Contrary to the common beliefs, customer support is not only a service needed for the satisfaction of your customers. It is also something that may be utilized for a further growth of your business, as it collects plenty of information about your customers or clients. Complex data often intimidates companies, it is unclear what are the best possible uses for it and what benefits can a company reap from it. In this article, we will discuss the different kinds of customer support data for fruitful insight into your business and the ways in which we can help.
Types of data customer support collects
Depending on the types of information a customer service team gathers, your approach to it may differ significantly. Very generally, customer service in your company gathers two types of data:
- ✌️ Quantitative: large amounts of statistical data and metadata that are collected automatically by CRM or other systems (personal data of your customers, customer behavior on the website, numbers of resolved and unresolved tickets, number of minutes it takes to respond to a certain ticket)
- 🛠️ Qualitative: information from the tickets themselves and conversations between your support agents and customers.
Data, KPIs and Business
First and, perhaps, most obvious thing to measure with the data you receive from the customer service department are their KPIs and their relations to the other metrics in your company. There are experience metrics (for instance, customer acquisition, customer retention, customer satisfaction) and operational metrics (for instance, average handling time, average resolution rate). More types and tools for tracking KPIs are discussed extensively in our previous articles. KPIs are responsible for measuring the success of your team and their achievements in relation to corporate strategy.
Insights into Your Products
Qualitative data collected by the customer service department is very useful for a specific purpose of gaining a different perspective into the product or service you provide. From the feedback you receive you gather a broader picture of product users beyond initial test group but also into how the products are experienced by the users themselves.
Fixing Bugs with Feedback
Both statistics and more qualitative approaches assist companies in better understanding of features that should be fixed. Potentially, if there’s a large volume of tickets related to the same problem, it might be worth looking into by the technical department. While if a certain issue is particularly frustrating and causes high anger levels in customers, it might be reasonable to fix it too. As an outcome, customer service data allows you to look into optimal ways to perfect and polish your product.
Updating Knowledge Base and FAQ
Keeping your customers and your employees up to date is an important step in making your company grow. Knowledge bases are large databases which have all information about a specific company, its products or services and are used by managers and employees in planning or content creation, customer service agents in providing support and creation of templates and, often, even customers themselves through FAQ pages. To compile such a database, a company needs a vast amount of pre-gathered data, which somewhat derives from customer service interactions too.
Creating Compelling Case Studies
Case studies and research are highly popular tools for successful communication, self-improvement and marketing among top companies. Businesses publish case studies of their successful experiences with clients in order to prove their competences to the potential clients, to communicate success and to create a shareable and referable content to be spread the word about.
Looking at case studies and research from a historical perspective may be used practically in order to refine managers’ approach to their business strategy and goals, therefore, providing a beneficial learning ground for the future.
How to Collect Customer Support Data
Customer support data seems like a great use, doesn’t it? If you feel like you’re ready to continue with exceeding in your business using customer service data, here’s a quick list of places to pull your data from:
- CRM systems (phone calls, emails, chatbots). In previous articles, we have talked about the best CRM systems and what we have learned from having used majority of the CRMs out there
- Social media. On social media people share what they like and dislike about companies and products all the time! It is an amazing place to learn first-hand raw insights.
- Review pages and interest forums. Similarly to social media, reviews on review-specific sites matter. They form one of the opinions about your company in the eyes of potential customers. Besides, they provide a handful in-depth and thorough glance at your company and its products and services.
As a customer service company ourselves, we SupportYourApp do not only deliver customer support, but also help businesses to boost sales, retain existing customers or scale, using all the tools we have at hand, be it data we help them collect, flexible CRM we offer or knowledge base solutions we help compile for our clients.