Here is what customer support experts have to say on how to deliver great customer support with the correct metrics and KPIs.

Customer support is an integral part of any business. More so now that almost every business has an online presence today. People are more vocal, more expressive online about the way a business attends to them. So, it’s safe to say that bad customer support seldom goes unnoticed. In fact, as many as 78% of customers will choose to back out of a purchase if a company delivers poor customer service.

But the question is do you know how well your customer support team is performing with your customers? How do you make your customer support processes efficient?

The answer lies in key support metrics that you can use to gauge how good your customer support is on several fronts. Tracking these metrics can help you identify any potential bottlenecks and ease them out to be more efficient

Identifying the right metrics for your industry 

Arun Jagannathan from CrackVerbal says that digitisation has helped them identify the right metrics to monitor their customer support effectiveness. Knowing your correct KPIs for the industry can involve a lot of varying factors. For instance, the target audience for CrackVerbal is students preparing for various competitive exams. They tend to reach out to the support team to clarify doubts, questions, and queries that may hinder their preparation. And so, for CrackVerbal, measuring the confidence of their students’ after support interactions became crucial.

“So, I think, the whole idea of digitisation for us was, you know, a process in identifying the right metrics, and I think that was the key challenge.” he recounts.

To answer this better, we spoke to several market leaders in the customer support and experience domain to understand WHAT is it really that makes a support function an industry benchmark.

The Twenty Minute Moat

At Verloop.io, we’re driven to help brands achieve the best possible customer support experience. To help facilitate this, we host a podcast called The Twenty Minute Moat where experts from across industries weigh in on the most important customer support metrics and tips you can use to better your understanding of the interplay of customer support and experience.

Experts’ curation of metrics to measure your customer support performance

Let’s take a look at what industry experts from Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, Licious, WazirX, Cashfree and Milaap have to say about the KPIs for measuring customer support: 

1. Higher CSAT – The milestone you need to achieve

The CSAT is the north-star metric that every organisation must look at to streamline its customer support functions. 

It quantifies performance based on how customers rate interactions with your support team. This is usually what the feedback section asking you to rate a customer support interaction is for. You can average out the results to give you a composite customer satisfaction score. 

As rightly stated by Sameer Nagpal “The most important metric to measure effectiveness, in my opinion, is your regular CSAT or customer satisfaction.”

Check out the full podcast here: Why the Future of Customer Support is Omnichannel – Sameer Nagpal, WazirX

Brands should aspire to collect proactive feedback and not just reactive feedback. It’s important for brands to reach out to customers and ask them how their experience shopping with the brand has been like. You can do this by analysing feedback at every step of the process. 

Here’s how you can collect feedback from your customers.

2. First contact resolution (FCR) – The higher, the better

This is the percentage of interactions that were resolved in the very first instance and did not require follow-up. This metric measures an organisation’s ability to effectively deal with and resolve queries across multiple support channels.

If your FCR is high, say 90%, that means that 90% of your customer support tickets were resolved the first time a customer raised it with you. Ankit Goenka, Head of Customer Experience, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, attests to this “How many transactions a self-service asset can actually end to end completely is the percentage you need to monitor”.

Keep this metric high with conversational automation that ensures most of your tickets are resolved before the first conversation ends.

3. Measuring effectiveness using NPS and volume

In customer support, it’s important to keep track of the volume of tickets you receive. This can be monitored daily, weekly or monthly to keep track of how many support tickets you’re receiving, when are the peak time and day for incoming tickets and if it is higher than on average. 

The NPS is another metric you should take into account if you want to measure your customer loyalty, notes Sreejit Nair, Head of Product for CX, Licious. Listen to how Sreejit added more value to Building Stellar Customer Experiences at Scale.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) uses a single form-fill survey that aims at gauging the number of satisfied customers and who are more likely to recommend your product to others. 

He continues, “For us, it’s [customer support] a core internal function that drives not only customer satisfaction but slightly later in the value chain is, of course, NPS, which automatically translates into better repeat and lower cost of acquisition.”

On the other hand, Dipu KV, President – Head Operations & Customer Service at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance lays down two types of NPS – Transactional NPS, which is based on feedback taken right after a user completes a transaction. The second is “Relationship NPS” which is collective research performed by an independent third party market research firm. Know about this and more here.

4. The difference between satisfaction and delight with ART and FRT

When brands attempt to maximise their customer support effectiveness, they’re primarily looking at their CSAT scores. However, the speed of connection and the speed of resolution are two important metrics that ultimately contribute to effectiveness. 

Fasih Abbas, who leads Customer Success at Cashfree, opined that it’s important for brands to realise that satisfaction stems from speed. It’s important to connect with the customer as soon as they reach out and also deliver the resolution quickly. 

This, as we mentioned above, you can track this using Average Resolution Time (ART) and First Response Time (FRT). You can use FRT to track the performance of your AI chatbots, as well as your agents.

Pro-tip: How empathy can pave the way for more meaningful customer support interactions

Empathy and emotional intelligence can help add a dimension of personalisation and connectedness to customer support. Responses that lack emotional depth can leave the customer feeling like their concerns aren’t being understood well enough. 

Athira SM and Sameer Nagpal, who head customer support teams at Milaap and WazirX respectively, shared the opinion that emotional depth is a key factor in improving CX. Listen to Athira talk about Why Emotional Intelligence and Empathy Leads the Way for Customer Support

Here’s what Justin Joseph, who heads Marketing at Landmark Group had to say about the importance of empathy:

Also find out: Best Practices to Future Proof Your Customer Support with AI

Conversational AI – Stay on top of your customer support KPIs with efficiency and real-time monitoring

Performance is intangible. But with the right metrics delivered at the right time quantifies your customer support efforts. 

How quickly are you resolving queries? Or how happy are your customers? To answer these questions in your favour, you need to deploy solutions that complement your support function. 

Conversational AI can respond logically and resolve queries in real-time. And with an analytical dashboard with real-time monitoring, you can weigh your success in visually immersive charts. 

Want to see it in live-action at Verloop.io? Let’s talk!