Your long-term B2B relationships depend heavily on the quality of the customer service you provide. This is increasingly important in today’s digital marketplace where companies are now offering a full range of services that allow them to interact with their customers. In order to stay ahead of the competition, a B2B needs to understand where their support services need improving. Knowing what’s working and what’s not is the best way to provide proactive customer support. Utilizing a data report is a great way discover this information. But how exactly can analyzing data help you improve customer service quality? What should you be looking for?
Handle Times
The average handle time refers to how long a single customer request takes a support rep. This means from the time the request is read by an agent to the time they respond back to the client. This number is critical in providing optimal customer support. When viewing these reports, you want to see a consistent decline in handle times. If the average time is increasing, you know you have an issue. You may need to make changes to your training procedures for support reps or zero in on which reps are causing the average time to increase. You also may need to look into modifications to your support software to prioritize requests that haven’t been responded to by a certain amount of time.
Measuring Support Productivity
Increasing and maintaining quality customer support means you have to frequently monitor the productivity of each rep. When gathering a data report, you need to look at the number of requests each rep closes out. This is a direct indicator of the person’s productivity, and it could also point to problems within your system. If you notice that a certain rep closes out twice as many requests than other staff, this could mean they’re choosing to only work on specific requests. You may need to automate your system using configurable customer support or consider assigning reps to certain clients. This option may work better in the B2B landscape. You also may notice a rep with much lower productivity. This could indicate a need for additional training or replacement.
Monitoring Messages
A big part of good customer service is efficiency. Clients want their issues handled quickly without the need for too much back and forth with reps. Looking at how much messaging is happening in your service department can tell you whether improvement needs to be made to the client interaction process. Your goal should be to resolve client issues in one response. This is hard to do, but shooting for it will improve your overall customer experience. If your data report is telling you there are a high number of messages being sent between clients and your support staff, this could mean a number of things. It could mean the responses your reps are sending out aren’t as detailed as they need to be. It could also point to a problem with information retrieval on your end.
Viewing reports related to your customer support operations is an invaluable tool when it comes to streamlining your process and improving the quality of support you’re providing. PhaseWare provides secure customer support solutions that allow for advanced data reporting so you can find out what’s working and what’s not. Let us help you pinpoint the data reports you should be using by contacting us today.