A customer service report can provide insight into your customer service strategy. Learn how to use these reports to your advantage here.
Are your customers happy? How do you know?
When you stop to think about those questions, it can create fear, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You can track customer satisfaction through several different methodologies, and one of them revolves around customer service.
You can create customer service reports that offer powerful insights into how your company handles customer service issues. Those insights can help you answer the original question.
A customer service report offers a quick way to look at metrics related to customer service. The goal of the report is to provide detailed data that can help you measure the successes or failures of your team. You might also see it referred to as customer reporting.
Simply put, it’s a way to gauge how your customer service team is performing. Typically, your reports will show you how many customer service requests are handled by your team, how long each request takes, and how many entries are created by each customer.
There can be a lot of data piled into a report, but when you break it down, it allows you to see your strengths and weaknesses while tracking progress as you try to make changes to your business.
One of the best ways to understand customer service reporting is to explore the common types of reports.
Below, you’ll find 5 different types of reports. This list isn't exhaustive, but it's a strong starting point.
Requests received is as simple as it sounds. It tells you how many customer service requests agents receive over a given period of time. However, it doesn't provide insight into customer expectations, the customer service team's performance, or customer interactions. Those come later.
You'll want to look at daily, weekly, and monthly totals. For very busy departments, look at hourly reports to get an idea of how to staff your team.
Knowing how many requests you receive doesn’t tell you how successful the team is in resolving requests (other customer service metrics will help), but it reveals how busy your team is. This can help you gauge how you're doing with general customer satisfaction and customer churn (fewer requests are usually better).
It also allows you to identify resources and tools you need to devote to customer service in order to keep up with demand and inform your customer service strategy.
The requests closed report is also straightforward. Once again, you can do daily, weekly, or monthly reports. This number tells you how much customer service agents accomplish, but when you compare it to the first metric (requests received), you can learn a lot more.
If there’s a large disparity between the 2 numbers, it's vital to investigate your customer service resolution process. It could be that resolution takes too long. Even worse, it may mean many customer service requests go unresolved.
Once you get a good look at request volume, you'll want to explore response times. The best way to view this is usually through averages. You can review the total average response time, but you can also categorize requests into different groups and look at the averages for each type.
The average response time is usually the most important, but there are instances where you might want a triage setup. Consider a tech company as an example.
Tech support often involves password resets. Typically, you don’t want to keep a customer waiting for a password reset because it can negatively affect customer satisfaction. Still, this type of request might not be the most important.
On the other hand, you may have a customer who was injured while using a product. That’s an urgent issue that might jump the response queue and get priority.
If you use a triage system, it makes sense to break the average times into different categories. If there's no triage, then you'll evaluate one single metric.
Handle time is a bit different. While the response time refers to how long it takes to begin the path to resolution, handle time is the total time it takes for the case to close. Response times might vary according to a triage model, but handle times depend on how difficult it is to resolve the problem.
The previous 2 examples can help you understand this concept better.
If customers can create accounts on your website, they'll also use a password. Password reset requests usually don't take long and aren't difficult to resolve. As you would expect, the average handle time for this category is lower than many others.
On the other hand, requests that involve personal injuries are delicate and require more time. It wouldn’t make sense to expect the average handle time in this category to match password resets.
The last metric on the list is uniquely insightful. With the other metrics, you know how many requests you get and how well they're handled. The messages per owner tells you something different.
First, it helps explain how much of your resources are devoted to a single customer. You might have a simple, far-reaching problem with a product or service if you receive many requests with very few messages per owner.
If you have fewer total requests and a very high messages per owner rate, you may have a more challenging issue (or issues) emerging. This might merit a closer look from a team of specialists.
The point is that this metric helps you understand how your resources are allocated and can help you find ways to free up resources to make your customer service more effective and efficient moving forward.
After seeing the common types of reports and what they can tell you, you may wonder if customer service reporting is worth it.
To answer this, we have to think about how the reports generate value and why they're important.
The answers to this are intertwined.
First, the reports let you see the current state of your customer service. You can learn how much work your support team has to process, how they're processing that work, how effective they are, and how their service quality compares to other departments.
Second, the metrics can give you insight into customer satisfaction.
If many requests take a long time to resolve, that can undermine customer satisfaction and loyalty. Fixing the customer service problem can directly impact your revenue.
At the same time, these reports provide numerical data and insight into how much resources should be invested in customer service. How much value can you expect to generate from additional customer service personnel or tools? Are the investments worth it?
Your reports may help you answer these questions and more.
The next thing to understand is how to actually create the report. For this, you need 2 things: customer service data tracking and presentation.
In many cases, you can combine those ideas with good software, but let’s look at them individually for now.
Think about the metrics we discussed previously. How do you generate the numbers for those reports? When a client creates a support ticket, that should be something you can track with CRM (customer relationship management) software. Whether the ticket is made via a mobile device or computer is also relevant. You can use a CRM to count the incident and generate your data.
You can do this with any metric. In other words, the key to creating the reports requires digital event creation in your customer service process.
But, how do you make a report out of the data?
For that, you want to use presentation software. At this point, you have data, so you want to use software that allows you to make the data easy to read. It’s all about charts and graphs.
There's no short explanation of charts and graphs, but any software you invest in to track customer service data should also be able to help you with the presentation.
Several automated reporting tools can help you collect and manage data while you sit back and focus on other tasks. When you need a report, you can quickly create one with the information the system holds.
Customer service reports can help you learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of your customer experience strategy. As a result, you can improve processes to ensure clients continue to have a positive perception of your business. This is also beneficial for increasing brand loyalty.
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