10 parameters to effectively measure Customer Service

In today's day and age, as the purchase power of consumers is going up, so are their demands. No longer are customers satisfied with the basics. They want to be made to feel special and they will easily switch brands or leave a bad review about you if you do not service them well.

Customer service today is not only about customer support at the time of purchase of your products/services. Customer support today encompasses everything - from the parking space you have available, the stock you have available, how your staff greets customers, how they assist them to make a purchase, how you handle customer complaints and more. If you want to offer quality customer service, then you have to make sure that your customers feel valued and appreciated.

As per a famous quote by Peter Drucker – "What gets measured gets managed". Hence it is important to keep a constant track of the customer service you offer and measure it regularly. This helps ascertain if your customers are happy and satisfied with you or if there is something more that you need to offer them in the form of customer support.

However, the question still remains as to how do you measure customer service? There are multiple different parameters that you can use to measure customer service. These are called "Key Performance Indicators" or "KPIs". These may differ from business to business. Let us look at a few KPIs that you can use to measure your customer service.

1. Customer Satisfaction

If you conduct periodic surveys for customer satisfaction, you can understand how your customers rate the customer support you offer. The simple metric here is if more customers are rating the support received, highly, your customer service is actually doing good.

You can also track the customer satisfaction received, over time. This will help gauge if you need to make any changes in your processes. For example, if the customer satisfaction has gone up over the past 2-3 years, it means you are on the right track but if it has gone down, it denotes that a change is needed.

2. Customer Retention

If your customer is happy with the support and service you offer, they are more likely to stay with you. They will engage more with you. So, if you have a considerable number of regular customers, it means that you are scoring high among your customers with the service that you are offering.

3. Net Promoter Score

Those customers who are really happy and satisfied with your customer support, will most likely recommend you to their friends, family and colleagues. The Net Promoter Score is nothing but the rate of customers who recommend your business/product/service to others. A good Net Promoter Score is an indication that your customer service is doing good.

4. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate refers to how likely the customers are to do business with you once your customer support team has interacted with them. If the customer service you offer is satisfactory, your conversion rate should be high.

5. Comparison to Competition

For any business, it is extremely important to gauge and evaluate where you stand in comparison to your competitors. Customers are fickle minded and even if they do like your brand, they may move to your competitors for multiple reasons. While customer retention is a good metric to measure customer service, you should not lose sight of your competitor’s moves.

6. Average time taken for resolution

One of the most important aspects of offering good customer support is to resolve customer grievances in as short a time as possible. Of course, there cannot be any compromise on the quality of the resolution offered. If you respond to customer queries in a timely manner, they are more likely to be happy and satisfied with you. This can be another parameter to measure customer service.

7. Issues that are active

In continuation with the above point, you should always aim to have the minimum number of active issues. If your average resolution time is less, then you will not have too many active issues at the same time. If you see that there still are too many active issues, it could mean that there are more complaints than usual and you need to relook at the customer service you are offering.

8. Issues that have been resolved

Another great and one of the most viable parameters to measure customer service is to see the quality and quantity of resolved issues. Any business will have its share of customer complaints. If the number of resolved issues is high and it is done qualitatively, it is an obvious indication of excellent customer service.

9. Rate of escalation of complaints

It is important to continuously monitor the number of complaints you receive. If you observe a sudden increase in the number of complaints, without the corresponding growth in the number of consumers; it is a sign of potential trouble with respect to the customer service being offered. This will also tie back in with the number of active and resolved issues.

10. Employee Performance/Retention

Last but not the least, employee productivity and retention are extremely important factors when it comes to measuring the customer support that you offer. If your employees are happy and they feel empowered, they are likely to do their jobs well and offer the kind of service that lives up to your business’s standards.

In conclusion, good customer service is the key to survival for businesses and the above methods can help you gauge where you are today on that front and what you need to do to better the same.