We all like graphs! It’s something that comes natural, especially in the customer support business. We all want to know where we stand when it comes to response times, ticket volumes, resolution times, top issues, CSAT, NPS, etc. And all of that is more than ok to measure, as it helps us improve our customer support operations and services.
Reports, whether dynamically generated or periodic, help us to have a clear understanding of how we are doing, so we can diagnose issues, implement actions/changes and then measure again, to hopefully confirm a positive impact.
Design, monitor and measure in alignment with Ideal Customer Experience
But how do we measure our customer’s experience with our product or brand? How do we perform customer experience management when it comes to support and service. That is not something that is easily achieved, and operational metrics like CSAT do not tell the whole story. We must come up with ways to LISTEN to the Voice of the Customer (VOC) along all the key touchpoints in our customer’s journey. Many of those, we know, happen as the customer interacts with our support and service teams. Whatever we measure needs to be aligned with the “ideal” customer experience we’d like for our product or brand to deliver. For example, what is a given customer (or persona) willing to do and not willing to do in order to contact us for a solution (e.g. yes to calling on the phone, but no to self-searching our KB)?, and what does the data tell us about how we’re complying with those wishes?
Monitoring our adherence to the right “hows” of delivering the ideal customer experience is an art, not a science, and must start with mapping the customer journey so that we know what those key touchpoints and moments-of-truth are in the first place. Then comes the creative process of deciding how we’re going to deliver (talent, channels, coverage, policies, etc) and what we must pay attention to on the back end. That will will most certainly need a combination of operational metrics and our observation of customer behavior and feedback any way that makes sense.
