Customer loyalty is a battle of inches, where the margin for winning or losing a customer is small. The motivation level of your customer support team has a direct impact on how your customer perceives your organization’s brand.
Companies whose support team members go the extra mile, are the ones that retain customers for longer periods. In fact, today’s customers too are willing to pay more for better customer support.
Daily huddles or standup meetings done on a daily basis can go a long way in ensuring that the team is aligned to what each member needs to accomplish on a given day. It also gives team members recognition among each other for the tasks they accomplish. Daily standups can be limited to a quick 15 minutes activity where people discuss what they are working on, if they have any bottlenecks to get things done.
For example, these meetings can focus on 3 simple questions like:
As much the focus is on tasks, also make sure you take the time out to recognize the accomplishments of your team members.
Another interesting way to ensure that your customer support team is motivated, is to set goals for each individual. It not only measures the performance of individual support agents, but also gives you a perspective of the support team’s overall progress. Let’s look at some mutually beneficial metrics to measure.
It helps a lot to let the agents know how well they are performing on each resolution area, i.e., different categories of solution your agents are helping out the customers with. You might want to measure CSAT ratings and time to resolution to understand the performance in each resolution area. Measuring this aspect, also helps your product team to focus on the areas where the product needs improvement.
It is a common practice to set up a goal for the number of tickets to be resolved by an agent per day. It not only motivates the team to be focused on their tasks but also by understanding the average number of tickets handled per day, you can plan your resource needs and identify trends in performance.
Customer wait time has a direct implication on their overall customer experience and customer satisfaction. It makes sense to set up SLAs on the first response time, i.e., the time period within which a support agent needs to respond for the first time to a new customer support request. The lower your first response time is, the better it is for your customers.
Measuring resolution effort refers to measuring everything from the first support touch after the request comes in, to resolving the query. It includes handling time which includes the time spent by an agent on a single support interaction. Measuring the number of support touches, comments, average customer wait time, first resolution summarizes the overall effort put on resolution. Whenever the customer satisfaction is low, these are key aspects to look at, to know what exactly needs to be fixed.
Ticket reopen refers to a situation where a customer changes back the support ticket status from “resolved” to “open”. Too many ticket reopens might mean miscommunication between the customer and the support agent or that there is scope for training the agent on specific areas to help them provide efficient solutions to the customer.
Next topic - How to hire your first customer support representative
Holidays are a time when several members of your support might choose to go on a vacation. You need to plan your holiday season and yet allow some flexibility to ensure both your team and customers have a seamless experience.
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