Have You Embraced Customer Service Analytics?

As many organizations mature and recognize increased competition, there is one key differentiator that can help companies win: customer service. Moreover, poor customer service can be detrimental to performance as a study from Harris Interactive showed that 86% of consumers have quit doing business with a company because of a bad customer experience.

The market has a host of software solutions looking to help maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service, including: Salesforce.com's Service Cloud, Zendesk, Get Satisfaction, and Bazaarvoice. No matter what solution you end up deploying, in order for managers to be successful they must track the right analytics, have the means to measure them effectively and act on the insights.

The problem with many customer service organizations is that there is too much information to digest. Managers must decipher and measure phone calls, e-mails, chats, forums, and knowledge articles. To excel and provide exceptional customer service, it's important to answer several questions:

1. How is my department comparing against previous performance? Are we trending positively or negatively?
2. What customers are at risk today?
3. Which of my agents are performing the best? Do I have enough capacity to support our existing customers and prospects?
4. Which issues have been persisting? Do they require escalation to another group in the organization?

Executives, managers, and even representatives should understand benchmarks and track their performance. How important is this? TARP estimates that attracting a new customer costs 5 times as much as keeping an existing one. Moreover, customer churn is caused by customer feelings of poor treatment 68% of the time.

Using analytics and a powerful business intelligence tool enables all stakeholders to keep a pulse on their support organization. In a time when pricing and availability is no longer a differentiation, organizations must invest in customer service and understanding how that impacts their business.

This piece is part of a four part series on how your organization can use analytics to maximize their customer service organization's effectiveness. Stay tuned for our next piece: 10 Key Performance Indicators for Customer Service.