Customer Support Professional Blog

Customer service is not about metrics, it is about customers.

– Chuck Dennis

There’s a common wisdom that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. This is mostly correct. However you should be careful not to get into trap of measuring and not to let benchmarks replace real things.

When you start measuring your performance in some area the results can be very unexpected.
For example you can find out that 30% of customers are not satisfied with your live chat support service quality. That’s very important information as it can give you a notice that you have serious trouble and should pay closer attention to it. But much more important is what you will do with this information. How would you use it? Which objectives would you set for your customer support team after such a finding?

And here’s the moustrap a lot of people, especially senior managers, fall into very often. They forget about real things (customer problems) and start operating abstract numbers. This is good for your calculus class but not so good when there’re living customers behind the numbers waiting for your urgent help.

“Hey, we have 30% of our clients not satisfied with our service quality! - Mr. Senior Manager says with a frown - We need to lower this to 20% by the end of this quarter and to 10% by the end of the year”. Here it is! The mouse (customer service department) is caught. Since now they are not working on individual customer problem resolution. They work on Overall Statistics Improvement. No more customers. Just numbers and benchmarks. Pitty.

The objective is wrong which leads to wrong priorities, wrong attitude and unwanted results.

This doesn’t mean that measurement is bad. It is a very good and useful thing. But as a customer service executive you should set correct customer-related goals. You should face each individual problem of those 30% and understand why those people are not satisfied. Then you should try to help each guy thus improving your service.

So don’t forget about people when measuring performance.