you operate and, as a result, you have to adapt you support’s organizational structure to reflect that. Some of those components include

Customer service quality standards

The type of customer service can also affect your team’s organizational structure. If you’re a company that prides itself on providing excellent customer service, then you need to have a customer support team that can deliver on that promise.

Meaning your customer service structure should be able to handle a large number of customer inquiries and complaints. It should also be able to provide support in multiple channels rapidly.

To do this, you need to have a customer service team that’s large enough to handle the volume of customer inquiries and complaints. You also need a proficient team in different areas, such as product knowledge, technical support, and customer service.

Customer expectations

Finally, you must consider your customers’ expectations when determining your support team structure.

Nowadays, customers expect prompt and efficient customer service. Once a problem arises, they expect to be able to reach your support department in every channel you’re in, receive an answer almost immediately, and achieve a good and consistent experience that reflects your brand, values, and promised quality of service.

That being the case, your team should be able to efficiently organize their tasks and responsibilities, which is why they need the best tools, systems, and resources in place to help with day to day operations.

Technological advancements

Years ago, companies could only offer support through phone and email. However, there are many ways organizations can respond to customer inquiries and concerns today, which is why customer service teams need to be adaptable to technological advancements.

With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), businesses can provide better service. AI can help you:

Automate specific tasks, such as responding to inquiries and complaints, which allows you to free up time for your team to focus on more complex tasks.
Collect and analyze customer data. You can use this data to improve the experience and provide a certain level of service
Personalize the customer experience. By using AI, businesses can create a profile for each of their customers and then use that information to provide them with an experience that genuinely responds to their needs.

The makeup of your support team

The final factor you need to consider in determining an organizational structure is the makeup of your support team.

Are they all full-time employees?
Do you have any remote customer service agents?
How many customer service agents do you need in each shift?

Answering these questions can show how each person can help and contribute to covering all your customer service needs. Plus, by considering other factors like their abilities, motivations, and work habits, you can identify what combination of customer service team structures will work for your business. Let’s take a closer look:

Skills, competencies, etc.

When determining the proper support team structure for your organization, you must also consider your team’s skills and competencies to establish whether they can deliver the kind of service your clients expect.

Examine the strengths and weaknesses of everyone on the team to figure out where you can provide additional support to strengthen brand perception and service quality.

Let’s say that your service team performs exceptionally well. If that is the case, you may want to focus on training them on upselling and cross-selling products and services. But, if your team is weak in product knowledge, you may consider holding more training and hiring additional agents who are knowledgeable in your product line.

Performance drivers

In addition to skills and competencies, you must assess what drives your team members.

Are they motivated by money?
Do they prefer working independently or as part of a team?
Do customer satisfaction scores drive them?

By understanding the motivations behind your team’s performance, you can better structure their roles and responsibilities to substantiate that they’re able to meet your customer’s expectations while at the same time boosting agent engagement.

For example, if your agents is motivated by money, you may want to consider commission-based compensation structures. On the other hand, if your team members prefer working independently, you may want to consider giving them more autonomy in their roles.

Practices and processes

The last two factors you must examine are your company’s practices and processes.

Do you have any existing systems or tools in place?
Do you have standard operating procedures (SOPs) set in place?
Do you outsource any of your support tasks?

The answers to these questions can help you structure your team to benefit your business the most. For instance, if you have existing systems and tools in place, you might want to consider how and in what areas your help desk team can use them to improve efficiency.

How to structure your customer service team

Here’s how you can structure your customer service in just five steps:

Define your goals

The first step in determining the proper support team structure for your business is to define your customer service goals. These will serve as the foundation that will guide the rest of your decision-making process.

To proceed with this step, think about what you want to achieve.

Do you want them to increase sales?
Improve satisfaction scores?
Decrease churn rates?

Once you’ve defined your goals, you can start thinking about how to structure your customer service team to achieve them.

Select an organizational structure

Let’s examine some structures that you can pattern your customer service team from.

Product-based

Companies with a product-based customer service structure divide the entire department into subteams, each with a distinguished product line to focus on, resolve issues, and answer queries about.

An example of a product-based business is Apple, a famous brand with many separate customer service teams for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

This structure also applies to organizations that make or carry products in various sectors, like conglomerates, such as The Walt Disney Company, which produces movies and has theme parks and resorts.

Market-based

In a market-based structure, the brand organizes the customer service department into teams based on a target market. So, each team would be responsible for servicing a specific group or type of customer.

Examples of a market-based structure are banks that focus on small businesses, middle-market businesses, and large corporations. The customer service teams in each bank are structured to support the needs of their specific target market.

By geographical area

You can divide your customer service department by geographical location, with teams servicing customers in particular countries or regions.

This type of structure is common for companies that do business internationally, like McDonald’s. Each country or region has its customer service team to support the local customers.

Top-down

In a top-down structure, the support department is operated according to the company’s hierarchy, with each unit reporting to a manager who reports to the customer service director. Small to medium-sized businesses often practice this structure as they don’t need a large, complex customer service department.

Non-hierarchical (flat)

A non-hierarchical or flat organizational structure has no defined management levels. Teams are self-managed, and everyone reports to the customer service director.

You can often observe this structure in startups and small businesses. It’s less common in larger organizations because managing a more extensive customer service team without a hierarchical structure can be more challenging.

Function-based

Here, the company divides the customer service department into units based on specific functions. Each team is responsible for a different aspect of customer service, like billing, technical support, or product returns.

An example of a function-based support team is Amazon, which has teams responsible for different functions like Whole Foods, Amazon Web Services, and Amazon Prime.

Matrix

A matrix structure happens when many customer service teams fall under a single department head.

If Samsung had a matrix structure, this would mean that their smartphones, home appliances, semiconductors, memory chips, and other products would have special sales, marketing, and service departments.

This structure enables each support team to be highly specialized for each product the firm offers, but it can also result in brand fragmentation.

Circular

A circular organizational structure is very similar to a matrix because there are still different marketing, sales, and service teams. However, each team reports to a board of directors or an executive committee instead of one department head.

Organizations with this structure try to decentralize power or decision-making. When examined closely, this structure facilitates collaboration and the exchange of ideas between different business components. It places executives in the inner rings of a circle while employees are outside the rings.

Leaders in the organization’s center do not issue instructions down like a chain of command but outward. Unlike the other structures listed above, the circular structure does not include various departments that function independently. In this structure, everyone works as a part of a single unit.

Identify team roles

Now that you know the different organizational structures available, it’s time to start building your team.

However, before hiring, you need to identify the most fundamental roles in a customer service team. Again, these roles may vary depending on the size of your team and the type of service you provide. However, the prominent positions in a support team structure usually include the following:

Customer service manager

The manager is in charge of leading and managing the team. They’re also responsible for

Creating and executing service policies, procedures, and standards within the workplace
Liaising between the support team and other departments in the company
Working with the marketing, sales, and product teams to ensure that the service team has the resources and information they need to perform their tasks
Creating the customer service budget

Customer service representative

A customer service representative embodies the company for many customers. They handle inquiries and complaints. Hence, these people need to have excellent customer service skills. They must be, for example, capable of

Resolving customer issues professionally and efficiently
Exhibiting product knowledge so they can answer questions about the company’s products or services.

Technical support specialist

A technical support specialist provides help for customers facing technical issues with the company’s products or services.

Technical support specialists need an in-depth knowledge of the company’s products, including its how-tos. They also need to be able to troubleshoot customer issues and find solutions quickly.

In some cases, technical support specialists may also be responsible for training customers on how to use the company’s products.

Account manager

The account manager manages customer relationships by working closely with customers to ensure they’re satisfied with the company’s products or services.

Account managers work with the customer service team to resolve customer issues. In some cases, they may also be responsible for upselling customers to higher-priced products or services.

Monitor performance KPIs and reevaluate

You need to set some performance KPIs for your customer service team. These KPIs will help you track and measure the team’s progress and identify areas that need improvement. Some of the most common metrics and KPIs include:

Net Promoter® Score (NPS)

Your NPS signifies your customers’ willingness to recommend your company’s products or services to others and it measures customer experience and predicts growth. It involves asking your customers how likely they are to recommend the company on a scale of 0-10.

Customer satisfaction

Your customer satisfaction rate measures how satisfied your clients are with the service they receive.

Data gained from this KPI can help you understand which service areas need improvement.

Average Handle time

The average handle time determines how long it takes for an agent to resolve an issue.

This information can help you understand if your team members need more training or if you need to streamline some aspects of your internal processes.

Customer retention

Customer retention indicates how many customers continue to do business with a company after experiencing a customer service issue. Knowing your customer retention rate helps with understanding the effectiveness of your customer service team as a whole.

First Contact Resolution

Your first contact resolution rate indicates how often your representatives can resolve customer issues upon the customer’s first contact with support.

This key performance indicator shows how efficient your customer service team is and how knowledgeable they are in addressing and resolving concerns.

6 Reasons Why You Need a Knowledge Base

The on-demand culture is the in-thing. Everywhere you look, the shift in customer behavior towards immediacy resulting from the ease of…

Click here to read this post

Plan for change

Even if you think you already have the perfect organizational structure, you must always be prepared to make changes when necessary. As your company grows, your team will need to grow with it, which means you may also need to make changes to the department’s organizational structure as you learn what works and what doesn’t.

Here are some of the reasons that might require you to rethink the structuire of your support team:

Scaling your support operations

If your company is doing well, as you scale operations you might need to change the way you organize your team to be able to handle more customers and solve their problems quickly.

You may also need to adjust upon learning that some parts of the service process need improvement.

New technology and AI

In the future, using high-level technologies like artificial intelligence might mean that some roles in the customer service team are no longer needed, like data entry.

You may also need to change your present organizational structure to accommodate this change.

However, embracing new AI technology may also mean the addition of new managerial roles that can help with training and problem-solving, which usually happens when agents need help with learning and using new technologies.

Unforeseen developments

Unexpected things, like the COVID-19 pandemic, might cause some changes in the way businesses establish support teams. Nobody knows what’s in store for the future, and that’s especially true for businesses.

So if your company fails to prepare to adapt to the changes in the marketplace, it will eventually die. One way to prepare for change is to have a flexible organizational structure that can easily be adapted to new challenges.

A Guide to the Most Important Customer Service Skills

Ville Kauppi — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 07:03:38 +0000

The ability to provide excellent customer service is one of the most important aspects of any business and something all employees should learn. Some of the most important customer service skills include communication, attention to detail, stress tolerance, empathy, and more.

Support skills are important for many reasons. They can help you build strong relationships, solve customer problems efficiently, and improve customer satisfaction. Great customer service skills can also lead to repeat business and referrals from happy customers.

This detailed guide provides insights into the most important competencies your support team should have.

What are the key ingredients of good customer service?

There’s no denying that good customer service is essential to the success of any business. After all, happy customers are more likely to keep returning and spending their hard-earned money with you. But what exactly makes for good customer service? Here are some key elements that should be a part of any good support strategy.

Put customer needs first

Putting your clients’ needs first means taking the time to understand what they want and expect then working to provide solutions that meet those needs.

It might seem like a lot of extra work, but it’s worth it when you see the results in terms of happier customers and increased business.

There are a few ways you can go about putting your customers’ needs first:

Ask them directly

The best way to find out what your customers want is to ask them directly. This can be done through surveys, interviews, or casual conversations. Take the time to listen to what they say and then use that information to make changes that will improve their experience.

Observe their behavior

Pay attention to how customers interact with your business and look for patterns in their behavior. This can give you insights into what they need and want and help you make changes that will improve their experience.

Use data

Look at your satisfaction scores, return rates, and other measures of customer engagement. This information can give you valuable insights into what your customers need and want from your business.

Once you understand their needs well, it’s time to start working on providing solutions that meet those needs. This might involve making changes to your products or services, changing how you interact with customers or making other changes to improve their experience.

Clarify the clients’ goals and roadblocks

One of the key elements of good support is clarifying the customer’s goals and roadblocks. This means taking the time to understand what the customer wants and what stops them from achieving it. Only then can you provide the help and support they need.

There may be several reasons a customer has difficulty achieving their goal. It could be that they don’t have all the necessary information or are unclear about something. It could also be that they are facing a technical issue or obstacle. Whatever the reason, it’s important to try to identify it so that you can offer the right solution.

The first step is to ask questions and listen to the answers. Try to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and understand their perspective. Then, once you understand the situation, you can offer advice or support to help them overcome their obstacle and achieve their goal.

Clarifying goals and roadblocks may take some extra time, but it’s worth it in the end. By taking this extra step, you can ensure that the customer leaves satisfied and achieves what they set out to do.

Prioritize quality over quantity

Customer service is all about providing a positive experience. This means creating a lasting impression that will keep your customers coming back.

One key element of good customer service is to prioritize quality. This refers to your ability to take the time to ensure that each customer feels valued and important. It also means ensuring that your product or service is of the highest quality possible.

Providing a high level of quality customer service will show your customers that you value their business and will also help build loyalty and trust, which are essential for any successful business relationship.

Engage customers with genuine interest and enthusiasm

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, so taking the time to show them that you care about their experience can go a long way.

There are a few simple ways to engage customers and show them that you’re interested in providing a great experience. First, make sure to greet them warmly. This sets the tone for the rest of the interaction and lets them know that you’re happy to interact with them.

Next, take the time to listen to what they have to say. Showing that you’re genuinely interested in hearing about their experiences shows that you care about their business. Finally, be sure to thank them for their business. A simple “thank you” can go a long way in making a customer feel valued.

Create accessible, omnichannel support options

Allowing customers to contact you through their preferred channels makes it easy for them to get the help they need when they need it.

Multiple support channels allow you to reach more customers and provide a better overall support experience. You can ensure that no customer is left behind by offering phone, email, chat, and social media support.

When creating your omnichannel support strategy, be sure to consider the following:

The needs of your target audience: What channels do they prefer? What times of day are they most likely to need assistance?
The capabilities of your team: Do you have the resources to staff all of the channels you want to offer?
Your business goals: What are you trying to achieve with your customer support?

Omnichannel support can be a great way to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. By offering multiple channels, you can make it easy for customers to get the help they need when they need it.

Troubleshoot collaboratively

When you troubleshoot collaboratively, you provide your customer with multiple ways to get in touch with you and receive support. This could include a phone line, email, live chat, or social media.

Offering multiple channels gives your customers the flexibility to choose how they want to communicate with you. It also allows you to reach more people and provide them with the best possible customer service experience.

Troubleshooting collaboratively can be difficult, but providing your customers with the best possible customer service experience is worth it. Here are some tips for troubleshooting collaboratively:

Make sure all of your support channels are always available and easy to find.
Train your customer service team on how to troubleshoot collaboratively.
Be responsive to all customer inquiries, no matter which channel they use.
Follow up with customers after they’ve contacted you, regardless of the outcome.
Use customer feedback to improve your collaborative troubleshooting process.

Provide long-term solutions, not short-term conveniences

Businesses should focus on solving their customers’ problems to benefit them in the long run rather than simply providing a quick fix that may not be sustainable.

Businesses can build trust and loyalty among their clientele by taking a long-term view of customer service. Customers who feel like they are being cared for in a way that benefits them long-term are more likely to remain loyal to a brand, even if there are occasional hiccups along the way.

This type of customer service also shows that businesses are interested in more than just making a quick profit – they want to build lasting relationships.

Of course, providing long-term solutions is not always easy. It can often take more time and effort to find a sustainable solution to a problem than it would offer a quick fix simply. However, businesses willing to invest extra effort into providing long-term solutions will ultimately be rewarded with happier, more loyal customers.

Customer service skills you should be hiring for

Below is a list of some top competencies you should be hiring for.

Excellent communication skills

Excellent communication is one of the most important skills you can look for when hiring help desk representatives.

Communicating effectively is essential to providing good customer service. Here are some tips to help you identify candidates with excellent communication skills:

Look for candidates who are able to clearly and concisely explain information. They should be able to communicate complex ideas in a way that is easy for customers to understand.
Make sure the candidates you are considering have good listening skills. They should be able to pay attention to what customers are saying and ask clarifying questions if needed.
It is also important that customer service representatives have good writing skills. They should be able to write clear and professional emails and create helpful documentation for customers.

Stress tolerance

Stress tolerance is the ability to remain calm and focused in challenging or difficult situations. It’s a critical competency for anyone in customer service, as it allows them to effectively handle complaints and inquiries, even when things get heated.

If you’re looking for candidates with strong stress tolerance skills, here are a few questions you can ask during the interview process:

Can you describe when you had to deal with a difficult customer? How did you handle the situation?
Tell me about a time when you were under a lot of pressure at work. How did you manage to stay calm?
What do you do when you start to feel overwhelmed or stressed out?

Asking questions like these will give you a good idea of how well a candidate deals with stress and whether they’re likely to be able to handle the challenges of a customer service job.

Interpersonal skills

Interpersonal skills refer to the ability to communicate and interact with other people. This includes everything from active listening and empathy to being able to build relationships and resolve conflicts.

Support reps with strong interpersonal skills can diffuse difficult situations, build rapport with customers, and solve problems more effectively. As a result, they tend to be more successful in their jobs overall.

Suppose you’re looking to hire customer service reps who will excel in their roles and assess their interpersonal skills during the interview process. Here are a few questions you can ask to get a sense of their abilities:

Can you describe a time when you diffused a difficult customer service situation?
Can you tell me when you had to build rapport with a difficult customer?
What do you do when you’re faced with a conflict?
Tell me about a time when you had to go above and beyond for a customer.

Attention to details

It’s important to pay attention to details when you’re providing customer service. Your customers will notice if you make mistakes, which can reflect poorly on your business. Showing you’re attentive and detail-oriented will inspire confidence in your customers and help them have a positive experience.

Empathy

Empathy allows customer service reps to see things from the customer’s perspective and understand their needs. This understanding can help resolve problems more effectively and create a better overall experience for the customer.

When interviewing candidates for customer service positions, ask questions that will help gauge their empathy levels. For example, you might ask them to describe when they had to deal with an upset customer. Pay attention to how they talk about the situation and what they did to try to resolve it.

How to improve your team’s customer support skills

Customer support is one of the most important aspects of a business, yet it is often one of the most neglected. To provide excellent service, you need to have a team of agents skilled in several areas. Here are some tips on how to improve your team’s competencies:

1. Strengthen your customer service skills

Empathy is one of the most important qualities of a customer support representative. It allows them to understand the customer’s situation and respond accordingly. Patience is also key, as customers may be frustrated or angry. It is important to be consistent in your responses, as this will build trust with the customer.

Adaptability is another important skill for customer support representatives. They need to be able to adapt to the customer’s needs and find a solution that works for them. Clear communication is also essential, as customers need to understand the representative’s instructions. Finally, a good work ethic and product knowledge are also necessary.

2. Look at every touchpoint

It is important to look at every interaction with the customer as an opportunity to improve their experience. This includes everything from the initial contact to after the issue has been resolved. Each touchpoint should be designed to provide the best possible experience.

3. Improve your customer interactions

One way to improve customer interactions is by identifying common ground. This can be done by asking questions and determining the customer’s needs. Another way to improve interactions is by practicing active listening. This means paying attention to what the customer is saying and trying to understand their perspective.

Admitting your mistakes is also important, as it shows that you are willing to take responsibility for your actions. Finally, following up after the issue has been resolved is an excellent way to ensure satisfaction with the outcome.

4. Enhance your customer service strategy

One way to enhance your service strategy is by getting personal with your customers. This means addressing them by name and finding out more about their needs. Another way to improve your strategy is by being available when the customer needs you. For example, by having extended hours or providing live chat support.

Catering to your customer’s needs is also important. You can achieve this by offering services that are tailored to their specific needs. Finally, creating communities is an excellent way to build relationships with your clients and support them.

5. Make sure your reps are engaged

It is important to ensure that your customer support representatives are engaged with their work. This means providing them with the training and resources they need to be successful. It is also important to create a positive work environment, as this will motivate them to do their best.

6. Allow customers to provide feedback

Feedback is essential for improving your customer service strategy. It allows you to identify areas that need improvement and ensure that your team is meeting your customers’ expectations. There are a number of ways to collect customer feedback, such as surveys or comment cards.

Conclusion

Customer service is a vital part of any business. It can mean the difference between a satisfied customer and one who takes their business elsewhere. Great customer service skills can help you build strong relationships with your customers and keep them coming back.

Some of the most important customer service skills include:

excellent communication skills
being able to show empathy
having a positive attitude
being able to handle difficult situations calmly

By honing these skills, you can ensure that your customers have a positive experience with your business and keep them coming back.

Ville Kauppi – Surveypal

Conversational Analytics – Benefits and Use Cases

Key Takeaways

Conversational Analytics: Using Insights to Enhance Customer Experience

What Actually is Conversational Analytics?

How Does Conversational Analytics Work?

Analyzing Customer Conversations

Utilizing Analytics Tools for Insights

Applying AI and Machine Learning

Benefits of Conversational Analytics

Enhancing Customer Experience

Identifying Brand Insights

Three Critical ways in Which Conversational Analytics Helps in Identifying Brand Insights

Gaining Competitive Intelligence

Improving Sales Conversions

Tracking and Managing Brand Health

Use Cases of Conversational Analytics

Sentiment Analysis

Competitive Analysis

Voice of the Customer Analysis

Optimizing Customer Service

Personalizing Customer Experience

Product Innovation

Real-time Customer Feedback

Identifying Market Trends

Enhancing Conversation Intelligence

The Future of Conversational Analytics

Enhanced Algorithms

Business Process Automation

Integrations with Other Technologies

Wrapping Up

Frequently Asked Questions

What is conversational analytics?

What are the benefits of conversation analytics?

How can conversational analytics be used to track and manage brand health?

What are some use cases of conversational analytics in improving sales conversions?

How does conversational analytics help in understanding consumer behavior?

What are the benefits of utilizing analytics tools for insights in conversational analytics?

How does conversational analytics contribute to product innovation?

What are some use cases for conversation analytics?

What is speech analytics?

How can conversation analytics help in contact centers?

What is conversational AI?

What is a conversational analytics tool?

How does conversational analytics software work?

How can conversation analytics be used in the customer journey?

What is conversation intelligence?

Your Guide to Average Handle Time

What is Average Handle Time?

The Importance of Average Handle Time

Higher Customer Retention Rates

Increased Customer Service Productivity

Improved Customer Satisfaction

More Opportunities for Upselling, Cross-selling, and Positive Word-of-Mouth

Reduced Customer Service Costs

How to Calculate the Average Handle Time

The Building Blocks of Average Handle Time

Average Handle Time Formula

What is a Good Average Handle Time?

How to Improve Average Handle Time?

Train Your Agents

Offer Self-Service Options to Deflect Incoming Contact Requests

Implement Call-Routing Strategies

Keep Your Internal Knowledge Base Up to Date

Automate Workflows

Empower Your Agents with the Right Customer Service Tools

Speed vs. Quality: The AHT Dilemma

Identify the Root Causes that Impact Your AHT

Consider AHT in Conjunction with Other KPIs

Offer Proactive Support

Wrapping Up

Agent Performance Metrics

Key Agent Performance Metrics

First Contact Resolution

Average Handle Time

First Response Time

Tickets Handled

Tickets Backlog

Agent Utilization

Cost per Ticket/Contact