Customer service is a critical part of any business. It’s one of the main touchpoints that customers have with a company and a strong customer service strategy can drive growth and increase revenue.
Businesses spend billions of dollars on customer service each year, but often the results are mixed at best. Many companies think that providing good customer service simply means allocating enough resources to handle support requests from customers, but there is much more to it than that.
A better way to look at customer service is as an opportunity to grow your business. The best companies don’t just limit themselves to responding to questions and complaints; they go beyond resolving individual problems and use their interactions with customers to create a better overall experience for everyone. They treat customer service as an opportunity to gain feedback, learn about their users, and improve their product or service.
In this article, we will look at some ways that you can use RisePath analytics to level up your customer service efforts by going beyond simple metrics like first response time or ticket resolution time and using data and analytics to provide better customer experiences.
In the last decade, the customer service industry has undergone a transformation. The switch from traditional to digital services was just the beginning. Today, customers expect brands to be available across multiple channels and want their needs to be not only addressed but anticipated as well.
In order to stay competitive, brands need to deliver excellent customer service across all channels and at every stage of the customer journey. This means being able to handle the volume in an efficient manner with minimal effort.
To deliver great customer service, you need metrics that can inform your decision-making process and help you understand what’s working (and what’s not). This is where RisePath customer service analytics come in.
Why is customer service analytics important?
It’s the data that shows you how well your agents are doing and where you can improve. It’s the data that helps you understand your customers, make changes to your processes, and grow your business.
What can you do to level up your customer service analytics?
How much time are your customers really waiting on hold? This is one of those stats that everyone knows, but few actually track. The average wait time is a helpful statistic, as it provides an overall picture of how long most people are waiting to talk to an agent. However, if you want to understand your customer’s experience, you need more than this metric.
This is why we’re sharing a few techniques that have helped us deliver immediate returns for clients:
- Use a mix of text analysis techniques
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are everywhere. These technologies are very good at parsing through unstructured text and pulling out relevant information.
- Compensate for cold-start issues
The first time you apply any sort of ML approach to your data, you will run into what’s known as “cold-start” issues. This is when the model needs more observations to make confident predictions or recommendations
- Test early, test often
The most successful analytics programs we’ve seen are those that value testing over upfront modeling.
- Break Out Your Metrics by Customer Type
When you’re looking at things like average handling time (AHT), first call resolution (FCR), and other metrics, it’s natural to look at averages across all your customers. But these numbers can be misleading. They don’t tell you what’s really going on for different groups of customers.
Compare how different groups perform on key metrics. For example, you can look at how new customers vs repeat customers perform on those same metrics. You could also compare the performance of individual products or services on key metrics as well as the performance of different channels. This is especially important if you have multiple channels for contacting customer support (i.e., chat, email, and phone).
- Measure Your Results Frequently
What’s the point of running an experiment and not checking whether it worked? But that’s often what we do when we don’t check our performance metrics frequently enough.
Take the following scenario: You want to increase purchases from your existing customers. So you launch an email campaign aimed at driving buyers back to your site. The initial results look good, so you continue the campaign. A week later, however, you realize that while open rates are up, conversions are down. You should have looked at your results sooner, before you wasted too much time on a strategy that didn’t work.
- It’s easy to get lost in the numbers.
It’s easy to get lost in the numbers. After all, customer service analytics is all about collecting data, analyzing it, and using those insights to make better business decisions. But there are a lot of numbers to choose from and even more ways you can use them.
- Create a clear vision for the customer experience.
The first stage in developing a customer experience plan is to develop a clear customer-centric vision that you can share with your team. Creating a set of statements that serve as guiding principles is the simplest way to define this vision.
For example, RisePath’s basic family values, which include delivering awe via service, being modest, and embracing change, are ingrained in their culture.
- Recognize your target market.
The next stage in implementing these customer experience standards is to illustrate the many types of clients who interact with your customer service representatives. If your company wants to truly comprehend client requirements and desires, it must be able to connect with and empathise with the conditions that they encounter.
- Establish an emotional bond with your customers.
“It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it,” as the saying goes. According to the Journal of Consumer Research, emotions determine the attitudes that drive decisions, and emotions account for more than half of an experience.
- Obtain real-time feedback from customers.
How can you know whether you’re giving your customers a WOW experience?
You must inquire – and ideally, you should do so by collecting feedback in real-time.
Use live chat tools to have real-time conversations, and then use post-interaction surveys and other customer experience tools to send a follow-up email to each consumer.
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