Customer service is not a new concept. It has been around for decades, but recently it’s become more integrated with analytics. The customer experience is a measure of the overall perception customers form when they encounter your business.
It includes everything from their initial contact to how easy it was for them to complete transactions. It is also about taking feedback about what you offer at each stage in between—from responding to initial queries on social media to final check out at the counter— all of which influences their future purchase decisions and marketing your products through word of mouth.
Today, companies use various data types—personal, behavioral and demographic, among many others—to analyze customer feedback and improve customer service experiences.
Analytics can help identify trends to understand what customers are saying about product defects or failure rates. Companies can then use this information to direct attention towards areas of concern and address the issue before it spreads like wildfire throughout social media channels or other outlets where consumers congregate online.
But how can companies go about learning the importance of business analytics to provide an optimal experience for new and existing customers? Here are three things to consider when looking at business analytics to achieve larger marketing goals of lead generation and revenue growth.
1. Understanding Customer Service Insights
Many companies, especially startups, focused on the culture of objective decision-making, can benefit from using CX analytics. It is easier to find direction in a business venture with concrete metrics and data to back up decisions. You can also empower employees with new knowledge about customer needs through conferences or other means like webinars where experts discuss trends within industries, allowing everyone involved (especially leaders) to make informed choices when managing resources accordingly.
Connecting with your customers is critical to the success of any business, and that starts with customer experience. It also allows you to make data-driven decisions so retention rates can improve across all aspects, from marketing efforts to CSR programs and everything in between.
2. Preventing Roadblocks in Customer Service
What’s the best way to make your product or service more appealing? By getting rid of any obstacles customers may face interacting with your business! You can create strategies and actions that make the process less clunky, difficult and inconvenient for the customer.
Achieving customer success is crucial for any business; and with analytics metrics at disposal, your business can identify customer service roadblocks, be it poorly trained employees, delayed response to queries, absent social media presence, a general lack of team spirit among the company or downright bad product/services.
Many companies struggle with creating organizational roadmaps which hinders their capabilities, providing exceptional customer service being one. For any good or bad product, customers want to leave feedback but lack of appropriate channels becomes one of the biggest roadblocks in creating seamless digital engagement. Enhancing capabilities in data and technology can prevent this and one of the easiest ways to go about this is by setting up metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES).
Once you have insight into your customers’ experience—based on their scores and feedback—, it’s possible to determine and resolve issues for an enhanced experience in the future. Using CES data, businesses can also optimize products/services by mitigating components that adversely affect customer satisfaction!
3. Tracking Metrics
When it comes to the success of your customer service department, one key metric that cannot be overlooked is the customer lifetime value (CLTV). Using a CX analytics tool can help you measure how valuable customers are for your company and identify the value they add in terms of promotion, revenue and a general ROI.
Some metrics you need to track to gauge analytics and ensure an effective customer experience are:
Tickets Opened and Closed
The ticket volume shows how many customers are contacting your company. Tracking this over time can help you anticipate their needs and prepare answers in advance about popular questions like return policies and order tracking. A high number of tickets with similar concerns (on top of things like billing errors) may indicate a need for providing more information to individual clients through FAQs.
The ratio of tickets opened to closed is an essential measure for understanding the effectiveness and efficiency of your customer support team. A high number of unanswered issues can indicate roadblocks in a seamless customer experience.
Response Times
It’s important to have a clear timeline of how long your customer support team will take when assisting customers. Suppose a customer inquiry takes longer to solve. In that case, it may indicate that there are too many tickets coming into the system. Tracking median response times will show how quickly or slowly the team responded based on when an inquiry came in, how many customers were waiting during the answering time and the total time it took to successfully resolve the issue.
Learning these analytics allows managers to make better decisions about where resources need to go first.
Resolution Times
Customer support teams must be able to resolve tickets promptly. The average resolution time of an issue is usually 24 hours, though some may take longer depending on the nature and complexity of their inquiry.
This metric provides the customer support team with relevant information regarding customer problems. It can help segregate service agents who responded and closed tickets appropriately instead of rushing through responses without thoroughly checking everything twice.
Managers can use these analytics to rotate agents and categorize them per their skill level.
Final Thoughts
The customer experience is the sum of all interactions of customers with your product or service. It’s not just about making things look pretty; it’s about understanding how customers interact with what you offer and figuring out ways to make that process easier for them. Analytics can help by providing insights into their behaviors or purchasing process decisions. Once you have this information, you can remove roadblocks to get more sales flowing through easily.
As far as customer service is concerned, business analytics should be the front line of your sales objectives, as this data can help you polish the touch points while surprising your clients in new ways.
The world of customer service is evolving day by day and the need to explore analytics will be growing exponentially in the coming years. Make sure you understand the factors mentioned above thoroughly. It will allow you to cater to your customers more effectively, helping you retain them for a longer time.
