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[MUSIC PLAYING] MATHEW PATTERSON: So we started this course asking the question, is customer service worth spending time and energy on? My answer, not surprisingly was yes. We've been working through a whole lot of ways to give great service to your customers. But how would you know if it's really working? Is the effort paying off? In this last lesson, we're talking about metrics and reporting, how to decide, how to measure your customer service, so you understand what's working, what's not, and when things change.
0:33
What gets measured gets managed. It's a famous Peter Drucker quote, although, he didn't exactly say that. But the point is clear. The things you pay attention to through measurement are the things you'll end up changing through your actions. And customer service is pretty measurable. How quickly you respond to customers, how many questions get asked, what your satisfaction rates are. You'll helpdesk software probably produces a whole bunch of those reports automatically for you.
0:59
And everybody should know those core metrics on responsiveness, on satisfaction levels, on request volumes. But being measurable is not the same as being meaningful. And your helpdesk can't tell you what matters most for your company. So you need to pick some additional measures for your own needs. A good metric should be meaningful. It should tie back to something that your company wants to achieve.
1:21
It should be movable, which means it should be something you can actually change through your actions. And it should be authentic. They need to tell a true story. It's possible to use real numbers to send a misleading message. You want to be honest, even when it hurts. And they should be consistent. Any particular data point is not as important as the trends over time. So you should pick something which meets all of those four requirements, but that still leaves you a lot of options.
1:46
So he's four step process to figure out what to measure. Step one. start by understanding what outcome you want to see. In e-commerce, that's probably something like an increase in new customers, or more sales to existing customers, or maybe an increase in the average sale value. In step two, decide what actions your customers would need to take to create those outcomes from step one. So they need to visit the website more often, or tell their friends about your shop, or they need to do more of their shopping with you.
2:16
And in step three, think about what your team can do to encourage those actions most effectively. And this is where it gets a little bit experimental. So if you are trying to encourage more repeat business, then perhaps focusing on creating a hassle-free returns experience might be a key activity for you. And in step four, focus on metrics that measure those key activities. So for example, if you're measuring creating hassle-free returns, you can see how many return requests you see, how long it takes to resolve those requests.
2:45
If you track that over time, you can try to correlate improvements in how long it takes to increases in the lifetime value of your customer. So looking not just at the raw numbers but at trends over time. Are you getting faster or slower for your key activities that you think are going to drive the outcomes you want to see? As your team gets bigger, you can dig deeper, start to connect your helpdesk data to other internal sources of data.
3:10
Two key areas to focus on for a larger support team, return on investment, ROI for your customer service activities. For every dollar you spend on customer service, what value do you get back? Check out the resources attached to this lesson for some deeper discussion on how to do ROI for customer service. And customer effort, it's a measure that correlates well with customer loyalty.
3:33
Reduce the effort to get help, make your customers more likely to stick with you. There are some links below on that, too. So to wrap it all up, a quick recap, over the three modules, we have covered why customer service matters, what great service means, and then how to build and scale a customer service team for your business. But if there's only one message that you should take away from this course, let it be this, exceptional customer service is not just the job of your support staff.
3:58
It takes a customer-centric company to create reliably good experiences. If your website's not up to scratch, if your selling the wrong products, if the customer complaints, never make it past support, no matter how good your customer service staff are, they only ever are playing catch up. Building that customer focus in your company from the start enables everybody involved to give a level of service that will help you really stand out from your competition.
4:23
By taking this course, by starting to think about really investing in customer service, you're already far ahead of the average seller. So thank you, again, for watching, and I wish you the very best of luck in building a bigger business. [MUSIC PLAYING]
