The demand for digital services and experiences has been at an all-time high and businesses have been forced to quickly adapt to meet changing customer expectations.
As such, providing efficient online customer support is now seen as a key differentiator – a way to stand out from competitors, grow revenue and provide more value.
Customer service is about much more than just supporting existing customers. It's about how you approach and assist all of the people interacting with your business.
Businesses that prioritize customer service experience increase sales revenue by 2-7% and profitability by 1-2%, no doubt it plays an essential role in the entire customer lifecycle.
So how can businesses provide excellent customer service throughout the customer journey in the new normal? It all comes down to efficiency and providing personalized, proactive and real-time customer experiences.
In this guide, we dive into how to improve your customer service, which metrics to track and the best ways to boost your team's efficiency.
Customer service metrics and KPIs
How to improve customer service efficiency
Offer proactive support
Automate customer service
Route requests to the right team
Collect more customer feedback
Main takeaways
Setting key performance indicators and metrics is the first step to any strategy. Without measuring, it is almost impossible to know how well your customer service is performing and what needs to be improved. How to measure customer service efficiency?
We’ve gathered the main metrics that we use to calculate and enhance customer service efficiency:
It’s no secret that people are more impatient than ever before and expect quick timely responses from the companies they interact with. Today, delays in response can have a negative impact on customer experience, with customers leaving your website and even abandoning their purchases.
That’s why first response time is one of our top KPIs – we value both our time and our customers' time. You may also know this metric as First Reply Time or FRT for short. It’s often measured in minutes, hours, or days – but we firmly believe it should be measured in seconds.
According to a study, companies have an average response time to customer service requests of 12 hours and 10 minutes which in our book, is way too long! Although response times do vary according to channels, when it comes to digital, customers expect prompt replies.
In a live chat, customers require real-time support, 42% of consumers expect a response on social media within 60 minutes, and 32% expect a response within 30 minutes.
This is the percentage of customer inquiries resolved during the first interaction with a customer. First Contact Resolution (FCR) is also known as First Call Resolution and is commonly used in call centres or contact centres as a measurement of efficiency. Additionally, businesses can also integrate voice-over internet protocols as part of getting in touch with customers.
It calculates the percentage of customer issues or problems that were solved in the initial chat, email or phone call with a customer.
Time to resolution or resolution time is the average time between a customer's first interaction and when the interaction, issue or ticket is marked as “resolved”. Time to resolution is also known as Mean Time to Resolution and is abbreviated as TTR or MTTR.
With this metric, it’s important not to forget the quality of service. A quick answer might be efficient but bad service doesn’t provide an excellent customer experience. TTR is usually an average over a certain period of time and can be calculated by simply recording the duration of each customer service.
Customer Satisfaction Score is the measure of customer experience and is also often abbreviated as CSAT. It measures how satisfied your customers are with your business' services or products.
This metric can help improve efficiency by measuring the effectiveness of a specific interaction, product or event. It can, however, be slightly limited when it comes to measuring a customer’s ongoing relationship with a company.
Customer Effort Score is the underdog of customer experience metrics, that asks customers to rate their experience with your services and products. “How easy was it for you to solve your issue?” i.e. how efficient was the customer service experience.
CES can be sent after a specific interaction with a customer and it can be measured in various ways:
Now that you have the right metrics in place, let’s look at the different ways to better reach them. We've listed practical tips for driving efficiency and reaching your customer service KPIs:
1. Provide proactive support
Efficient customer service is not just about supporting customers, but an opportunity to grow revenue and drive more sales. That’s where proactive support comes in.
It’s also a great way to exceed customer expectations and reach out to customers before being prompted to do so. Proactivity helps manage the number of incoming inquiries ensuring your customer service tickets don’t pile up!
Proactive vs reactive
Customer support is the perfect example of a reactive service, where your customers have to reach out to you to receive help. A reactive chat, for example, would require a customer to click on a button to chat to start.
Proactive customer service, on the other hand, is when support is automatically offered based on a visitor's behaviour. In our live chat example, this could be an automatically configured chat message that appears to the visitor.
Proactive chat can increase customer service efficiency.
It all starts with understanding your online customer behaviour. This helps predict when customers need help, when they are frustrated and what pages they require more support on.
Using giosg Live Chat with intelligent visitor targeting, providing a proactive service online is simple. It allows you to efficiently target your messages to the right customer, at the right time.
How to offer proactive customer service?
Read our blog on the benefits of using live chat for your customer service team!
2. Automate customer service
Automation enables 24/7 support, allows customers to self-serve and get answers immediately when they need them. This typically involves chatbots or AI technology.
Automation helps take pressure off of customer service teams, helping them focus on more critical support issues saving both time and money. Not only is this beneficial for your business, but meets the high expectations of customers that now require service on their own terms – when and where they want it.
Chatbots can handle up to 80% of customer service inquiries. And although there can be some level of personalization, automation still works best when helping customers with straightforward recurring questions, like the ones on your FAQ page.
Here are some ways to automate parts of your digital customer service:
Get more tips on how to automate your customer service and easily create an FAQ chatbot in our blog "How to automate customer service - just in time for the holidays"
The key to faster responses, solving problems quickly and increasing customer satisfaction is routing customer service requests to the right agent. When a customer reaches out to your business they expect to be connected to a customer service representative that will know how to fix their problem.
Making sure customer issues are handled by the correct chat agent from the get-go, will decrease wait time and ensures efficient use of agent resources. Not to mention, it can increase the possibility of resolving the issue during the first customer interaction. Automatic routing can be set up according to:
Customer satisfaction is a lot of work, but it has huge power to gain you loyal customers and consistent revenue.
How to automatically route the right team?
Customer feedback is a way to measure your customer experience and provide invaluable insight into how well your customer service is functioning. It also helps identify problems or issues such as slowness in your service.
Customer service interactions are excellent opportunities for gathering valuable feedback and are crucial for:
How to collect more customer feedback online?
Getting customers to provide feedback can sometimes be challenging, but customer service interactions on your website is an excellent place to start! Here are some ideas on how to get more feedback from customers:
Need more insight? Get four more tips in our blog about maximising customer service efficiency or download our guide:
Customer service efficiency is not just about speed. Although fast responses and resolution times are crucial, efficiency is also about providing an excellent customer service experience throughout the entire journey.
94% of customers will buy again from companies that offer excellent customer service.
Even small changes can make a world of difference to your business. So why not start with some of our tips and take your customer service experience to the next level?
If you have questions about further optimizing your digital customer service or implementing any of the strategies mentioned in this guide, we are here to help. Don't hesitate to chat with us or book your free online demo!