As technology converges and start-ups grow, businesses and consumers have more choices than ever. Smart executives know that the customer experience is what is going to win in today’s crowded marketplace. 

But you’ve got this, right? You’ve mapped the customer journey and you’ve analyzed the customer experience (CX). Customer support is the pride and joy of your company. Your execs think that customers are thrilled with your service. 

But are they?

According to a recent survey commissioned by Insightly and conducted by Zogby Analytics, there is a disconnect between what consumers say and what companies believe. 

Only 6% of consumers say a company’s customer support always exceeds expectations but 35% of business decision makers believe that their company always exceeds customers’ expectations.

Ouch.

There’s a CX disconnect  

Maybe your CX team isn’t killing it? Check out these stats:

About a third of Americans (31%) would rather wait in line at the DMV than try to resolve an issue with a company or service. They would also learn a TikTok dance with their kid (18%), get a tooth pulled (14%), or stay with their in-laws for a month (10%).

Why would anyone choose these awful alternatives to simply placing a call with customer service? According to the study, they say they fear being ignored (30%), having to repeat oneself to multiple departments (30%) and length of time to get the issue identified (27%).

How does your customer support process work? Would your customers ever feel ignored during the process, get stuck in ‘a phone tree of frustration,’ or spend an unreasonable amount of time on the phone? 

When was the last time you tested it? Listened to calls? Sent in a social media message to see the response?

It’s always a good time to examine your processes and look for incremental improvements. 

Appreciating your customer support team

Don’t ever underestimate what it takes to answer support calls. You need a deep understanding of your product and your customers, plus a whole lot of empathy. These team members start each day knowing that every time they pick up a call, they may be dealing with an irate person. 

Business decision makers on the same Insightly survey don’t seem to have the personality to perform the functions that their support teams do. 

For example, 44 percent of business decision makers surveyed said they’d rather enter data in a spreadsheet than deal with a call from an angry customer, while three in 10 said they would do almost anything other than take an angry call, like sit on an 8-hour Zoom call (13%) or sit next to a crying baby on a cross-country flight (15%).

How do we show this team how awesome they truly are? First off, put National Customer Service Week on your calendar. It’s typically the first week in October. Use this as an opportunity to recognize your team’s hard work. But don’t wait for a special occasion; check in on the team and ensure they have the leadership, tools, and bandwidth to make every engagement a successful one. 

CX shows up on the bottom line

There is good news here, too. Unlike the external threats to your business like emerging competitors, market forces, economic downturns and the like, customer experience is something you fully control.

Data from the same study reveals just how powerful this can be.

When customers are unhappy, businesses worry that they will complain to customer service (23%), complain on social media (56%) or, even worse, choose a different provider (21%).

However, when happy, American consumers are most likely to tell all their friends (27%), tell the company (25%), write a comment on review sites (23%) and post about it on social media (15%).

These actions should sound familiar since they are all characteristics of brand advocates. According to Entrepreneur.com, brand advocates are super fans and brand loyalists who engage with the brand because they truly love it and will take action if asked.

If you reframe calls and outreach to customer service as an opportunity to create brand advocates, you start a cycle that fills the top of your funnel with new leads. 

Feed the top of the funnel with successful CX

After seeing these statistics, what are some action steps that leaders like you can take today? 

• Examine closed tickets. Don’t just read them. Look at the time stamps. Look at the length of the calls. Listen to the calls if possible. How can each interaction be studied and improved the next time?
• Reframe your mindset on support. Every time the phone rings or an email is submitted is an opportunity to create a positive experience and produce a brand advocate. Think about the things that people said they would rather do than talk to you (e.g. learning a TikTok dance), and then elevate their experience by delighting them.
• Some people will never be happy. Ensure you have ‘no blame culture’ from the top. Frame those negative customer interactions as learning experiences for the team without blaming team members, product, sales, etc.
• Encourage leadership to personally call random customers regularly and check-in to see how they are doing. They could potentially intercept a problem before it snowballs, but they will also gain an understanding of what’s going on daily on the front lines.

Manage relationships with Insightly Service

Your customer service team needs a powerful tool to meet the needs of your customer base. Wouldn’t it be ideal if your tool for customer service was part of the same suite of products as your CRM and marketing automation platform? So the sales, marketing and customer service teams are aligned on a single, powerful platform?

Built on Insightly’s platform, Insightly Service is a customer service and support ticketing product designed to work seamlessly across the business applications that companies are already using. With Insightly Service, critical data is shared across departments and in real-time, so that all customer-facing teams are aligned and empowered to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success.  

Insightly Service can be bundled with the entire Insightly suite of customer relationship management applications and is also available for purchase as a standalone customer service and support product. 

Get a demo of Insightly Service today.

The post CX survey shows companies overestimate customer support satisfaction appeared first on Insightly.

In addition to solving customer problems, customer service professionals need to deliver a positive customer experience in everything they do, whether it’s offering technical support, sharing additional information to help customers maximize their investment in your product, or simply listening with empathy.

Customer service professionals need to perform to the best of their abilities for the good of the customer and the company. 

But how can you evaluate whether or not your customer service is effective? The answer is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which can give you critical insights into your customer service team’s performance and provide you with actionable and practical paths towards success.

Tracking customer service KPIs is essential

There’s no debate between the benefits of intuition vs. data. Data-based decision making uses quantitative measuring to make crucial business decisions. 

KPIs empower you to better understand the health and performance of your customer service practices so you can guide your team in reaching your company’s benchmarks and goals. 

The benefits of KPIs include:

• Sharpening business insights
• Improving customer satisfaction 
• Measuring efficiency 
• Strengthening customer retention 

When you focus on customer service-based KPIs, you can achieve results quicker and gain critical insights into buyer interactions. You will also help your customer support team identify and gauge customer loyalty and customer retention patterns. 

How to choose the right customer service KPIs

When you identify and measure your customer service teams with KPIs, you commit to helping your company efficiently analyze and monitor the entire customer journey. 

Let’s look at the best metrics and types of customer support KPIs you can use to accurately measure customer service practices. 

Customer satisfaction KPIs

Customer satisfaction KPIs measure how your customers feel about your company and the quality of their interactions with you and your customer service team. 

The following are the best KPIs to track and measure how satisfied your customers are with your company and their customer journey: 

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The NPS is a metric that helps you measure customer enthusiasm, satisfaction, and customer loyalty. You can calculate the Net Promoter Score by asking customers to rate their likelihood of recommending your company, product, or service on a scale of 1 to 10. 

Why it matters: 

You can use the NPS to determine business growth opportunities. A high NPS shows a healthy relationship with your customers, while a low one indicates there are issues with customer relationships that you need to address. 

How it helps: 

While the NPS alone isn’t enough to paint a complete picture of your customer’s loyalty, it allows you to quantify the data over time to create internal benchmarks. 

You can also use it to rally your employees around creating an enthusiastic customer base because your teams can see the impact they have on customers.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The Customer Satisfaction Score is a metric that measures customer satisfaction levels throughout the customer experience. 

This data comes from customer feedback surveys that ask questions about their satisfaction with your product, service, or brand as a whole. The CSAT score can range from 0 to 100%. 

Why it matters: 

The CSAT is a strong indicator of your customer loyalty and overall customer experience because it tells you how happy your customers are with your company. 

It also helps you identify the steps your need to take to increase your retention rates and improve your brand’s reputation. 

How it helps: 

The KPI gives your company a cumulative view of customer support to deliver goods and services for you to compare and contrast over an extended period. 

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score allows service organizations to analyze how easy it is for customers to interact with your customer support team to resolve their issues. 

The CES asks one question and then scores the responses on a numeric scale with one being the highest level of disagreement. 

Why it matters: 

Boosting customer loyalty is essential, but there is a more significant opportunity by keeping customers from becoming disloyal. 

Disloyal or dissatisfied customers are much more likely to negatively impact your company in a variety of ways.

How it helps: 

The CES analyzes the amount of effort your customers have to exert during their interactions with your service agents. 

You can use this metric to gauge and adjust your processes to achieve a highly satisfactory and low-effort experience for your customers.

KPIs for Customer Service Performance: Teams and Individual Agents 

Your customer support team is the face of your company in post-sale interactions. They are often the first ones to interact with new customers, which means their performance will reflect on your business and reputation. 

Companies need to make sure their customer service experience is second to none. And to do this, customer support teams need access to key metrics that will help them identify areas of strength and improvement. 

4. First Response Time (FRT)

Also known as Time to First Response, this metric measures the minutes, hours, or days it takes from the moment a customer submits a support ticket to when customer service reps respond. 

To find your average time to first response, identify the total number of tickets within a selected timeframe and divide the total time it took your team to send the first response. 

Why it matters: 

Your Time to First Response plays a critical role in enhancing customer satisfaction levels. Your clients want a prompt response to their support requests so your team’s performance makes a big impact. 

How it helps: 

Identifying your Time to First Response will help you set a baseline for support ticket response times. In addition, it can help you develop a timeframe benchmark for your customer service reps. 

5. Average Handle Time (AHT)

The Average Handle Time identifies the time it takes for a customer to finish their interaction with your customer support team from when they start the call to when they hang up. This KPI includes hold time, talk time, and any other idle time during the call. 

To find the AHT, add the total hold time, talk time, and after-call task time. Next, divide that time by the number of calls your team received during that time frame. 

Why it matters: 

Once customers start the resolution process, they want it to go as quickly as possible. No one likes to wait for a solution to their issue. The longer your customers have to wait for a resolution, the more likely they are to become dissatisfied and end the call. 

A discontented customer can make a negative impact on your business, so it’s crucial to identify and put practices in place to avoid long resolution times. 

How it helps: 

Finding your Average Handle Time will allow you to compare it with your industry benchmark times to ensure you are on par with your competitors. 

It also provides a benchmark to strive towards, which will motivate your customer service team to meet their call time goals. 

6. Ticket Resolution Rate (TRR)

The Ticket Resolution Rate is a metric that compares the number of tickets your representative or team receives with the number of tickets they resolve within a particular time. 

To determine the TRR, divide the number of tickets your team solves by the number of tickets they receive. Next, multiply that number by 100 to identify the resolution rate. 

Why it matters: 

Ticket resolution rates are subjective to your industry; however, every business knows they need to solve any customer issues quickly and efficiently. 

Your customers need to know you care about their time and problems, so offering a quick ticket turnaround time dramatically improves the customer experience.

How it helps: 

Identifying your ticket resolution rate will help you compare your company with others in your industry and assist your customer support team with identifying the areas they need to improve. 

7. First Contact Resolution Rate (FCR) 

The FCR is an essential customer service metric because it measures how many customer contacts your team resolves within a single interaction with the customer. 

If your company resolves the customer issue on the first contact, your customers won’t need to call again or require the representative to follow up. Improving your FCR increases customer satisfaction and improves customer loyalty. 

Why it matters: 

There are many ways to measure the performance of your contact center so it’s important to find the right metrics. 

To boost customer satisfaction, your customer support representatives need to view customer contacts as an escalation and have a strong desire to deliver prompt, effective resolutions. 

How it helps: 

The FCR is a straightforward way for you to experience your support team’s interactions through your customer’s perspective.

Call centers that honor the reality of customer contact allows them to surpass the expectations and requirements of the customer, which leads to a more satisfying customer service experience. 

8. Identify your top performing agents

When you combine multiple KPIs, like conversion rates, customer satisfaction surveys, and call response times, and sort them by the representative, you’ll be able to identify which of your customer support reps are performing well and which are not. 

Why it matters: 

Your representatives want you to recognize their accomplishments. They also want to clearly understand the expectations of their roles. 

How it helps: 

Positive reinforcement by rewarding top-performing representatives will ensure adequate staffing and encourage employee engagement. 

Operational customer service KPIs

Operational KPIs measure company efficiency in your day-to-day operations. These key metrics help identify which strategies during daily operations need improvement and which are working well. 

Here are the most important customer service KPIs to ensure your support operations are running smoothly. 

9. Tickets by channel

This metric identifies how many tickets your customers generate through various channels, such as your website, phone calls, or chatbots. 

Why it matters: 

Whether you operate through customer service apps or live call centers, knowing where your customers are looking for assistance is crucial. 

To meet the needs of your customers, you must be sure to have the optimal resourcing in the right places. 

How it helps: 

Seeing where your tickets are coming from will help you target where you need to focus and improve your customer service efforts. 

10. Tickets by customer

Use this metric to determine if any of your customers need to repeatedly reach out to your customer service team. 

Having to keep contacting support will lead to customer dissatisfaction and lead to a reduction in customer retention. 

Why it matters: 

If a customer generates multiple help tickets, you’ll know there is a problem to pinpoint and solve as soon as possible to avoid customer frustration. 

How it helps: 

Using this metric can help you determine which product or service is causing the customer to generate multiple tickets. Then you can set actionable goals to resolve the issue and stop multiple help tickets.

11. Tickets by category

Sorting tickets by category allows you to see which areas of your business result in higher amounts of customer inquiries or tickets. 

Knowing where to focus on improvements can help you improve the customer experience and raise customer retention rates. 

Why it matters: 

Much like sorting tickets by the customer, identifying how many tickets your customers are generating per category shows you the key areas you need to address. 

Faster resolution for customers will raise customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

How it helps: 

Automating the ticket categorization process can make it easier for your customer support agents to handle tickets by routing rules and knowledge sets.

How your customer service efforts impact higher level metrics and KPIs 

Every customer touchpoint is an opportunity to build your customer relationships and increase profits. Since your representatives are the first point of contact for questions and concerns, they play a significant role in your user experience (UX). 

Sometimes, customer service efforts can impact higher-level metrics and KPIs. Surprisingly, the following KPIs and metrics that may not seem connected to customer service can act as a litmus test for whether or not your customer service makes a positive impact on your customers.

12. Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

Customer Retention Rate (CRR) measures the number of customers a business retains over a specific period. 

To identify your CRR, begin with the number of customers at the end of a given period and subtract it from the number of new customers during that same period. Next, divide this number by the number of customers at the beginning of that period and multiply it by 100. 

Why it matters: 

Onboarding new customers improves your overall brand, but retaining them for the long haul shows you have cultivated a solid relationship of trust and loyalty. 

How it helps: 

Tracking your customer retention and churn rates will help you build unique, long-lasting relationships with your clients. It also demonstrates they trust you and your brand gives them value. 

13. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Some businesses abbreviate this KPI as CLTV or LTV. It identifies the net profit your company has contributed to the entire relationship lifecycle of a specific customer. 

Essentially, this metric lets you know how much it costs you to retain a client as well as the revenue they bring to your business. To calculate your CLV, subtract the lifetime customer costs from the lifetime customer revenue.

Why it matters: 

Successful businesses use CLV to guide their business decisions and identify where to focus their marketing efforts. This gives them valuable insight into which customer segments are the most profitable. 

How it helps:

Knowing which customers are bringing in the most revenue will help your customer service team focus on maintaining positive relationships with those clients. 

14. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

The MRR is a KPI that identifies the revenue a company can accurately predict it receives every month. It’s the amount of income existing customers generate. 

Calculate the MRR growth metric by adding the additional revenue from current clients that occurred within a given month. 

Why it matters: 

This metric is essential to understanding your overall business cash flow and profitability. Your KPI can help you monitor your business profits and make changes before your revenue sinks too low. 

How it helps:

Tracking MRR and MRR growth will give you a better idea of how your company is performing right now with current customers. It may shed light on customer service practices that are working well and some that may need improvement. 

15. Contract Renewal Rate (CRR) 

Your company’s contract renewal rate is the percentage of customers that renew their contracts or subscriptions with your business. This metric shows you how many customers are satisfied enough to extend their relationship with your business. 

Determine your contract renewal rate by dividing the number of contract renewals by the number of eligible members within a specific period. 

Why it matters:

Happy customers will renew their contracts. If your contract renewal rate is low or dips, it could indicate that you need to make some changes to your customer service procedures. 

How it helps:

Evaluating this metric regularly will help alert you to potential problems so you can start taking action. If renewal rates are trending down, this will alert you to look at a number of areas across your business, including product performance, service offerings, support, or customer success practices.

Build your customer service KPI dashboard with Insightly

The front-line interactions of your customer service professionals can determine whether or not your clients stick with your business or move on to a competitor. 

Evaluating critical KPIs is an efficient way to provide them with a clearer focus and ensure your strategy is on the right track. These metrics provide critical insights into the health of your business and point out areas you may need to improve. 

To help your customer service team go above and beyond, they need the benefits of a high-quality CRM. The KPIs they offer will allow you to access essential client interactional information and data to drive innovations and improvements. 

Test out all the great features Insightly CRM offers with a free trial. 

The post Use these KPIs to optimize your customer service efforts appeared first on Insightly.

Customer success and customer service are fundamental components in your organization’s ability to deliver great experiences and create long-lasting relationships.  More specifically, these two teams are at the very center of your organization’s efforts to drive adoption, retention, and ultimately, customer loyalty. And according to the Harvard Business Review, companies with a focus on loyalty grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers.

Businesses are increasingly differentiating themselves from the competition by providing seamless continuity across customer success and customer service, and ensuring that their employees are able to demonstrate expertise, insights, and empathy in every single customer interaction.  

Customer service and customer success are aligned in that both teams are responsible for creating and maintaining customer loyalty. But there are differences in each team’s remit. Understanding the differences and how they can complement each other is essential for minimizing churn and maximizing revenue growth.

Identifying the differences between customer success and customer service

Customer service and customer success together constitute the perfect marriage of reactive and proactive customer engagement. 

Customer service is primarily reactive. Teams respond in the moment, as quickly as possible, to customer tickets, concerns, and complaints. There might be a technical issue to solve, or a bug to identify and report to engineering. Customers might also reach out to the support team to address learning needs, or alleviate confusion about how to leverage and optimize product feature sets and functionality.  Customer service also has the opportunity, by listening with intention, to identify and create sales opportunities based on unique customer requirements and growth strategies. 

Customer success is primarily proactive, with a focus on the strategic, long-term view. CS teams typically focus first on the onboarding process to encourage engagement and adoption, and drive retention. They continue to build for the future by leading customers through quarterly business reviews to analyze performance and create long-term, strategic mutual success plans to optimize the investment that customers have made in your product or service. 

Exploring the intersection of customer success and customer service

Even though these roles are clearly differentiated, ultimately, they need each other to optimize performance and orchestrate successful customer outcomes.  They become exponentially more valuable to your organization through cross-functional engagement and alignment. The primary way to achieve that is through enhanced communication across teams, facilitated by a unified customer data platform. 

To explore this concept in more detail, we spoke with Zeke Silva, Insightly’s Senior Director of Client Services, and Luke Via, Insightly’s Senior Director of Customer Success. They share key takeaways on their partnership in delivering exceptional customer experiences at Insightly. 

Securing a complete view of the customer

“Our collaboration has centered on breaking down barriers around securing a complete view of the customer. CS maps success to alignment with customers. If my team isn’t armed with detailed customer service ticket information to round out that full view, there’s a risk that we look out of touch,” said Via.  

Via and Silva’s teams are empowered to capture actionable customer insights through Insightly’s unified platform. “With data across sales, marketing, and service on the same platform, we’re armed with a complete view of our customers,” adds Silva. “My team works primarily in the Service app to capture current customer status, and that information is available to Luke’s team, and the rest of the organization, immediately–it’s completely frictionless, which enhances our ability to be successful across functional groups.”

Maximizing performance and creating impact

This seamless flow of information across the platform has made a tremendous impact in their teams’ ability to drive great experiences. 

According to Via, “With a consolidated platform view, we’re all able to do a much better job of anticipating and over delivering on outcomes. We’ve got the right information to guide conversations more effectively and with more impact. It also helps our teams move with greater velocity. We don’t need to schedule meetings to find out more about current customer status; the data is right there in the platform and anyone can access it quickly and efficiently. It’s made a huge difference during COVID, with remote teams. Ultimately, having access to support, marketing, and sales data in a single platform, and easily accessible to everyone, has freed up time for our teams and enhanced their productivity. It’s empowered my team to be much more strategic in their account interactions, which creates value for us and our customers.”

Silva adds, “With a unified view of our customers, we can all pick up the relationship right where it’s at. My team uses the data they collect in the Service app to quickly react and troubleshoot on behalf of customers, and Luke’s team uses that same information, along with data in the CRM, to facilitate proactive, strategic conversations leading to transformational growth.”

Empower your teams with unified data

A unified data platform is at the nexus of creating loyalty, building long-term customer relationships and growing your business.  Customer success and customer service teams, along with the rest of your organization, require unified data to optimize communication, create visibility through the entire customer lifecycle, and maximize productivity.  Empower your teams with the data they need to capitalize on insights and deliver exceptional experiences. 

Key takeaways:

• Remote work makes it even more imperative for cross-functional teams to have access to the tools and systems they need to support their customers
• The tools and processes you create should make it easier, not harder, for your teams to do their jobs, and ultimately, create impact for customers.  Think about ways to deliver information quickly and easily, with fewer meetings. 
• Optimize knowledge transfer, communication, and outcomes through a unified data platform across sales, marketing, and service for a full view to the customer relationship
• Make sure everyone has access to the same information so that, as Silva says, you can all “pick up the relationship right where it’s at.”

If you’re just getting started, be sure to check out the other articles in this four-part series: 

• Part 1: 5 customer service skills to build great customer relationships
• Part 2: 4 customer service challenges (and how to solve them)
• Part 3: 4 tips for creating a customer-centric experience

Interested in learning more about how you can align your customer service and customer success teams?  Chat with us.

The post Customer service + success: designed to drive exceptional experiences appeared first on Insightly.

Many companies talk about being “customer-centric.” In reality, too few invest the time and effort to provide truly customer-centric experiences.

How can you push your organization to become more customer-centric?

Recently, I sat down with Luke Via, Senior Director of Customer Success at Insightly, to discuss best practices for enabling customer-centric experiences. Here are four important tips to consider.

1. Align around providing the best possible customer experience

Modern buying cycles are complex. Gone are the days of exclusively relying on sales to handle every customer interaction. Marketing, customer success and support, product development, finance, and a myriad of other stakeholders play important roles in the customer experience.

Before you can align your teams and individual contributors around an ideal experience, you need alignment at the top. “Being customer-centric requires alignment among all of a company’s executives and agreement to focus on the best possible customer experience,” says Luke Via, Senior Director of Customer Success at Insightly. “From marketing to selling to supporting customers with great products and services, leaders must consciously seek new ways to improve.”

Open and honest communication is the best way to cultivate alignment among leaders. Start an internal conversation and begin collecting opportunities for improvement. Explore how your company can maximize value across every stage of the customer experience—and with the highest level of satisfaction. Which parts of the customer experience are contributing to (or eroding) satisfaction?

Tip: Frontline staff, who regularly interact with your customers, can be an excellent source of ideas. Find ways to include them in the conversation, too!

2. Define your ideal customer journey

Once leadership agrees that the customer experience is a top priority, it’s time to develop a shared vision of the ideal pre-sale and post-sale experience. “Leaders need to gain a clear understanding of a customer’s desired outcome,” says Luke. “It’s about knowing where customers are today, why they arrived at your solution, and the resources they’re willing to spend to achieve their goals.”

Journey mapping is one approach for obtaining a shared vision of the customer experience. As pointed out in 3 ways to use CRM data in building customer journeys, mapping your current journeys involves three basic steps:

Define your ICPs and personas. Gain a clear understanding of the types of companies and people you serve. What do they have in common? Organizing customers by ICP (ideal customer profile) and persona will make it easier to think in terms of an “ideal” experience.

Gather data to identify similar journeys. How do your ICPs and personas advance through the customer journey? Do they go through common steps when purchasing or renewing? Use data from your CRM or other business systems to avoid flawed assumptions.

Build your customer journey map. Your journey map could be a simple spreadsheet or a complex diagram. Either way, the end product should be backed by real-world data and easily accessible by leadership. Which parts of the journey are less than ideal for the customer? What steps can be taken to provide a more customer-centric experience?

Frequently reevaluating your journeys through the eyes of the customer will help you close the gap between the status quo and the ideal. And, according to Luke, it’s also an activity that can have a measurable impact on your bottom line. “If you provide the best experience possible, customers are more likely to stay,” says Luke. “So, if you’re looking to grow, you should be customer-focused through the entire journey.”

3. Get the right data, metrics, and tools

How do you know if you’re providing a customer-centric experience? Collecting the right data and monitoring the right metrics is key for establishing a baseline and tracking progress. Which data and metrics are most important? The answer may vary from company to company, but here are a few to consider:

CSAT is the measurement of a customer’s satisfaction with a particular interaction. A sustained uptick in aggregated CSAT can mean that customers are generally happier with their experiences.

Contraction, or churn, measures the number of customers who take their business elsewhere during a period of time. Negative experiences lead to elevated levels of contraction, while positive experiences reduce churn. So, it stands to reason that lower contraction indicates an improvement in the customer experience.

Average time spent per support ticket measures how long agents take to resolve customer issues. Customers prefer shorter wait times to longer ones, so reducing time per ticket is bound to make customers happier in the long run.

Aligning all of your customer interactions—across sales, support, and marketing—into one system like Insightly can make it easier to track and report on key metrics. Eliminating data silos reduces complexity and makes it easier to develop a comprehensive view of the customer experience.

4. Establish an effective feedback loop

Internal data and metrics are no substitute for direct customer feedback. Unfortunately, many companies struggle to implement a scalable feedback loop. “Effective companies do more than ask for feedback,” says Luke. “They use feedback to initiate meaningful internal discussions and ultimately communicate it back to their customer base.”

For example, Insightly’s founder and CEO, Anthony Smith, regularly hosts product release webinars to share the company’s latest innovations—innovations that stem largely from customer feedback. These webinars not only serve as an effective vehicle for feature announcements, but they also help customers feel more connected—and committed—to the Insightly experience. “Celebrating victories is huge because people want to feel like they’re being heard,” says Luke. “Forming an emotional connection further solidifies the customer’s connection to the company.”

Time for a customer-centric approach?

Customers have never had more choices at their disposal. In an increasingly commoditized marketplace, the companies that deliver the best experiences will win.

Stay tuned for additional customer service tips. Next time, we’ll explore the relationship between customer success and the customer experience.

The post 4 tips for creating a customer-centric experience appeared first on Insightly.

This is part 2 of a customer service blog series based on conversations with members of Insightly’s client services and customer success teams.

In part 1 of this customer service blog series, we discussed five important skills for building great relationships. Continuing on with my discussion with Zeke Silva, Sr. Director Client Services at Insightly, today we’ll discuss a few challenging situations in customer service—and how agents can apply their skills to overcome them.

1. Getting to the root of the problem

“It just doesn’t work.”

If you’ve spent any time in customer service, you’ve probably heard customers make general statements like this. Deciphering what the customer actually means can sometimes be more challenging than fixing the problem at hand. Is your product or service actually broken, or does the customer simply not understand how to make something work? Is this a support issue, or does it have more to do with training?

The customer’s level of technical expertise is a key factor to keep in mind when trying to get to the root of the problem. “You have to be very careful with word choice, especially if you’re working with someone who isn’t tech-savvy or familiar with your product,” says Zeke Silva, Sr. Director Client Services at Insightly. Newbies aren’t the only ones who can cause challenging situations for customer service agents. “On the flip side, you also have to be ready to help that super-technical customer, too,” says Zeke.

Try this: Avoid jumping straight into the weeds and making incorrect assumptions. According to Silva, a better approach starts with asking general questions. “You have to treat it like a funnel and slowly—or quickly—work towards more pointed questions,” says Zeke.

2. Dealing with seasonal fluctuations and other growing pains

Answering dozens of similar support tickets can lead to a numbing effect that quickly erodes an agent’s ability to empathize with customers. That’s especially true when your company experiences a period of rapid hypergrowth or a seasonal uptick in demand. Focusing too much on average handle time, time to resolution, and other performance metrics at the expense of the customer journey will only compound the problem.

Experienced customer service teams seek a balanced approach that focuses on efficiency and effectiveness without losing touch of the bigger picture. For Insightly’s support team, this means reminding agents that each new quarter is an opportunity to serve an entirely new batch of customers—many of whom may have similar questions. “Having agents ready for that prepares them to be in the right mindset for responding appropriately,” says Zeke. “Preparing the team for an influx enables them to offer a great experience, especially for brand new customers who may be switching from a competitor.”

Try this: Re-examine your company’s revenue patterns and identify periods that tend to yield large influxes of new customers or support requests. Proactively communicate this to your customer service team and make sure they’re amped up to handle the surge.

3. Advocating for the customer when things break

Not every customer service issue can be resolved with a simple email, phone call, or screen share. Sometimes things break and require a considerable amount of effort to identify, replicate, capture, and fix the underlying problem.

Training front-line support staff to diagnose and escalate tickets is the first step. However, escalating a ticket will do no good unless there is a reliable infrastructure in place to deal with bugs and other unexpected problems. “You don’t just throw a baseball at someone and hope they’re ready to catch it,” says Zeke. “They’ve got to be ready to receive it, and the same is true for dealing with escalated tickets.”

Solving complex problems may require input from multiple stakeholders across customer service, operations, engineering, and other teams. And, that’s no small task in a business environment that’s still dominated by remote work. It’s difficult to be an effective advocate for the customer when information is spread across multiple inboxes, threads, and systems. That’s why having all of your essential customer data in one, easily accessible location is particularly important.

Try this: Audit your existing ticket escalation workflow and look for ways to improve it. Where does information tend to get lost or overlooked? How does communication break down across departments? How can you consolidate overlapping systems and make it easier to advocate for your customers?

4. Holding other teams accountable

Streamlining ticket escalations, reducing overlapping systems, and eliminating data silos is a major step forward, but doing so doesn’t guarantee accountability from the rest of your company. To ensure timely resolution for your customers, it’s best to establish cross-departmental service-level agreements (SLAs) that are backed by leaders from each team.

Tying internal SLAs to customer-facing SLAs is another strategy for creating urgency throughout the organization. For example, Insightly users on the Ultimate success plan can expect to receive a response within one hour of sending an email. “That builds confidence with customers that they’ll get a first touch within a certain amount of time,” says Zeke. Once an issue has been validated, Insightly’s engineering team sequences the work based on previously agreed to SLAs, which gives the support team—and, in turn, the end user—a specific time frame for achieving a satisfactory outcome.

Keeping the lines of communication open is essential for avoiding misunderstandings. Insightly’s support team also sends a bi-weekly email to engineering, which contains additional context for prioritizing customer requests. “We’ve created multiple avenues to prioritize and elevate,” says Zeke.

Try this: Formalize the working relationship between your customer-facing and back-office teams, perhaps through one or more SLAs. Gain buy-in from leaders from across the organization and look for ways to tie agreements back to customer expectations.

Next up, tips for becoming even more customer-centric

Stay tuned for the next article in this series. We’ll be moving beyond customer service issues and focusing our attention on proactive strategies that ensure a customer-centric experience.

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