- Instilling supporting metrics in your operation
is a vital aspect of customer service.
The right metrics enable you to gauge the effectiveness
of your services.
They also tend to guide behavior, and help you
and your team focus on the things that matter the most.
There are many variables in customer service.
There are almost always different perspectives
about what's important.
What should you pay attention to?
Let's explore answers to that question here.
We've found there are seven key aspects of service
that should always be reflected in metrics.
They build on each other, from tactical
to more strategic, and they form an effective framework
for identifying the metrics that make sense.
The first is anticipating customer needs
or the workload forecast.
If you don't have an accurate prediction
of how many customers you'll be serving,
and what their needs will likely be,
it's going to be very difficult to deliver effective service.
That's true for any kind of operation,
from a small medical office, to a busy restaurant,
to a large multi-site customer care center.
So a good supporting metric would be tracking
variants of forecast to actual,
and get as specific as you need.
How many customers need help with homeowners policies
on Saturday mornings?
I've seen too many struggling environments
where the leadership team regarded forecasting
as too tactical for their interest and involvement.
While you're probably not the one producing the forecasts,
be sure they're happening.
Everything's built on them.
The next key aspect of customer service is related.
You've anticipated the workload, now it's important
to anticipate the staff and other resources
required to handle it.
For example, if you manage the emergency department
of a hospital, it's essential to ensure you have
the right number of physicians and nurses
and support staff in place at the right times.
A supporting metric could be the variance
of actual to planned schedules.
Do you have the right skills in place at the right times?
The next aspect of customer service is wait times,
or how accessible you are.
Accessibility really is an outcome of the first two
aspects of service, predicting workloads
and getting the right resources in place at the right times.
Supporting metrics here, customer wait times.
Different terms such as service level, or response time,
are used in different settings.
Be sure to include all types of access,
whether customers call or walk in
or use some other alternative.
Next is the quality of interactions.
And this, along with wait times, is probably
what most of us think of when we think of customer service.
What actually happens at the point of service delivery?
Criteria such as understanding the customer's need,
resolving the issue, accurately entering data,
and other aspects of quality are important.
And both input from customer surveys
and internal quality scores from samples
of customer service interactions
can be used as supporting metrics.
The next essential area in delivering service
is employee engagement, and by engagement I mean
the degree to which your employees are committed
to your mission and the work they do.
Studies resoundingly show that engaged employees
provide better service.
You can measure engagement through employee surveys
and in things like turnover.
A high-leverage, high-value aspect of customer service
is cross functional, many call this strategic.
What do you learn in customer service that would be helpful
to other areas in improving products
and services and processes.
Customer service can be such a powerful set
of eyes and ears if you have the metrics
to support these efforts.
Finally, what you're doing in all these areas
should ultimately be reflected
in customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The supporting metric can be a net promoter score,
customer effort score, or similar.
You should also look at behavior,
such as repeat business, reviews they post,
new customers that come from referrals, and others,
that might indicate what's happening.
The healthiest organizations, those with the most
effective customer service, have metrics that reflect
all seven of these aspects of service delivery.
I find in too many organizations that two or three,
and sometimes more, are underrepresented,
and in some cases, missing altogether.
As a leader, having this palette of metrics
encourages focus in the right areas
and leads to more consistency and greater strength
in your services.