Traffic and Conversion Meetup

After a long vacation T&C Meetup is back covering 6 things that Ewa and Sam taught you last time that are wrong :)

[Customer Support KPI’s - traditional and hardcore style ;) ]

As promised, we are sharing here ideas on what kind of KPI’s you can use to evaluate your Customer Support activities.

[Rule #1] Make your KPIs different from your Sales Team KPI’s.

The Customers Support team is not a sales team! Their job is to make subscribers (members of your free community) and customers (paying members of your community) go from where they are now, to a better place (as a result of your free or paid help). Now, this may well result in customer service generated sales, so track this definitely. But don’t make this your main KPI.

[Traditional KPI’s]

Number of Resolved and Active Issues.
How many issues are being submitted to you daily via all the channels you are present, and how many of them have been resolved?

Average Resolution Time.
How long it takes to respond to your customer or subscriber? A great goal is not longer than 24 hours.

Customer Satisfaction Rating and Net Promoter Score.

You can install a short survey at the end of the Customer Support emails and ask every Person that interacts with you for feedback. The other good question to ask is: “How likely are you to recommend us to someone else?”.

Refund Saved Rate.

Your refund Policy should be clear and easy to execute. But are you making an effort to understand reasons why someone wants to refund? Often Customers don’t really want a refund, but they use it as a threat to get what they want - attention, support using their product, help with their own emotional issues (seriously, some people just need love!)

Customer Retention Rate.

If you are SaaS business or other business selling in the subscription model, your Customer Support can have a direct impact on how many people stay in your program, by reacting to issues, showing care and solving problems.

Number of Closed Sales.

Last but not least, measure the closed sales as a result of your Customer Support actions. Just don’t make it a key focus for your support team! (if someone is really good at this, you may consider some cross training with sales team for this person). The close you get your support team to your sales team, the better both will work together.

[Now, here is a Hardcore Ninja Approach]

By our favorite company Zappos of course.

For those who don’t know them Zappos.com, they started as an American online shoe shop that is famous for slightly “quirky” company culture. In fact, they brand themselves with the slogan ‘Delivering Happiness.”

They invest in Customer Support more than in marketing and praise their Support Agents for taking few hour long calls with customers (the longest in company history lasted 8 hours!) or helping them to buy shoes from different online shops or even helping to order pizza (true story!).

What they measure is really simple (and counterintuitive).

[Did the agent try twice to make a personal emotional connection (PEC)?]

And this breaks down to:

Did they keep the rapport going after the customer responded to their attempt?
Did they address unstated needs?
Did they provide a “wow experience?”

Now you decided what works for your company, we think balancing between traditional and hardcore is cool ;) If you go Zappos style it be even cooler!

Let us know what you think!