How Do You Measure Your Customer Service?

Your customer service team is the face of your business. Yet, measuring the effectiveness of your customer service and how it fits into the the overall customer experience can be tricky. This is due to the fact that it is a very subjective variable based on your customers’ expectations and the impressions your business is making in order to meet those expectations.

Though customer service may be a bit abstract, there are still ways to measure it. The following are seven factors that, when taken together, will give you a pretty good idea of how effective your business’ customer service is.

1. Customer Satisfaction. If you want to measure the effectiveness of your business’ customer service, then the first place to start is with your customers themselves. You can do this by conducting customer satisfaction surveys. One thing in particular that you want to pay attention to is your customers’ level of satisfaction over time. Does it trend up or does it tend to trend down? Depending on what you find, you may have vital information on why your customers choose to either stay or leave your business.

2. Customer Retention. And that brings us to the next important factor: customer retention. If your customer service is doing a good job, then chances are your overall customer experience is pretty good as well. Customers who are happy with the service they are getting will be much more likely to stick around and continue to patronize your business.

3. Rate of Referrals. When your customers are happy with their experience, then they will be likely to recommend your business to their family, friends, neighbors, and peers. So, another factor to consider is the rate of people who are actively recommending your business to others.

4. Sales Conversion. When your customer service team communicates with a customer, what happens next? Do they to make a purchase or do they take some other desirable action? If not, then determine when during the communication process are your customers slipping away.

5. Resolution Time. Another variable to consider is the time it takes your customer service team to respond to customer inquiries and resolve any issues. These days, your customers may be expecting extremely fast turn around times- meaning they want to hear from you within a few hours. A good rule of thumb is that no more then 24 hours should go by without the your customers getting some kind of response from your customer service team.

6. Rate of Resolved Issues. How many questions and complaints get satisfactorily resolved? If your customer service team is able to solve them quickly and your customers are walking away from the experience feeling satisfied with the actions that were taken, then this is a good sign that you are providing effective customer service.

7. Number of Complaints. You certainly can’t please everyone, and your business is bound to generate some customer complaints along the way. But if you see that your business is receiving an unusually large number of complaints, or the number of complaints has been increasing without an overall increase in customer growth, then this could be hinting to a fundamental problem.

If your business keeps track of all of these factors, you will get a pretty good sense of how effective your customer service is. This information will also help you to pinpoint those areas that may need improvement and ultimately allow you to provide the best customer experience possible.