“What are the customer service metrics to watch” is one of the most common questions in the minds of business leaders.
I can’t blame them.
Determining which metrics are the best predictors or measures of customer service success isn’t an easy task. There are many considerations and plenty of opinions on what is and isn’t worth measuring. In fact, a quick web search for customer service metrics returns a mountain of results. Over 300,000,000 results, to be exact.
Too much choice and questionable authority on the topic can make finding meaningful insights on the best KPIs for customer service professionals feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Getting clear, trustworthy advice shouldn’t be that hard to come by.
Fundamentals of Customer Expectations
As my mentor and former colleague, Brad Cleveland, would often say,
“The fundamentals of customer expectations have not–and will not–change.”
This is an important and all too frequently overlooked reality. The core principles of what customers expect through service remain constant throughout time. There are two implications as a result.
- You can use tried and true approaches to how you plan, manage and innovate our customer service teams. When well-developed, it’s a predictable practice that can drive sustainable performance improvement.
- The ways in which you deliver customer service and create customer experiences will constantly evolve. The way you provide customer service today may be different from how it was yesterday or will need to be tomorrow.
Great customer service leaders understand the fundamentals of customer expectations and leverage them to effectively address the volatility of when, where, and how they might need to deliver service. This is both good and bad news when it comes to the metrics for measuring customer service.
Baseline Customer Service Metrics
Here’s the good news: Since the fundamentals of customer expectations are unchanged, you can rely on a core group of foundational metrics to manage essential aspects of your business.
A few years ago, Brad Cleveland and I collaborated on a metrics guide for ICMI. It explored each of the following categories of metrics and provides some ideas on how to measure each of them. It’s a helpful place to start if you need a beginner’s guide to customer service metrics.
Seven Categories of Customer Service Metrics
- Forecast accuracy
- Schedule fit and adherence
- Resource accessibility
- Quality and issue resolution
- Employee satisfaction and engagement
- Customer satisfaction and engagement
- Strategic value
I think of these categories of customer service metrics as being always-on.
They’re the metrics you need to establish a firm foundation for your business. Once you have those in place, however, you’ll need to look above and beyond these measures as you pursue strategic initiatives and business goals. And let’s face it, on the back of an unprecedented 2020, there is no better time than now to think about where to focus your customer service metrics for the new year.
Here’s where I’d be giving the most attention if I were in your shoes.
2021 Customer Service Metrics To Watch
Self-Service Utilization
No one could have predicted that the requirement for no/low-touch experiences and automation would have become what it did in 2020.
While this helped to drive awareness and adoption of self-service capabilities, it was a rush to get there. In some cases, businesses shifted their service delivery models in a few hours or days. Customer service and contact center leaders did whatever it took to keep their businesses moving along and leveraged things like self-service, robotic process automation, and business process outsourcing to get it done. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s likely that there are some opportunities to improve those quickly designed customer experiences.
Self-service utilization is exactly what it sounds like – a customer service metric that looks at how people are utilizing your self-service tools.
In this interview with Call Centre Helper, I further discuss self-service and provide 12 ideas for improving your utilization rates. One piece of particularly important advice is to treat your self-service system like a living, breathing entity. Because it is!
In other words, don’t make the common mistake of believing that you can set and forget your self-service tools once they’re installed. You should regularly test them to ensure that they’re doing what you intended.
This brings me to the point of the next customer service metric to watch: the propensity to pivot.
Propensity to Pivot
The customer experience at a typical business happens across multiple systems, channels, and individuals.
In 2021, we’ll continue to see the trend of people conducting business over the phone or online in significantly greater quantities than those who chose to visit brick and mortar locations.
With all of those interactions happening across all of those channels, it’s highly likely that some channels are working better than others. When that experience doesn’t go well, however, the customer is forced to move to another channel. This can lead to frustration, anger, or switching service providers.
Enter the customer service metric of propensity to pivot. It looks at the percentage of contacts that move from one channel to another and enables you to find weak spots in your service experience. This can be closely tied to the metrics First Contact Resolution and Customer Effort Score.
Strategic Contribution
My last customer service metric focus area for 2021 is strategic contribution. This is less about something that you measure in one of your systems and more about what you intentionally do to align customer service with business strategy.
All too often, the customer service or contact center teams are looked at as cost centers. Entities that are necessary for a business but are limited in value. This couldn’t be further from the potential reality, but it’s up to you to change the paradigm.
Most businesses don’t accidentally validate their strategic contribution to a business.
They plan for it and they work hard to make it happen.
And when they do, they can achieve some pretty amazing things.
- Sales and marketing can learn more about customer trends and decisions
- HR/Training can gain insight into skill and career path development
- Manufacturing can discover previously unknown quality or production problems
- Product development can identify opportunities to differentiate products and services
The list goes on but it all starts when you and your team sit down and make the intentional decision to look for and share the ways in which what you do contributes to the companies beyond serving customers.
What’s Next
You might be wondering why I didn’t include things like employee and customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty. Simple: it shouldn’t have taken a pandemic to make those a priority. If you don’t focus on those every single day then nothing else you do matters. It’s impossible to have a customer-centric program without a clear understanding of how your customers and those who serve them are thinking and feeling about their experiences.
Interested in learning more about customer service metrics and how to navigate them in your business? Sign up for the CX Masterclass. Each month’s content includes discussions on metrics and it’s a great opportunity to ask questions and get ideas from your peers.