Customer Support Software Featured Articles

When it comes to customer service, understanding how your end users are being served is critical for maintaining quality control. It’s like anything else—once the support mechanisms are built, there needs to be a feedback loop that ensures that the systems and processes are actually working as well as they should be.

Unfortunately, according to a TeamSupport white paper, “Effective Reporting for Team Managers,” one of the single greatest challenges facing help-desk managers today is ineffective measurement.

Oh sure, you may know that your team is busy and always on the phone. But do you know what issues they’re working on? Are you stuck with manual activity reports that may not be entirely accurate? Do you lack the qualitative data that’s needed to make the case for hiring more personnel?

Knowing what’s actually happening in support operations can help managers (and executives) spot relative trends and ultimately make good business decisions. That in turn is driving uptake for business intelligence capabilities that deliver real-time insights into how a team is performing.

To get a bead on this, a good reporting system should provide a window into ticketing times, trends in customer support issues and agent performance/customer satisfaction.

When it comes to ticket open and close times, businesses should be able to detect long delays that could be indicative of underlying issues like poor agent training or complex product flaws.

“Monitoring the number of tickets your team is opening—and the length of time to close them—gives you a window into trends that may be developing behind the scenes,” TeamSupport noted. “Long delays in close times may be a customer agent training issue, or it may reveal a bigger issue that requires your development team to help solve.”

Also, gaining a holistic view of a customer over time is important. Ideally, customer support agents should be able to see a customer’s trouble ticket history, along with which issues are still open and what the outcomes have been. This in turn allows for trending analysis over the life of the customer account.

And finally, customer satisfaction feedback should be a priority.

“If you want to know how your customer service team is doing, just ask the customer directly,” TeamSupport said. “The best support software gives customers the option of providing immediate feedback on the quality of their interaction with the support agent and their level of satisfaction.”

Armed with these capabilities (and graphing and reporting in place to make the information applicable), companies can level up their customer service organization. TeamSupport noted that these insights can underpin several metrics specific to the operations of customer service and the help desk that are especially important. These include:

• Monitoring productivity.

• Illuminating where your team’s time is (and is not) well spent.

• Allocating resources appropriately.

• Making the case to upper management when staffing changes are needed.

• Collaborating with internal teams more effectively.

• Assessing customer satisfaction, and potential “at-risk” accounts.

Bottom line? Customers and customer service are in many ways the lifeblood of business. As such, knowing how it’s pumping through the system should be seen as a critical priority.