Customer Service & Performance Measurment

How to improve your business’s customer service performance now, and long into the future

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. In today's climate, especially, focusing on your customer service efforts is the best investment you can make. Consumers are willing to spend 17% more on a business that offers outstanding customer service. Plus, 93% of consumers are likely to make repeat purchases based on positive customer experiences.

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Sharpen your customer service skills

Let’s get started and share our key performance indicators to customer satisfaction. As COVID-19 continues to cause disruption across the globe, businesses across industries have been forced to reconsider the way they operate as well as communicate with their customers. To help you thrive now and as the pandemic slows down, we’re going to look at how to improve your customer service offerings—starting with communication skills.

Whether it's via telephone, email or online chat, social media, or any other consumer-facing touchpoint imaginable, first impressions count. In the digital age, customers expect affable, personalized communications from brands—no exceptions. To ensure that you offer friendly and efficient communications across the board, sharpening up your customer service communication skills is essential.

Here are some key areas you should consider which will help to measure customer satisfaction:

Clear, concise communication

Some customers will be angry or disgruntled when they contact you. Regardless of a customer’s feelings or attitude, it’s always important to remain calm, neutral, and empathetic. Place yourself in their shoes to understand where they’re coming from and respond in a conversational tone that is friendly, helpful, and most importantly, to the point. Understanding customer support means a happy customer.

Tip: Create a customer communications guide for your reps, outlining essential dos, and don’ts. Host regular role play-based training workshops and empower your customer service staff to upskill themselves on a regular basis. Make sure the response time is satisfying for your business.

Niche knowledge

In today’s world, adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to your customer communications will not do. To connect with your consumers on a deeper level and ultimately improve your customer service performance, your reps should have a solid working knowledge of your products as well as the industry as a whole.

Tip: Provide your customer service team with an internal knowledge base of resources that will help them remain informed with industry news and trends. You should also host regular informal meetings where your team can ask questions about the business and interact with your products or service.

Reward and recognize

A motivated customer service rep is a customer service rep that is likely to go the extra mile every single day. In fact, 69% of employees state they would work harder if they felt more valued in the workplace. To keep your customer service staff motivated and engaged, you should take the time to reward and recognize success while placing value on team bonding.

Tip: Here are some staff morale-boosting approaches you should consider to maintain your business: Host a monthly team quiz, drink, outing, or social event. Offer regular incentives (bonuses, time off, vouchers, or anything you feel will offer genuine value) for good performance.

Get conversational with your customers

There are countless communicative channels available to customers in the modern age and it’s your duty as a business to handle them efficiently. What do we mean, you say? Great customer service is no longer a one-way street, it’s a conversation between brand and consumer. By responding to all feedback, positive or negative, in a timely manner and asking your customers how they’re feeling or how you can improve, not only will you boost your consumer retention rates but you will also gain valuable insights into what people really want from you and help you to measure customer service.

When it comes to getting conversational, you can get as creative as you wish—but, here are some practical tips to steer you in the right direction:

  • Explore social listening strategies, using social media to discover what consumers in you’re industry is talking about and how they interact with your competitors.
  • Respond to customers’ comments on your social media platforms publically and offer a practical solution to their problems in a timely fashion, particularly if what they are saying is negative. Trying to hide from the conversation will only serve to hinder your brand reputation.
  • Send out branded emails to your subscribers and offer them the option to respond directly with comments, queries, or feedback. By adding a poll or an open-ended question (‘what do you think of our new branding?’, for example), you will encourage engagement which will lead to conversation, and potentially, more conversions.

Focus on customer experience (CX)

When looking at customer service performance, most businesses overlook the importance of customer experience (CX). But, in reality, the two are linked. So, during your quest for customer service excellence, it’s important that you formulate a solid CX strategy. Here’s how:

  1. Consider and set your main customer objectives. Do you want to improve your response rates and improve your messaging? Do you want to make your online channels more user-friendly? These decisions will form the foundations of all of your customer-focused activities, so choose them wisely.
  2. Understand your customers on a deeper level by creating buyer personas or profiles, conducting market research (with TGM Research, of course), and working with the right metrics.
  3. Look at your competitors to examine their customer service efforts and communications. By examining your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you will be able to formulate strategies and ideas that will help you approach your customers in a more creative and improve your business line.
  4. Look at every one of your customer-facing touchpoints in detail. Create a customer journey map that visualizes every one of your touchpoints for website contact form and support lines to online live chat, social media, email, in-app, and beyond. Use this map to identify any roadblocks or weaknesses between touchpoints and make necessary improvements that will improve your customer service offerings. All those touchpoints will help to measure customer service.

Work with the right tools & metrics

Another key aspect of consistent customer service performance is leveraging the right tools and metrics.

Market research

COVID-19, without a shadow of a doubt, has changed the commercial playing field, completely. With such a level of uncertainty comes the necessity to gather intelligence—research that will help you make more informed, confident decisions in all key customer-facing aspects of the business.

Knowledge is indeed power and by gathering market research data, you will get under the skin of your customers, empowering you to provide innovative solutions to their existing pain points while strengthening your relationships at a time when it matters most. It helps to measure customer service.

By hosting virtual focus groups, sending out polls or questionnaires on specific subjects, incentivizing your customers to fill them out, you will be able to paint a panoramic picture from your market research efforts—the vivid kind that will enhance your customer service offerings.

Customer service tools

A wealth of customer service performance optimization tools exist in today’s digitally-driven landscape. From internal efficiency to service output, here are the types of tools that will offer a healthy return on investment (ROI):

  • A shared team inbox that will empower your staff to take a collaborative approach to daily customer service requests, strategies, and issues. This will prove particularly effective if you’re currently working on a remote basis.
  • An artificial intelligence (AI)-powered online chat service where chatbots can automate frontline human communications and perform basic tasks. This will boost your output, improve your response times, and increase your internal productivity levels.

Customer service metrics

In the Age of Information, data is everywhere—so use it to your customer service-boosting advantage. To keep improving your customer service performance and customer satisfaction now and post-COVID-19, here are the metrics you need to explore:

  • Customer retention rates: Your business’s overall ability to retain customers over a pre-determined timeframe. This metric will empower you to make strategic changes that enhance your customer support efforts.
  • Top-performing agents: Remember what we said about staff engagement? This is an effective means of honing in individual performance and rewarding achievement while offering support and training to agents that may be struggling.
  • Average reply time (ART): This insight will give you a solid understanding of how swiftly you reply and respond to consumers across various channels or touchpoints.

"Good customer service costs less than bad customer service." —Sally Gronow

Right now, your customers need you more than ever. Improve your customer service improvements now and you will thrive long into the future.

TGM Research has decades of experience in qualitative and quantitative research. We can support you with any type of survey including advising you, in that case, with the best practices when it comes to customer service or if you would like to evaluate the performance of your customer service through online surveys. We have a global reach covering more than 120 countries with proprietary panels and additional sources of respondents.

The Team is located around the clock which allows you a 24/7 coverage. Do not hesitate to reach out to the team if you have any questions or would like to know more. Get in touch now!

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