Data-Driven Is the New Black: What Are the Key Elements to Good Customer Service

At SupportYourApp, we resolve thousands of tickets daily. We work with different types of clients: B2B, B2C, SaaS, FinTech, e-commerce and cybersecurity, just to name a few. Each of these have their own specific business needs and approaches when it comes to customer service. Adjusting to the differences of products we support, there is a vast set of skills we continuously improve to better our services and learn from our experience.

Before diving deeper, it’s important to learn the aims of customer service teams. Providing the quickest possible thorough solution for issues, successful customer-company communication and relations, feedback collection — all are definitive for representing the ultimate goals and approaches of customer support.

Elements of Good Customer Service

A famous survey by Bain & Company showed us a contradiction that 80% of senior executives believe their company provides superior customer service, while only 8% of their customers actually think they receive superior customer support. What are the things these companies miss? There are certain components of customer service, which aid in meeting and exceeding customer expectations. 

• 🛠️ Quality — whether the customer is satisfied with the resolution;
• ✅ Efficiency — how many interactions are needed per ticket;
• ⌛ Time — how much time is needed to resolve the problem.

Each one of these are often specified further with customer support key performance indicators, which measure company’s goals. For customer service, it’s either customer experience (customer satisfaction score, retention rate, engagement, customer attraction) or more technical operational metrics (average handling time, resolution rate, ticket volume).

‼️ KPIs affect your relationship with your customers in ways you may not expect. Research shows its significance in defining customer attraction, retention, net sales, in creating loyalty and providing your business with a competitive advantage. Though metrics are important in helping to set up a standard or SLA, we also firmly believe in the use of data for consultant and service improvement as the key element of customer service too.

How We use Data for Customer Service Improvement

Business is a tough world. Empirical information allows us make better judgements about markets, current situations, but also ourselves as a company. In day-to-day life, we use data to enhance customer support experience in three major fields: optimizing ticket resolution, creating knowledge bases and training our customer support consultants.

For ticket resolution

Using our customizable QCRM system or others CRMs, we closely look into types of tickets and analyze their experience metrics and operational metrics. Analysis of plain ticket types helps us understand which questions are the most common. In application, this translates into quicker solutions through templates or, in some cases, helps to point out consistent bugs in the products we support. 

For customer service knowledge bases

Customer support knowledge bases are large databases of information about a specific company, its products or services, which are used by customer service agents. We consistently help our clients to improve or even create a knowledge base from scratch. Data we gather is crucial in pinning down the most effective ways to expand a customer base in relation to incoming tickets. These could be forming templates (that are further personalized per ticket), adding answers into the public FAQ section or to internal databases.

For consultants trainings

Regular performance reviews are among the very important standardized processes in SupportYourApp. We want to make sure that all of our consultants are delivering their best service. Data we collect is of a great use for measuring both personal- and team-level productivity of our consultants. Fluctuation in customer service metrics show shortcomings or, on the contrary, success of our teams, which allow us to understand the best ways to improve consultants performance or reward them.

At SupportYourApp, we make a great use of our data. It helps us ensure efficiency of our partnerships with clients and their satisfaction, cater to their customers, improve ourselves and innovate continuously.

🔒 But we also have strict rules about how we collect, store and use it by following GDPR guidelines, as well as ISO 9001:2008 and PCI security protocols. All of this to ensure safety of our clients, consultants, processes, hardware and software — the cornerstones of any business or organization.

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