It's tough to manage a customer service department. Your team is always fire-fighting, it’s difficult to keep morale high and it might be easy to think that your efforts go unnoticed by management. When executives don’t see the value of great customer service you’re seen as a cost, not as an opportunity. However, 90% of Americans see customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company.
You might be tracking your team’s performance with numerous metrics. However, if you’re struggling to prove the value of your team, there’s at least one metric you want to step away from. It’s the Net Promotor Score - NPS. It’s a classic, but the score makes it absolutely impossible to prove the value of your team.
This reason has to do with the nature of the job. Customers only reach out to customer service when they have a problem. Something else, out of the control of customer service, went wrong. If you want to focus on your team's performance, you need a metric and a follow-up question that's able to filter out the original annoyance of why a customer got in touch in the first place.
Proving the value of your customer service team starts with relevant questions and asking for open feedback. The Customer Effort Score (CES) and the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) narrow down the focus. You can ask how satisfied they were with the assistance of the agent or how easy it was to solve their problem. This pushes the customer into giving relevant feedback about your department. There’s less of a focus on the negative experience that made them reach out, so you benefit from going for a targeted approach. The feedback will mostly include what you’re doing well or what you need to work on as a team, so it couldn’t be more specific and useful.
Getting a score - combined with open customer feedback (the reason why) about their interactions with your customer service team provides you with valuable insights over time.
Targeted questions narrow down the accountability to what you can control and improve. If people still give you a low score but complain about the product, then you know it's not on you.
Keeping customer agents motivated can be a challenge as they are always problem-solving. However, positive open feedback directly from the customer is a morale boost like no other.
For 62% of consumers, service insight and knowledge is the key to a good experience. Open feedback will highlight if you need to work on the expertise of your team or improve their processes.
/Illustrations%20EN/2021/Industry%20pages/Retail-MaximizeCustomerServiceProductivity.svg)
When we remove the fluffiness from the Net Promotor Score (NPS) to measure customer service accurately and reliably, it paves the way to demonstrate the value of the department. And more so, having clear feedback on how well they are performing adds to your internal credibility. Backed by customer feedback, customer-facing teams show what they are accountable for and can give input to back-office teams on what needs to be improved.
Want to learn more about measuring and optimizing customer service? Discover how customer service feedback helps you improve customer service performance.
Receive the best insights on Customer Experience and stay up-to-date with our latest company news.
