How to measure the effectiveness of the support team. Part 1. Principles

“You can only control what can be measured,” Peter Drucker, father of the American philosophy of management.

Customer service is measured far and wide. The volume of received and lost calls, chat time, the number of e-mails, the quality of feedback - a bunch of other numbers that are easy to fix and count. Juzdesk helps to collect statistics .







But helpdesk will not tell you which indicator matters to your company. The leaders of the support issue reports with the circulation of the newspaper Pravda, but not all of them are useful. So that your graphs and charts do not turn into waste paper, we will help you figure out what exactly should be counted and how to make a report on this data.

What are the metrics

To evaluate the work of an employee or team, you need to know how quickly they respond to requests or how many letters are processed per shift. In order to understand what questions customers most often contact you with, you should count the number of letters “on the subject”. You shoot metrics at different levels depending on what you want to find out.



As a support manager, you have access to this data and thousands of others. The task is to choose from them significant and to figure out to whom and how to present them. Let's see what principles are guided by the world's best support teams.

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1. Why are you preparing reports?

The essence of your customer service is not in creating beautiful reports and drawing color graphs, but in providing a cool service to customers. Reports are needed, because to prove the coolness of the service and to achieve it is possible only with the help of numbers. Depending on what your company considers to be an indicator of quality of service, you will choose metrics.



Beyskamp sells quality service and quick response as a feature of the product. For the head of support, Christina Aardsmy, significant figures are the time of the first response and the customer satisfaction rate.



Bill Bounds from Meilchimpa admits that during the rapid growth of the service, he had the only headache - to hire enough support staff to maintain the quality of the service. “We were focused on growth and all I did was signal that“ Hey, we haven't finished the set yet ”! So the amount of tickets per agent and the level of client satisfaction became the main metrics for Bounds at that moment.

Before you begin to calculate anything, first answer yourself, why do you need this report and what you will see in it.

2. To whom do you provide reports?

Individual first-line support results may not matter for your CEO. What and how you report in the report depends on who you show it to.



In Campaign Monitor, client service reports are at three levels, and the content of the reports is slightly different each time.

• Agents send personal reports by email every day for a change to the support manager.
• A monthly report of the team leader is posted on the wiki, where it is visible to all employees of the company. These reports do not disclose individual agent results, but report team achievements.
• At the highest level, the support manager shows the statistics of the CEO in two slides with several comments explaining the trends.

An alternative approach is used in SurveyGizmo. Taylor Morgan reports at weekly support team meetings with top managers. Here is an open discussion that helps the team to immerse themselves in a single context and find out the details of concern to any of the participants.

When compiling reports, consider what the one you are reporting to cares most about.

3. What result do you want?

If, after your presentation, the listener wearily props up his cheek, he asks: This is a fiasco. Looking at your graphics, he should clearly see what is required of him. And here you are in an advantageous position, because you see opportunities that the leader does not see.



For Mailds in MailChimp, it was important to prove with figures that he needed new people to join the team, and he focused on the data in the report that clearly indicated this.



If you are presenting a report to the product manager, show feedback. How customers use the product, what new features they offer and what they complain about. This will refresh his eyes and push for changes.

Use the data reports to listen to you, those who make decisions.

What should be the metrics?

• Valuable. Link metrics to something your company wants to achieve. If your goal is immediate support, then the time of the first response is the ideal metric. The time to resolve a request may not be so important.
• Changeable Measure only what the team can affect. Taylor Morgan advises discarding indicators that do not change from time to time.
• Genuine. Reports should not be misleading. Be honest, even if it hurts.
• Contextual. The numbers themselves are meaningless, take care of the context.
• Consistent. Trends over time are more important than specific data. Eighty percent customer satisfaction - a lot or a little? Unclear. But the increase in the rate for the month from 70% to 80% is great news!

Show helpful reports

Here is our monthly report. We received 20% fewer questions about setting up triggers. Thanks to the finalization of the application, we saved 12 hours of support time, which is X dollars in money!

Look for correlations, understanding the connections between metrics to help uncover deeper problems.

When the time of the first response to an e-mail reaches four hours, we see correspondingly failures in customer satisfaction.

We spend three times more time on billing questions compared to the average.

Do not make reports that do not provoke any questions and cause no action. Choose the right metrics and use them to tell how your customer service team contributes to your company's goals. Next time we will talk in more detail what the metrics are talking about and whether it is necessary to strive for ideal indicators.