A serious challenge for every business in the digital age is to run diverse everyday operations while doing best to ensure that every customer feels like he or she receives personalized service and support.
Indeed, personalized customer service is increasingly seen as a good way to deliver and drive loyalty, which is a critical marketing goal since retaining an existing customer costs much less than obtaining a new one. That’s why delivering a superb customer experience has become a top priority for businesses in 2018 and will continue to play such a role in 2019 as well.
In fact, this report by Super Office found that customer experience (which, of course, includes customer support) was the most exciting opportunity for businesses now
Achieving a top quality customer support, however, is anything but easy, but one factor can make a huge difference. The success of customer support depends on the ability of a business to use various customer metrics and data to generate actionable insights and scale operations.
In this article, we’re going to reveal how to use customer metrics and other data to scale customer support more effectively, and therefore, drive customer loyalty.
What Customer Metrics Are Scalable?
To increase the effectiveness of scaling customer support, we’re going to start by identifying metrics that can be used to scale customer metrics. The following list contains metrics that this recent Ericsson research found to be the most effective for helping to generate actionable customer support insights:
- Does the customer support score reflect an insight an entire organization, a group of users, or an individual level?
- The exact number of customers who provided the feedback during a specific period of time
- Is the feedback provided by customers objective or subjective? In other words, does it reflect a fact or a perception?
- Was the customer insight a result of a predictive model or was it directly measured?
- How fast customer experience should be altered to reflect insights?
- How often should an organization update customer support score to ensure relevant insights?
All these specific customer support case requirements should be reflected in a customer support score that shows how effective your organization is at providing excellent experience to the customers.
Let’s now turn our attention to the ways to use data to scale your customer support and maximize this score.
Track Time and Complaints Systematically
A lack of systematic collection of customer issues and how much time is spent to resolve them will inevitably result in a lot of problems. With such customer support arrangement, you’ll have no way of knowing how you perform.
On the other hand, if you’re using these customer metrics and track them systematically, you’re maintaining the focus on your customers, which is the principal goal of any business. A systematic collection, however, provides great takeaways from individual customer experiences that you can use to increase personalization, and, therefore, customer satisfaction.
Implement Customer Support Tools That Can Grow With Your Business
Automation is a big deal these days that has lots of benefits for businesses including increasing the efficiency of repetitive tasks. Since customer support operations include a lot of mundane, repetitive tasks that can be done by software, using automation tools makes a perfect sense.
Moreover, automation tools provide a lot of insights into customer support and experience, so they can be a source of precious information for you. Not only it’ll increase the number of customers you can serve (more companies adopt technology like chatbots), but also show you important trends in customer experience and support, types of common issues, a time needed to resolve them, and many other valuable insights.
“An important thing here to remember is to choose a software that will grow as your business and customer support operations expand.” – says Roger T. Lawson, customer support manager at Axonim.com. He continues – “This is very easy to check but it’ll serve you well by helping to scale customer support processes.”
Add More Support Channels
More customer support channels mean more data for analysis. For example, if your business experiences a large volume of customer requests via traditional channels such as web forms and email, it may be a good time to consider some additional ones. Live chat support and social media support are among the ones that are increasingly adopted by businesses today.
For example, according to this compilation of stats from Inc., 42 percent of online customers say that they prefer live chat feature because they don’t want to wait on hold. What’s more, the same source also suggested that 92 percent of customer feel satisfied when they use the live chat feature.
Social media can also be an effective customer support channel that has enormous potential in providing you with valuable data about customers and their issues, so consider using it in your strategy as well.
Tools for Improving Quality and Efficiency of Your Customer Support
Now that we know how to scale your customer support, let’s take a look at popular tools used by businesses to improve its quality and efficiency.
- Pure Chat. A free live chat software designed specifically for service-oriented, high traffic websites that provides unlimited chats, conversation-based lead capture, powerful operator dashboard, and is easy to install.
- Rignite. If you want to add social media as another customer support channel, take a look at this one because it’s designed to monitor everything happening across your business’s social media accounts.
- SupportBee. This is a ticketing system for highly effective customer support that allows a support team to engage in meaningful conversations with your customers.
Focus on Your Customers
Businesses in all industries are constantly striving toward innovation that improves customer experience. Since customer experience that involves customer support is one of the most important business opportunities at this point, do your best to ensure that your own customer support is effective and efficient, which is impossible without proper scaling.
Ryan is a passionate writer who likes sharing his thoughts and experience with the readers. Currently, he works on medical device design. He likes everything related to traveling and new countries.
customer support team -DepositPhotos
