In this article, we’ll check out what profitability analysis means, why you should track it, and the best strategies to maximize the profitability of your business.

What is customer profitability analysis

First off, customer profitability is the measure of profit a customer is expected to generate through the course of doing business with you. From a managerial perspective, customer profitability is the alternative to product line profitability, which only denotes profit from individual products.

According to the concept of CPA, any customer that generates a revenue stream larger than the expenses spent on acquisition, sales and service is a profitable customer. Analyzing customer profitability tells businesses where their revenue is coming from, and which customers are drawing it down.

Difference between LTV and Customer Profitability

While LTV also measures a customer’s prospective value over the whole period of engaging with a business, it’s not the same as profitability analysis.

The key difference between LTV and CPA are,

Revenue vs. Profit; LTV measures the overall revenue a customer generates over the course of doing business with you. On the other hand, CPA measures the exact profit a customer is going to provide.

Touchpoints; While LTV measures key touchpoints to assess the value, it doesn’t cover all touch points. CPA is different because it takes into account all the touchpoints involved, from lead marketing to after-sales. 

These key differences make CPA a much more actionable metric compared to LTV.

Why undertake profitability analysis

Conducting profitability analysis helps businesses make informed decisions. This, in part, has a huge impact on the overall business strategy. The most concrete benefits of analyzing customer profitability are,

Downsize cost factors

A great deal in CPA is segmenting customers based on the profit they are generating. You can easily segment groups based on whether they are generating an acceptable amount of revenue against the investment you’re making for them.

It is worth mentioning that it’s okay to provide service to segments that generate low returns. However, it’s also important to monitor segments that have a negative profit index. The best course is to cut off the service to these segments because they are incurring losses even when they are doing business with you.

Marketing to the right segment

Similar to segmenting based on profit, CPA lets you segment customers based on the investment it takes to acquire them. It could easily be that the segment you’re considering as the target could be the segment that brings in the least profit. Whereas a segment that is neglected is bringing in more profit.

CPA makes drawing these lines easier and lets you drive your resources to the most effective segment. In most cases, that means you can redirect your marketing effort and resources to segments that generate the most revenue.

Customized retention strategy

Once the profit segments are established, companies can focus on their retention strategies for each group. The highest profitability customers are the place to invest in, and companies can afford to give a service of the highest quality. CPA also lets you strategize on a micro level by answering questions such as,

• What customer engagement model to choose from? 
• How many CSMs are required for a specific group of customers? 

Through CPA, you can get a clear margin of how much you can spend on building customer loyalty. It’s easier to design loyalty programs based on the profit margin for a customer segment.

Customer Profitability Formula

To calculate CPA, you need concise and reliable data.  The formula goes as follows,

CPA = (Annual profit) x (no. of years customer stays with the company)

To calculate, you’ll need the annual profit per customer, which is calculated as follows,

Annual profit = (Total revenue generated in a year) – (Total expenses incurred in a year)

When calculating the total revenue, you need to gather data from the following sources,

Cost of customer service

Expenses in loyalty perks; Costs you incur from offering discounts and other loyalty programs.

Operational cost; Operations cost per customer

Maintaining a customer support and service team; Cost incurred to maintain a dedicated support and service team.

Recurring revenue

Upgrades to the higher plans; Increased revenue from moving to higher plans.

Cross-buying relevant products; Partial increase in revenue from cross/upsell campaigns.

The Steps in Customer Profitability Analysis

In this section, we’ll cover what you need to run a CPA and how you can analyze it for actionable decision making

Evaluate Customer costs

Customer costs are all expenses you have to spend to continue doing business with a customer. This is one of the fundamental data points you need to conduct a customer profitability analysis. Apart from the cost of production, Gross and Net sales, customers incur additional costs, such as,

Marketing costs; Also known as customer acquisition costs or CAC.

Shipping costs; Applicable for online businesses, with return policies.

Social Media touchpoint; To keep your social channels accessible at all times for customers.

Service and Support; All costs incurred when serving a single interaction with your support/service team. Also known as, customer support costs.

Define your customer groups

We’ve already covered an example of segmenting customers based on profitability. But you need to have the segments in your customer pool to make the CPA concise. Even if you don’t have access to big data sets about your customers, you can always go back to the basics.

You segment your customers based on demographic and geographic data to get started. However, the most effective customer segmentation comes from an RFM analysis. 

RFM analysis is basically a weighted Recency, Frequency, and Monetary analysis of your customers. This means you can create segments based on,

• How recently they purchased from you
• How frequently they’ve purchased from you
• How much they’ve spent

Segmenting customers based on these factors help to identify who are your most valuable customers and where to invest the most.

Find the data

When conducting a customer profitability analysis, the most challenging part is conjuring the data needed to make the analysis accurate. As the formula suggests, underestimating certain costs can significantly alter the results of your analysis.

One thing’s for sure; you’ll need to get in touch with most of the departments in your business to gather all the relevant data.

For instance, customer support costs and acquisition costs, although metrics themselves are based on hard data such as cost per ticket, average handling time, and more. To get this data effectively, it’s good to invest in tools that offer detailed reports.

Applying the customer profitability analysis model

Lastly, it’s time to develop a model for your CPA and plug in the data you got from your business. For this, we’ll use an example,

Say you’ve got two segments of customers. Segment A is individual clients as such in B2C models. Segment B is SMEs that fall on the B2B side of things. For this example, consider the following data

Seg A revenue/purchase = $120

Seg B revenue/purchase = $95

From this, it’s clear Segment A is more profitable. But that changes when you take into account the profitability analysis.

As per the CPA formula, you need to account for hidden costs. Say those costs are as follows,

When you plug in these values in the CPA formula, you get something like this.

This chart makes it clear that although Segment A is generating more revenue, they are actually costing you more money than Segment B.

Based on this, you can effectively decide where you should invest more and where it’s time to stop.

Wrapping Up

The most obvious drawback of Customer Profitability Analysis or CPA is the dependence on a limited time frame. Because of that, customer profitability is calculated using new methods that determine an LTV rather than just the sales within a quarter.

It’s intuitive to think of these metrics as complementary to each other instead of alternatives. We hope the benefits you can get by conducting CPA are clearer for you guys. Let us know what else you’d like to measure to evaluate your business success.

Until next time, happy serving!

The post Customer Profitability Analysis: Definition, Formula, Benefits appeared first on Fluent Support.

Companies that insist on being customer focused have to track average handling times for the simple purpose of evaluating the support team’s efforts. In this article, we’re going to look at what average handling time is, why it’s important, and how you can measure it to improve your customer support strategies.

What does AHT mean

Average handle time or AHT is basically the time it takes to resolve a customer support interaction from start to finish. This includes the time to submit the first response, time on hold, and the time it takes to follow up and close the conversation.

This measure can vary significantly depending on the channel you’re using. Emails have a lesser average handling time compared to calls. We’ll elaborate on the ideal wait times for each channel later on. 

Why it’s important to measure AHT?

Measuring average handling time is important because it is easily quantifiable, as in you can measure and evaluate it with reliable accuracy to compare aspects such as,

Speed

Speed is an essential part of providing excellent customer support. Measuring average handling time means you can effectively evaluate how fast your customers are getting responses from your support team. In customer support reducing waiting times is essential for customer satisfaction. Average handling time gives a quantifiable measure of how fast your support team is.

Productivity

Average handling time also measures the productivity of your whole team. While fast responses are good, you still need to make sure your team is functioning at optimum capacity to handle your customer queries. The more productive your team is, the less handling time is needed.

Proficiency

To balance out speed and productivity at a sustainable level, your support agents need to be proficient at their job. A support agent can respond and resolve support tickets only when they can solve the issue. This largely depends on the difficulty of the customer’s requests and the capability of the agent. Usually, low average handle times mean a highly productive team with good proficiency in their tasks.

Formula to calculate average handling time

As we’ve mentioned, average handling time includes the time to submit the first response, processing time, holding time, and following up. While it’s true, not every channel has the same figures for these times. So, we’ll show you how to calculate the average handling time for the most common channels customers use.

Calls

Calls are the most elaborate among customer support channels and have the highest expected average handling times. That’s mostly because only calls involve more moving parts than other channels. To calculate your average handling time for calls, the equation is,

So, if you’re team spent 1000 min on the first response, 300 min hold time, and 700 min following up on 1500 calls you’re average handling time will be,

AHT = (1000+300+7000)/1500 = 5.53 min/call

Tickets and Emails

Unlike calls, the average handling time for tickets and emails is easier to calculate. Mainly because emails and tickets do not entail holding times. To calculate all you need is the total time it took to resolve an email or ticket. So the equation for calculating AHT for emails is,

So if your support team resolves 500 emails or 600 tickets within 100 hours, your average handling time will be,

AHT = 100*60/500 = 12 min/email

Or,

AHT = 100*60/600 = 10 min/ticket

Chat

Similar to emails and tickets, the average handling time for chat-based support interactions is easy. You just have to take into account the time to resolve a chat interaction. So the equation is,

So, if your team has spent 72 hours resolving 1200 chat requests, your team’s average handling time will be,

AHT = 72*60/1200 = 3.3 min/chat

What is a good average handle time

In light of what we’ve covered so far, it’s obvious that every industry will not have similar average handling times. This is due to a number of factors such as,

• Complexity of issues; Technical and digital products usually entail more complex issues and require more time to effectively solve.
• Type of requests; Handling time also depends on the requests customers make. A simple pre-sale question will not take as much time to resolve as a refund request will.
• Proficiency; Whether handling complex or simple requests, AHT by large part depends on the company’s philosophy towards customer support in general. Your company’s policies for customer-facing jobs have a huge impact on AHT and similar metrics.

From TalkDesks 2021 KPI Benchmark we can see that standard average handling times for retail and consumer goods companies are at 3:29 min, for the manufacturing sector that time is 4:13 min.

Sources: Zendesk, HubSpot, GetMindful

3 tips to reduce average handling time

As promised, now we can take a look at how you can reduce this average handling time for your support team. The following strategies can significantly reduce average handling times,

Proactive support

Proactive customer support is a strategy to anticipate your customer’s needs before they ask for a solution. This strategy can not only improve your average handling time but also contributes to customer retention and reduces churn rate. 

Proactive support also saves time for the customer support agents because they are always prepared for the customer’s expectations.

One important aspect of proactive support is that it reduces the overall number of queries that are submitted to your support team. This reduces the net total time your team had to spend on resolving customer complaints.

Resources and Knowledge base

Similar to the proactive strategy, having well-organized resources and a knowledge base can also reduce average handling times. It reduces the number of tickets that are submitted to your customer support team on average. 

Customers expect companies to have resources properly arranged so they can get ahead of issues without having to wait for an agent. Alongside reducing waiting times for trivial troubleshooting questions it can reduce the hassle for your agents too. Being able to find the solution on the fly can significantly reduce the time needed to resolve a customer request. 

Efficient helpdesk

A key part of your support agents’ speed depends on the customer support help desk you provide them with. Fast refresh rates and easy-to-navigate dashboards are important to keep the process simple and flowing. Page load times can contribute to holding times that ultimately increase your average handling time. 

An effective help desk plugin can reduce these losses and increase your team’s overall efficiency. When choosing the best help desk for your business you should evaluate the redundancies in user experience for smoother handling.

Factors for a good support ticketing system are,

• Fast loading times
• Integrated dashboard
• Agent activity tracking
• Automation, etc.

Wrapping up

Average handling time is a very crucial metric to measure your customer support team. It’s one of the most important KPIs for support managers. Companies that track average handling time and optimize to reduce it are way more likely to succeed. This is in part due to higher satisfaction rates that improve retention and reduces churn.

To improve your support team’s AHT it is not enough to just focus on the agent. It’s also crucial to focus on the resources and tools you provide for them to use.

Because more often than not an agent’s response can only be as fast as your system allows it to be. Hope you can implement average handling times in your quarterly evaluation. 

Until next time, happy serving!

The post What is Average Handling Time in Customer Support? appeared first on Fluent Support.

Keeping customers satisfied is especially important now because 50% of customers are willing to switch after a single bad service experience. 

Yes, that’s right, 50%. A churn rate of this proportion can bring the largest of companies to their knees. Whether you fall into the SME or Fortune 500 group, customer satisfaction is something you can’t compromise.

Not only does it help retain existing customers, but it also offers a chance to build loyalty which is the gold standard of marketing success. Going the extra mile to satisfy customers can make the difference between you and your competitors.

In this article, we’ll be looking at what is customer satisfaction, why it’s important, and how you can achieve it. 

Customer satisfaction definition

In broad terms, customer satisfaction is the state of a customer where they are pleased with their decision to do business with you. 

In other words, customer satisfaction is the degree of success your business has at meeting customer expectations. Based on this, you might think customer satisfaction is easily obtainable with an awesome product, right? 

Unsurprisingly, the rabbit hole goes way deeper.

A product can be very good at its job and still fail to satisfy the target customers. This can be due to not meeting customers’ specific needs, misleading resources, lacking the knowledge of practical use cases, etc.

From the definition of customer satisfaction, it seems a little subjective, right?

Well, it kind of is. However, the methods to reliably satisfy customers are far more objective.

Customer satisfaction importance

Measuring customer satisfaction has always been difficult due to its subjective nature. Hence it takes a lot of thought and creativity to quantify the level of satisfaction of individual customers. Before we get to how that works, here are 3 good reasons why customer satisfaction is important.

Customer satisfaction increases retention

Satisfied customers are usually the last ones to leave you hanging. Customers have a tendency to choose familiarity over the hassle of moving to a new product/ecosystem. So if you’re product is as good as your competitors, what will be the defining factor?

Service and ease of use, of course! 

The better service you provide post-sales, the easier it is to make these customers stick with you. This is also known as customer retention, and it’s by far the most crucial reason to invest in customer satisfaction.

Mostly because higher retention rates mean you have less churn. Having less churn means you can ease off the gas for new customer acquisition. So when you invest in customer satisfaction you’re actually reducing pressure on your customer acquisition process.

Customer satisfaction promotes loyalty

When you’ve retained a customer long enough, they evolve into this new Pokemon called “loyalists”.

Jokes aside, customers tend to develop a genuine bond with a brand that they’ve been with for a significant amount of time.

That being said, there is an element of trust in it for this to work. Customers buying from you aren’t always going to become loyal advocates. It’s about developing a sense of uncompromised reliability. When you go the extra mile for your customers, it converts into satisfaction.

Only when you’ve been there for your customer through uncertainty and satisfied them will you develop trust. Trust is what turns customers into advocates. All of this starts with customer satisfaction and that is what you should aim for in the long run.

Customer satisfaction helps you to offer more value

When you focus your efforts on satisfying customers, it translates into the whole philosophy of your business. By measuring customer satisfaction, you can determine the gaps in your efforts.

If your customers say your product is missing key features, it’s probably more true than your development team will like to admit. In that case, it’s crucial to revisit the drawing board and rethink the USP of your product.

Similarly, if a customer finds your support system dated or hard to use, it’s important to make changes to it. The same is true for customers not finding adequate resources about your product.

As a whole, customer satisfaction paints a picture of the likelihood of leaving your business and what might cause it. If you ask us, that’s enough to evaluate your efforts and find gaps to improve. 

How to measure customer satisfaction

As we said, measuring satisfaction is a very subjective matter. So to make it quantifiable, businesses have come up with the comprehensive metrics that we’re going to talk about.            

CSAT

CSAT is basically a survey to assess the satisfaction level. This usually comprises a numerical representation of the degree of satisfaction a customer gets from your business. While the language can vary, the end result is usually a rating of how good or bad customer service is.

Aside from the rating of your business, you can add data points on individual aspects of your product/service. For instance, how easy it is to make a purchase, get customer support, use a particular feature, etc.

NPS

NPS or Net promoter score is one of the oldest metrics to measure satisfaction. This survey usually determines how likely is a customer to recommend your business to others. Companies have diversified a lot on this survey, which is why NPS has become a standard practice to determine satisfaction rates.

NPS allows you to dissect your customer pool into promoters, detractors, and neutrals. That is, promoters are the ones who will recommend you to friends and family, while detractors will advise against it. Having a high promoter ratio is the ideal outcome.

In contrast, having a large neutral portion means your marketing team is doing well, but your service and support team isn’t achieving the gold standard. NPS data helps you find those gaps and improve accordingly.

CES

Lastly, we have a customer effort score or CES. This measures the degree of ease in interacting with your business. Consider a business where customers have to file a complex form and wait for approval before buying a product. It may work for limited edition collectibles or expensive schools. It definitely will not work for consumer goods and software. 

As a business, making things easy for your customer is crucial. So in order to evaluate the satisfaction a customer is getting with your brand, CES is a good tell.

CES surveys include questions such as,

• Rate the support interaction you had with us?
• Did you find the solution in our resources?
• Was the submission guideline helpful?

These questions focus on the effort a customer made to do business with you. A low score CES score means your business is very friendly and cooperative with customers, which means more satisfied customers.

On the other hand, a high CES means doing business with you is tough, which means it’s going to be very difficult to satisfy customers.

How to create survey forms?

You’re probably wondering how to build survey forms for your customer satisfaction surveys. Well, we’ve used Fluent Forms for the purpose of this blog. It’s one of the most robust form builders available on WordPress. Even if you don’t have Fluent Forms Pro installed, you can still create basic forms to get preliminary data using the free version.

The best part is you can store and reuse form templates, so creating a survey form is just a few clicks away. Make sure to check out this awesome form builder for all your customer survey needs.

How to satisfy customers?

Now that you know how to measure satisfaction among customers we can get to how you can improve these satisfaction scores.

Meet expectations

As a business, you need to be aware of the expectations a customer might have from you. That’s to say what the current trend is, what your competitors have set as standard, what your product is going to be actually used for, etc.

Figuring out what your customers expect from you is half the story. Afterward, you have to bring your product vision in line with what your customers expect. We know it’s easier said than done, but that’s the cost of satisfying customers in this era.

Deliver on promises

People hate being misled. So if your marketing team is making promises your product or service team can’t keep, it’s going to cause a lot of losses. Make sure your marketing strategy is in line with what your product is made to deliver. For instance, if you say you have the cheapest essay writers, then you have to live up to it. Otherwise, you’ll end up looking like a scam.

Only when you deliver on your promises with minimum hassle will you satisfy a customer. That satisfaction will be of use when you keep doing this consistently. There are no momentary lapses in business. Customers will always remember the worst experience, and being misled or lied to is something they will never let you live down.

Go the extra mile

Do you want to know the other thing customers remember? Going out of your way to offer them a good experience. On this note, I’ll share a personal story to make the point.

On my last vacation, I stayed at three places at varying price points. While all were standard services at their respective price range, only one of them stood out from the rest of my experience. 

None of the places had a drug store nearby. I had to ask for directions at each place. Two of them just said there is no store nearby. Only after prying did they tell me where the nearest store was and how to get there.

The 3rd place I stayed in won my heart. They asked what I needed, and told me to wait a minute. Then they called up one of their staff who was already out, to bring in my meds. I paid for the medication and the service they offered was free of charge.

It’s no surprise which one of them I gave a 5-star rating after leaving. That’s enough said for going the extra mile. If you do it, it will show and pay off. 

Develop a mindset

Satisfaction isn’t a one-time thing. It’s about always having the mindset to satisfy. That doesn’t come easily. You need to train your service and support team to have a mindset to satisfy. Customer support and service teams should be prepared to find and utilize the opportunities. To develop this it’s essential to train them in this regard.

Wrapping up

Customer satisfaction is the most reliable way of retaining paying customers and building a base of new ones. Now that you’ve got a clear idea of how your business decisions can affect satisfaction scores, it’s time for you to develop your own unique approach.

Measuring satisfaction is most important, so make sure to use the satisfaction metrics as often as possible. Emails are a great way to do this. For instance, you could send a follow-up email to check how the customers felt about their tickets.

There are a lot more ways to ensure customer satisfaction. However, by far the best way is to create a mindset that prioritizes customer satisfaction.

Until next time, happy serving!

The post Customer Satisfaction Explained: What it Does and How to Measure it? appeared first on Fluent Support.

Building a long-lasting relationship with your existing customer is vital to growing your earnings. Sometimes it is inevitable that customers will stop doing business with you no matter what you do. Customer churn is when a customer stops using your products or services over a certain period. And how many customers you lose over a quarter from your existing customer base can tell your customer churn rate.

Every business should focus on reducing customer churn rates. But how can you do it while acquiring new customers? In this post, you will learn about customer churn and 7 ways to reduce churn rates.

What is customer churn rate?

Customer churn is a business growth metric analyzed when customers leave any business over time. This metric shows how your business is doing quarter by quarter.

Customer churn rate shows the percentage of customers your business lost in a certain period. You can calculate the customer churn rate by dividing the number of customers you lost over a quarter by the number of customers you started with.

Customer churn, also known as customer attrition, helps you determine how much revenue your business lost in a certain period. It is the opposite of customer retention.

Let’s say when you started your quarter, you had 1000 customers. At the end of the quarter 200 of your customer decided to not buy anything from you anymore. Then your churn rate would be 20% for that quarter.

Why does customer churn matter?

Churn rate is a critical metric every business should consider analyzing. If you have a high churn rate, you are losing money every quarter. You should start investigating what is happening and lower the churn rate.

Churn rates matter. Businesses lose 1.6 trillion per year due to customer churn. You see, you can spend less money to keep your existing customers, but it costs five times more to acquire new customers. According to Harvard Business School reports, an increase in customer retention rates of 5% can increase by 25% to 95% in profits.

This is why businesses should start improving their churn rate and focus on keeping their existing customers happy. The lower your churn rate is, the more revenue you can expect over a certain period.

How to calculate customer churn rate?

Calculating customer churn rate is easy. All you have to found the data of how many customers you had when you started a quarter and how many customers you lost in that quarter. Now you can calculate your churn rate by dividing the lost customers by the total number of customers you had at the beginning of the period. Multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage.

Here is the formula:

Churn Rate = (Number of customers lost / Total number of customers at the start of quarter) x 100

What causes customer churn?

Every business is different. Customers can lose interest in your products and services for various reasons. Here are some common factors that trigger customer churn in every business.

1. Poor Product/Market Fit

When you market your business to a specific category, you should do the business analysis properly. Every business should know who their customer is and their product fit. If you fail to do business analysis, you will lose money advertising your business to the wrong customer demographic. Your customer churn will be higher and it will double your marketing cost. 

If your sales team is trying to fill up a quota, it will also hurt your business. Customers will churn high when they realize the product does not fit them. It may be beneficial for you in the short term, but a high customer churn rate will cost you much in the long term.

2. Terrible User Experience

Sometimes terrible user experience with your products could be the reason for your high churn rates. If your product has a bad design, buggy software, and poor user interface, it may be hard for risers to stick around.

3. Bad Customer Experience

Customer satisfaction plays a huge role in customer retention. Everything connected to your business, like your marketing content copy, social media channels, customer support agent’s behavior, and customer service, can influence a customer’s decision. If they have a negative experience, they will lose interest in your product or service. Over time they will churn anyway.

4. Price 

This is the most common churn reason you will find in any business. No matter what price you offer, if a customer finds out your competitors are offering a much better price, they will churn. Then how can you avoid this inevitable loss?

Establish value right when a customer onboard and educate your users, so they feel your products and service are worth the cost.

How to reduce customer churn rate?

You can’t make everyone happy. Customer churn is a common thing in business. You can not make customer churn go to zero. But there are a few ways businesses can reduce customer churn rates. Here are ways to follow:

1. Target the right demographic

When launching products or services, every business should do a business analysis to find out what their market fit is, their demographics, and whom they are selling. It is an essential process of starting a business. Because if you do it right, your churn rate will be low from the start.

Always prefer customers who want to invest in long-term quality, not free or cheap products. Those are the customers who appreciate your business’s value and will stick with you for a long time.

2. Provide excellent customer service

Bad customer service is another reason for high customer churn rates. Offer great customer service to reduce churn rate. Sometimes users will get confused about your website or where to get the correct information. This will make them frustrated and the customer will churn. Use AI tools and chatbots to level up the customer experience. Give your customer instant solutions when needed, and reduce churn immediately. Go 24-hour customer support if it’s needed.

Research shows that 58% of customers will never use any service or products from a company after one negative experience. Poor customer service can leave this kind of effective impression on most people.

Pay attention to the complaints submitted by users. Train your support agents properly and give them the freedom to ensure customer satisfaction no matter what. Put empathic people in your team and empower them. Most times, listening to your dissatisfied customers can make them more loyal in the long run.

Find out your most loyal customer and offer them additional service beyond your business. It will not only make them stay, but they will also more likely recommend your business to your friends and family. Surprise and delight your champion customers from time to time. This will make them feel closer to your business and boost your organic marketing through word of mouth.

Always ask for customer feedback to reduce customer frustration. This way, you can identify issues before they arrive and solve them. Customer frustration is another huge reason why customer churn happens. The more you can minus frustration from your user onboarding and use process will lower customer churn rates exceptionally.

3. Analyze why churn is happening

No matter what you do, customer churn will happen in your business. But it would be best if you did not wait for it to occur. Use data to fight churn and learn from it. Whenever your customers leave, find out the reason for their leaving. 

Analyze why customers leave. Find out the key data to predict customer dissatisfaction and customer happiness reasons. Use customer service metrics to collect customer support data. Analyze time frames, days, and weeks. Figure out when churn occurs and what kind of contact can reduce that. 

Try to collect feedback from your lost customers. Use that information to improve your customer service to provide excellent customer satisfaction. Use your analyzed data to identify the customer’s risk churn, contact them, and re-engage with them with incentives and offers to solve their problem. Communicating with customers at the right moment and tone can help them retain and lower churn rates.

4. Educate your customers

Find out your most profitable customers. Then train them to get the most out of your business. Leaning into your best customers will be more effective because they will most likely respond and re-engage with you.

Educating your customers about your products and service will naturally increase customer retention and reduce churn. Customers will more likely use your product if there are enough tutorials, guides, and documentation available.

Keep your customer onboarding process straightforward. Please do not confuse your customers by offering a free trial and then charging their credit cards. This will leave the customer churn rate high. Avoid these tactics and be honest with your users from the start.

5. Offer incentives

Show your customers that you value their time and money. Offer incentives like free promo, extended subscriptions, or free account manager. This will help you retain existing customers and reduce the churn rate.

Determine when to offer an incentive-based on the customer’s timeline. Analyze your customer feedback rigorously to determine which customers need in line with your incentive offer. Offer customer managers to your valuable customers. Give them a way to connect with your business anytime they face any problem. Your customer manager will take care of their problems, give them tips and help them when necessary. 

You can also offer long-term contact to your valuable customers as an incentive. This will help you retain your profitable customer and reduce churn.

6. Create a community 

Connect your customers with your brand by building a community around them. People love to feel connected with things they use and like to belong in groups with like-minded people.

Use a community to gather your most loyal customers and make them feel part of your brand. Your marketing team can use the community to help others, answer community questions and educate your customers with day-to-day engagement.

The community will help put your brand in front of your customers’ minds. Customers will stay loyal and this will reduce any churn along the way.

7. Increase customer engagement

Engage with your customer frequently. Remember, customers, are often bombarded with various promotions and information all the time. It is your responsibility to connect with your target customer using valuable content marketing tactics.

Engage with your customers in all channels. Keep providing value by offering deals, promotions, step-by-step tutorials, in-depth guides, videos, and information through blogs. The main goal of your content marketing effort should be building a relationship with your customers day by day. Keep an eye on social media and join the conversation where it happens. Don’t miss out on trends to engage with your users.

Focus on customer satisfaction and retention rates; use one-to-one communication to increase customer engagement. Segment customers into groups and define your most loyal customers for maximum engagement. Use automation and funnels in emails to make most of your email subscribers. Always keep collecting feedback from customers to measure your service strategy on the go. Strategic & planned customer engagement can lower your customer churn significantly.

Moving on

Your business should prioritize retaining existing customers as much as you want new customers. That is why analyzing customer churn and reducing churn rate is necessary for any business. Nurturing existing customers creates loyal customers that can help you grow and scale your business. Profits and revenue will come by default. 

Reducing customer churn rate has no magic formula available. Every business is unique and has its characteristics. Follow these tips, analyze your business churn rigorously, and take suitable actions on the go. Provide great customer service, treat your customers better and they will surely stick with you for a long time.

What tips are you going to implement from the above list? Are you using any new tactics?

Please share with us; comment below!

The post 7 Actionable Tips to Reduce Customer Churn Rate appeared first on Fluent Support.

How can business measure their customer service? Here comes customer service metrics. A company’s customer service metrics indicate how well it meets its customers’ needs. You can use metrics to track where you are, what is going well with your customers, and where you need to improve.

If you are wondering what metrics you should follow, take a seat back. This post will cover the benefits of customer service and ten metrics you should follow for positive success.

Why should you measure your customer service?

Business runs marketing funnels, advertise, and can have great sales. But if you are not measuring your efforts, you don’t know if it impacts your business or how it impacts. If you don’t evaluate your customer service, you can’t tell if it is working or not, and what you have to improve or not.

Customer service metrics help you understand overall customer happiness around your brand and answer if they will buy more from you, refer you, and how your support team is performing. It also helps you understand your customer service objectives and make them suitable for your business.

Customer experience data will tell you exactly where you need improvement, how your agents can perform better, and help you make an informed decision. Learning how to measure customer service will help you understand what is working well for you, so you can invest more in those areas to double the results. This will help your business to gain loyal customers in the long run.

10 metrics to measure customer service performance

Here are some top customer service metrics you should implement in your day-to-day work. Collect the data and analyze it as recommended below.

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Businesses should find out how satisfied their customer is with their customer support. CSAT, customer satisfaction score helps you identify that. On a 1-10 scale, you can directly ask your users how satisfied they are after chatting or resolving a ticket with your customer service agent.

If that is below 5, you should evaluate your customer support team and determine why your customers are not satisfied with your customer service agents. Ask straightforward questions like:

• How much are you satisfied with our products/service?
• How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the service you received?
• How would you rate the agent interaction?

Make the survey process easy to participate in and collect answers to get a good CSAT score.

2. Average Response Time (ART)

The ideal data to collect is between a customer starting a chat or opening a ticket and an agent responding. Customers expect a fast reply when they contact your support team for a solution. It is a vital customer support metric you should continuously monitor. If the average response time is high, there is a problem with how your agents handle users. Get right to the root and solve it.

Use automation and chatbots to answer basic or frequently asked questions in a customer’s chat or tickets. Proper use of automation can help you build better customer service. Build a better knowledge base and F.A.Q to point to customers when necessary.

3. First Contact Resolution (FCR)

If you want to measure your customer support agent’s efficiency in resolving tickets on the first interaction with your customers, then try to collect data about first contact resolution. It gives you data about how many customer problems are resolved in the first chat, call, or ticket. You can also collect data about how many average replies it takes for a customer to solve their problem.

In other words, it shows how capable your agents are of understanding and resolving an issue at the first contact point. If you follow FCR data, you will know your agent’s capacity and knowledge. You can use these service metrics for individual performance in the agent performance report. High FCR also means your support team is performing well above the line. If it is low, your support agents need proper training and resources to resolve customer issues.

4. Number of Touchpoints

While collecting first contact resolution data, it’s essential to know how many times a customer had to go through returning interaction to solve the same problem. Users are not happy to get transferred from agent to agent for a solution. The issue should be resolved on the first contact.

Find out:

How often have users had to go through various channels for the same problem?

How many agents had to attend to the issue to resolve it?

If your agent-to-agent transfer is high, then there is a problem in your internal support system. Make your support solution easy and ensure your agents follow the required instructions. The low number of touchpoints is a positive indicator of your customer service performance.

5. Customer Effort Score (CES)

This is a new kind of customer support metric you should consider monitoring. It helps you determine how much effort a customer can dedicate to solving their issue with your support team. The more effort users have to spend, the more frustration they will endure.

Your goal should reduce the effort and make it easy for your customer to do business with you. The easier it is, the more loyal customer you will cultivate in the long term. To calculate customer effort score:

Ask your customers for an answer that can be answered with numerical information.

Find out the average score.

Do not evaluate CES as individual data but combine your data with other metrics for actionable results.

6. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

We already wrote about the Net Promoter Score in our blogs. It is a high-performing customer service metric you can monitor to find out your loyal customers. You can measure how your customer service performance affects your customers with NPS.

You can ask the question:  “How likely are you going to refer this business and our product/service to others?” and gather answers on a 0-10 scale. Put the average answer and find out the NPS of your brand. The higher the answer is, the more likely these customers will become your repeat customers and positively affect your business.

If the answer is low, find out the issues making your customers unhappy. Start working to fix the problems.

7. Customer Service Abandonment Rates

How many times does a customer have to call or get a ticket reply for a solution?

Many times customers will abandon customer service due to frustrating waiting times. Find out the answer from the volume of your daily tickets and waiting time. Divide the number of abandoned tickets from a particular time with that time’s total tickets. You will get your abandonment rates. If that is high, you should talk with your support about what is happening.

You should hire agents immediately if there are not enough. If automation or AI chatbots can help you fine-tune your first contact point, then do so. The goal should be to lower your customer service abandonment rates. If customers are unhappy with your services, they won’t come back.

8. Customer Churn & Retention Rate

These metrics are opposite to one another, yet both are related. When customers are happy with your customer service team, they are more likely to come back again. This shows how many customers you gain after a certain period.

Customer churn rates tell you how many customers you lost after a while. If your customers are unhappy with your customer support team, more likely they are not going to make a second purchase from your business.

These two metrics are hard to measure because you have to collect data within a considerable time frame. You can calculate the retention rate by subtracting the number of new customers from the total at the end of a period. After that, divide the number of customers you retained by the total number of customers at the beginning of the period. This is your customer retention rate.

To calculate the churn rate, subtract the number of lost customers from the total at the end of a period. Divide the number by the total number of customers at the beginning of the period.

9. Customer Ticket Request Volume

You want your customer to contact you about their problems. But if ticket request volume goes high at a specific time, you should immediately investigate what is happening. Sometimes broken features, bugs, or complicated processes can trigger mass tickets. This can turn into a support ticket backlog.

Always pay attention after any product release or feature update. Compare support ticket volume by day, week, and month. Optimize your service, product, or website for efficient use. Train your support agents to make them ready to handle mass tickets if the issue arrives.

10. Average ticket handling time

Find out how much time your agents are taking to handle a single ticket. If they are taking a shorter time, they are efficiently doing their job. But do not take these metrics seriously alone; consider a few other metrics because sometimes agents can rush into resolving tickets without thinking about customer satisfaction. Use the data with the overall customer satisfaction score to determine if it is worth it.

Conclusion

Review your customer service and compare it to the above-mentioned customer service metrics. Using various KPIs and metrics, assess your customer service performance and take action when you see poor customer service. Do not follow metrics blindly. Take action to improve your customer service and track metrics to see how you’re doing.

The post 10 Ways to Measure Customer Service appeared first on Fluent Support.

Then you can more precisely target your customers with this information. Putting the customer first can lead to growth for your business. But what types of customer data should you collect, which data is super valuable and how can you collect those data?

The answers to these questions are easy to find when you know where to look. In this post, you will learn about various types of customer support data, why it is crucial to collect them and how to collect them.

Types of customer support data

There are many types of customer support data. These are divided into two groups:

• Structured data: Data you can visualize and present to others.

• Unstructured data: Data could not be visualized and presented, connected with people’s sentiments.

Most types of data we use in our day-to-day are structured data. Structured data can be measured and can have a direct impact on business. You can collect information through surveys, and put that in a graph or diagram. These data are structured.

But when you ask your customers how they feel about your product, the answer is unstructured data. You can’t put that in diagrams. Both of these data are important for your business. They help you determine your business’s customer service objectives.

Here are 8 best customer support data you should collect from your customer support team:

1. First Contact Resolution

Find out how your agents handle the customers who opened support tickets for the first time. “First Impression” always matters. If your support agents are not handling your first-time customers properly, it will harm your business. An unsatisfied customer will be clueless about their problem’s solution. Most of the time, they will not return to repurchase anything. Your re-targeting will be worthless. And they may share this negative experience with others.

When first-time customers are satisfied with your support team, they will most likely buy more from your business and tell others about their positive experience with your business. Try to collect data on everyday support queries – 

• How many first-time customers opened a ticket?
• How many replies did the support agent make to resolve the ticket?
• Average handling time on these tickets?
• What is the response from users after the ticket survey?

You can use your findings based on your industry. If the answers are negative, then you should take time to talk with your customer support team. Help them train them to better at service and answer customers.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Try to find out how satisfied they are with your support agent’s answer and the support they received. CSAT, short for ‘Customer Satisfaction Score,’ can help you in this situation.

A customer satisfaction score is a widely used method to determine performance indicators for customer service and overall product quality. You can define customer satisfaction in percentages from 0% to 100%.

You can use one or two questions to ask your customers some options and collect this information. 

• Are you satisfied with the support agent?
• Are you satisfied with overall support?
• Do you find the solution to your problem?

You will find various examples on the net, or you can use free templates available using a simple google search. Use them in your business, collect data and analyze your CSAT regularly. Always try to collect CSAT after a resolved ticket. You can also collect CSAT after a refund or cancel the subscription or a product return. 

Use this formula to get a percentage score:

(Number of satisfied customers/ Number of survey responses) x 100 = % of satisfied customers

3. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net promoter score is one type of customer satisfaction metric. It is about how many of your customers are ready to promote your products and service. NPS collects data about referrals. Loyal customers are a business’s brand promoters. The more loyal customers you have, the more new customers you can reach. 

Your target should be to gain as much as a promoter using your outstanding support. This will help you expand your market and sell more to new users. Cultivate a relationship with your customers through your support team. Your support team knows your user’s pain points. They are the ideal data point to communicate and collect information. Identify your repeat customers and ask them questions-

How likely is it that you would recommend our Product/Service to a friend or colleague?

You can offer options ranging from 0 to 10 to rate the answer. Collect the answer and analyze the promoter, neutral, or Detractors (below five ratings). You can track everything from business to products/services with Net Promoter Score. Create an NPC survey associated with your industry for better results. 

NPC is a strong indicator. It will provide you with an overall look at your business and help to improve or monitor products and services. The more data you can collect and analyze along with your NPS score, the better you can determine where to improve your customer experience. It will help you prioritize your improvements to make the most significant impact.

4. Customer Happiness Metrics

A strong product, a sound customer support strategy, and a team are not enough sometimes. You have to analyze and use your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to determine how to reduce churn and optimize the customer experience.

This information will help you understand customers’ emotions and how they feel about your business. You can also monitor how customer sentiment is changing at a certain point in time. You can set your future marketing funnels and content basis on that customer sentiment. This will give you better conversion and ultimate customer satisfaction. 

Every business should collect customer happiness metrics from time to time. They are easy to collect. Train your support team to do the work and ask the right question for the correct answer.

5. Support Ticket Data

Support ticket data is the most structured data you should prioritize collecting and analyzing. You will get an overall idea of your customer happiness from your support ticket data. You should collect these data for future analysis:

• Ticket volume on a certain period (on the day, week, month basis)
• Tickets around certain topics
• Time to resolution
• Last ticket submitted by the customer
• First ticket submitted by the customer
• Average handling time on new customers
• First touchpoint activity
• Number of tickets by customer

You can use automation to collect and organize support ticket data to save time. Use this information to find out customer churn reasons and churn risk (more on that later). Use efficient customer support tools which help you collect these data without any headache.

Create an instant trigger with your automation on selected events like when a new customer opens a ticket, then selected instructions are shown in ‘Internal Note’ on how to handle the customers for new assigned agents. There are limitless possibilities with support automation available. 

6. Customer Churn Reason

When a customer opts out of your service or applies for a refund, you should collect the reason for their decision. The business has a high priority to getting repeat customers and cultivating loyal customers for the long run.

That’s why every business must find out customer churn reasons. Find out-

• Why do users are optin out of your service?
• Why are customers applying for a refund?
• What problem are they facing, so they have to open support tickets?

Try to collect as much structured data about why a customer is optin out. Ask a simple question like these, keep the process easy for your customer, and analyze how to reduce future churn risk.

7. Customer Churn Risk

Businesses should analyze customer happiness metrics to evaluate customer churn risk. Find out churn reasons and solve the issues one at a time. Use data to determine which customer has a high churn risk and have specific instructions for your support team for the specific demographics.

8. Customer Happiness Reason

Like finding out a customer’s frustration reason, find out why a customer is happy with your business. Collect positive reviews from your repetitive customers. Ask questions like –

• Why do they love your brand?
• Why do they use your service or product?
• Why do they choose to promote you?
• How to improve the product or service?

Customers with high NPC scores are the ideal profile to collect this information. Learn about your customer’s emotions, and transfer that information unstructured to structure data through accurate survey questions and simple processes. Implement your learning into new customer interactions and hostile customers to improve relations, reduce churn risks, and better customer satisfaction.

Why should you collect customer support data?

Collecting support data is a mandatory process for businesses. But they are sometimes overshadowed by the hype of big data. Big data is a hot trend right now. It is good to invest in big data. Before investing in big data, you should ask some questions yourself first-

• What is the goal of my data collection?
• How is it going to improve my business?
• Is it going to create problems in the normal process?
• How can I improve my process to collect the correct data?
• How am I going to use the data throughout company teams?

These are the starting question you should answer first. Data helps you visualize your company’s progress, a certain status, and the performance of teams. You can present data in company meetings or share your data across teams.

Data gives you the ability to set performance goals based on your present success. You can get insight into how your teams are doing and what they lack. Data helps you to fulfill the lackings.

Robust data will help you evaluate recruitments, marketing budgets, and ongoing expenses. You can invest more precisely without wasting time and money. By presenting data to your teams, you can inspire them, and show them how they are contributing to the business and how they can hey improve their performance. Positive data will make team members more engaged and motivated toward their work.

How to collect customer support data?

The best sources to collect customer support data are those you are already using to serve your customers. Here are six ways you can collect customer support data-

1. Helpdesk software

What tool you are using to serve your customer support is the best source to collect customer support data. It should be your primary source. Choose a suitable help desk software for your support operation from the start. Do not hesitate to invest in the right tools. You should these things consider while buying a help desk software-

• Does it help me track individual and team reports?
• Does it show daily ticket volumes, waiting time, and resolve time?
• Does it show first reply time and average handle time?
• Does it have multi-channel support features?
• Does it have a pre-built dashboard for both admin and agents?
• Does it have custom tag, priorities, and product abilities?
• Can I run automation on this?
• Can I connect my favorite applications through webhooks?

These data are essential to collect and use; your support solution should provide features to collect these data. Dashboards with visuals are a high priority for a good support ticket system.  

2. Knowledge Base

Knowledge base software is another source of customer support data most business sometimes ignores. You can find out which of your documentation page are getting the most view and optimize it to get better results. You can also get an insight into which topic is most searched on your site, then research that topic-related questions or problems and write a depth blog or do video tutorials showing users how to solve the problems.

3. Customer Surveys

Customer surveys easily collect user responses on particular services, products, or specific things. You can collect customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS) surveys and run surveys after a ticket close. If your support ticket software has the options, you can automatically send surveys triggered by specific events.

Use precise words to ask questions in your surveys. Make it easy to understand your customers so the support agent can collect the correct information using the survey.

4. Business Tools

Tools like Google Analytics, Kissmatrics, or Heatmaps can give you rich, valuable data about your business, website, and customer behavior. They can provide you with in-depth information that your support system may miss. Integrating these tools with your support desk can improve ten-fold customer support data collection.

Sometimes these tools can be difficult and time-consuming to use. Measure your time and money if you don’t need these tools immediately.

5. Community Forums

Online user forums are another unstructured data source you should consider collecting. Invest some time to research community forums related to your industry. You will find all kinds of posts from your customer demographics, go through them and learn about their problems. Use that knowledge in your business operation.

Often time users share their experiences with others in these forums. Know where your customers are hanging out. Train your support agents to be there and handle questions, reviews, and user posts about your business.

6. Online Reviews

Review sites are excellent sources of customer support data. These sites often give people the ability to rate products. Find out where people are writing and rating your products/ services. Learn how people are reacting, expressing and what they are sharing about your business.

Collecting these data regularly will be time-consuming. It’s not worthwhile to collect support data from these websites every day, so try to do it on special occasions and projects.

Wrapping up

Collecting, maintaining, and using customer support data is a regular task. Tracking your customer support data can give you knowledge about improving areas in your business. Always keep solving these issues and monitor the customer support data matrics constantly.

Make sure you have a clear objective on what data you want to collect, why you want to collect them, and how you will collect them. The more accurate customer support data you have, the easier it is to make decisions about marketing, sales, support, and overall business.

The post 8 Types of Customer Support Data & How to Collect Them appeared first on Fluent Support.

Your support team knows about your customer better than anyone. They are in touch with your frustrated customers daily; they know their pain points and how they react to your products or services. They have a more significant impact beyond support. This knowledge is valuable for your business operation, such as marketing, re-targeting, and improving your products.

When used in a proper way, customer support data can help your company achieve unbelievable customer happiness metrics and gain a new customer market.

But what is customer support data and how can you make the most of your customer support data? In this post, we will explore seven ways to make most of your customer support data effectively.

What is customer support data?

Everything related to customers and how they use your products or services collected through your business’s support team is customer support data.

This data includes your customer information, their interest, what they are buying, what their problems are, and much more.

Customer support data can be differentiated into many types. Businesses can collect customer information based on metrics like customer happiness, support ticket data, user churn risk & reason behind it, and customer satisfaction.

You can analyze and research the collected data for robust re-targeting, offer related customer service, and a better marketing plan. Customer support data can help businesses create new strategies to strengthen their marketing and support goals. You can use this data to predict your customer’s future actions and set your re-targeting process to get a positive result.

How to collect customer support data?

Collecting your customer support data is super important from day one. Businesses must have a process to collect the correct information using the right tools.

The best way to collect customer support data is to have super responsive and feature-rich helpdesk software. Most of the support ticket solutions have built-in data-collecting features nowadays. Using tags, automation, and custom priorities, you can collect different types of information about your customers in a support system like Fluent Support or Awesome Support.

You can use your knowledge base to determine which topics are most searched and the main reason for new tickets. You can also research online reviews to learn about customers’ pain points and run surveys to determine customer satisfaction.

Tools like Google Analytics, Kissmatrics, and Heatmaps are some business intelligence tools widely used to collect customer data. You can implement these tools to get deep customer support data for future use.

How to make the most of customer support data

Customer support data is gold when you put that into action. It would be best to use customer service analytics to evaluate your support team’s performance and identify problems to solve them immediately. You can use this information in other ways too. Here are 7 ways you can make the most of your business’s customer support data-

1. Know your customers

Enough customer support data can help you identify your ideal customers. If you know your customer’s demographics, you can adequately segment them. It can help you connect to the right customers when necessary. You can also create a suitable marketing funnel for your specific customers or re-target a particular group.

Customer experience data will help you understand your demographic behavior. You can use that understanding to apply the right tone and training to your support team. So they can improve themselves, give better support experience to customers and boost customer satisfaction.

Collect customer support data from your support team and ask them these questions to identify your demographics-

• How are customers connecting with support?
• What is their pain point?
• What products are they buying? Are they buying other products? 
• How are customers behaving from one product to another? 
• Is there any churn rate?
• How many customers leave after checkout?
• What is the behavior of customers while in the refund process?
• What is the problem customer trying to solve with your products?

You can ask many questions you can ask your industry. Choose wisely. Collect data on your intention to use the data for analyzing present and future customers. You can use this information to provide feedback to your first buyer. You can collect how they react and use that to create onboarding messages, email campaigns, and help documentation for users.

2. Follow the right metrics

Choosing the right metrics while collecting data is the most crucial step. When you are collecting data, follow the right metrics. This will help you focus on specific topics and tools you should use.

Try to figure out the customer’s first touchpoint with your support. How are they behaving with your support? Are they getting the right answer when connecting with your support team? Most of the time, customers’ first contact with support determines their relationship with your brand long-term. When they get immediate solutions for their problem from your support or even satisfaction, it leaves a positive image on them about your products. These customers are most likely to buy again or tell their friends & family about your brand.

The second metric you should follow is how they are satisfied with your customer support team. Try to figure out this question. The answer will tell you a lot. You can use this data to figure out how to evolve the support team or how much you need to invest in support.

The third metric is how likely your customers will refer your business to others. This data will help you analyze customer retention and determine what your brands lack in terms of customer needs.

You should also consider other metrics like time to first response, average handle time, resolved cases, etc. But always follow the mentioned three metrics first.

3. Review team performance

When collecting and analyzing customer support data, you should consider reviewing your support team’s overall performance. Because everything depends on the connection between your support agents and customers.

Put the right people on your team. Try to avoid all kinds of bad customer service. Train your people to handle your customer with empathy.

Keep in mind while reviewing your support team-

• How are they communicating while engaging with users?
• What are the waiting time data on average tickets?
• What are the average closed tickets by individual agents?
• How do customers react after refund requests?
• How many tickets closed at first touchpoints?

You should review performance weekly, monthly, and quarterly to ensure quality support data. Use your support data to get an overall look into your support team’s performance. Your collected data will be worthless and not actionable without a good support team.

4. Define business goal

Using customer support data, a business can define its goal for the long term. When it comes to business goals, all things are defined by revenue and cost.

To run a business, the main goal is to increase revenue and decrease costs. You can use support data to know what is costing you money or what you need to improve to increase revenue per customer.

Every business should have a clear data strategy. Data strategy means how your business uses data to implement proper processes toward fulfilling its business goal. 

Analyze customer support data about your product or services; if one feature is costing you more customers, you should focus on improving the feature and benefits to improve customer satisfaction, thus increasing customer retention. The proper use of customer support data will risk going in the wrong direction—or stalling out completely—if you don’t have a solution for using data to guide your decisions and actions.

5. Evaluate data tracking

Data tracking is hard work when you are tracking lots of data. Sometimes businesses lose track of data because often they collect so much event data that they don’t know where to start. That’s why you should have a clear answer on how and why you are tracking and using your data.

Constantly evaluate your data tracking. If you are unsure where to start, try finding your immediate questions answers. What data do you need to track these answers? You will then know how to start the right process.

Use tools (Google Analytics, Kissmatrics, etc.) to track your events and goals, name them properly for future use. Analyze and evaluate overall progress to determine which needs your immediate attention.

6. Store data for future

Businesses should start planning to store data privately from their start. In the early stage, free analytics tools will do the work, but as the business grows, it is will helpful for the future to company invest in data storing and analysis.

Nowadays, it is easier to store data. As a business, you should always think ahead. In this era, data is like a goldmine. It is far more valuable than money to businesses sometimes. Data is useful when you make it easy to access your team. It is only possible in your own dashboard. 

You can make charts, diagrams, and information with metrics visualized into a dashboard accessible to everyone in your company. Storing your data on your own and making it easy to find for everyone will make your data more valuable. It will help them make the right decision backed by actual customer data.

7. Use support data on marketing

Your all customer is not here to stay forever. You will lose users every day. But with customer support data, you can analyze metrics like customer satisfaction and support ticket data to find out the customer churn rate. You can use that information to improve your marketing funnel to re-target those customers repeatedly.

Support data can be helpful in marketing to target new users. Because you already know about your existing customers, you know about their age, what they like, their pain points, and their problems through your support data. Use that data to target the same demographics and personalized marketing materials for better conversion.

You can use support data to provide content based on users’ first purchases and keep up good retention. Apply that to a follow-up email, checkout text, or message too. Your knowledge of support data can help your marketing team gain engagement, and retention, decrease customer churn rate and increase back-to-back product sales.

Conclusion

Customer support data is one of the most valuable data types you can use in your business growth. Not only is it helpful to increase profits and customer retention, but customer support data can also give you ideas on how to make your products or services more effective. In some cases, it will lead to new product or service ideas.

Businesses can identify their support representatives’ performance and customers’ needs by using customer service analytics. They can utilize these data for marketing or content to retain old and gain new customers.

You should not just store customer support data. You can follow any of the above methods to use support data wisely in your business and keep your team productive all the time.

The post 7 Ways to Make Most of Your Customer Support Data Effectively appeared first on Fluent Support.

Let’s consider the customer acquisition process to get a better grip on what we are about to get into.

When a customer chooses your offerings over your competitors, they make a conscious choice guided by your marketing efforts. However, once they’ve actually purchased from you, the marketing thought chain doesn’t exactly work in favor of another following purchase. At least not as significantly as marketers would like it to. 

So what might be the initiator for repeat purchases or renewals? Enter stellar customer support.

Why improve customer support strategies?

To make the most of such opportunities, it’s important to have a customer support team. To be the best at their work, customer support teams need to have a broad perspective of their role. They have to think beyond answering individual questions.

Their ultimate job is to understand the type of customer and their goals and help them reach those goals. Call it the customer retention team, and it won’t be wrong.

All of this is based on the Service-profit chain framework developed in 1994. The framework connects customer profitability, and loyalty, with employee satisfaction, loyalty, and
productivity. It goes on to iterate that customer loyalty is the primary stimulator for profit and growth.

In turn, loyalty is generated by creating customer satisfaction. Satisfaction arises from value, mainly the value customers expect from your business.

Your employees are responsible for delivering this value. Only when your employees are completely onboard with your business will they go the extra mile to generate that value.

So, in order to retain customers, you need loyalty. This loyalty comes from satisfaction. Your employees are meant to create this satisfaction with the best customer support your clients have ever seen!

7 Strategies to improve customer support

So the idea to improve retention rates is to offer excellent support. Here we look at 7 support strategies that can help you retain more customers.

Make support consistent

The first and foremost responsibility of a customer support team is to deliver consistent and reliable service to customers. The point can’t be stretched enough, especially because research shows that customers are more likely to leave businesses because of poor service. Having an active, helpful mindset is crucial to avoid customers feeling taken for granted.

Track support metrics

Knowing your most valuable customers and understanding the buying cycle for the business makes empathizing with customers easier. Having a grasp on how product usage correlates to retention helps customer service teams focus and evaluate their efforts. 

Finding a reliable source for this information in your finance or business analysis team can help you better understand the numbers that drive your business. In turn, this helps to evaluate the efficacy of your support strategies. The best helpdesk plugins offer in-depth reports for you to compare sales to support ratios.

Smoothen out customer onboarding

In most cases (bar a few), there can be an extended period between a new customer’s onboarding and when they start receiving the value that marketing or sales representatives might have promised them.

Customer service teams have to play the demanding role of bridging this gap by elaborating features, suggesting necessary optimizations, or spotting problems beyond a customer’s expertise. Through these steps, customer support enables customers to gain the optimum value from their purchases.

Answer, anticipate, and elaborate

This three-part model can change the very approach for any support team. Implementing this is simple, and yet the effects can be measured right away.

Answer: Provide the customer with the information they asked for.

Anticipate: Consider the questions they are likely to ask next and answer them too.

Elaborate: Preemptively offer resources, i.e., documentation, a video, or other contextual information that might help customers before needing to come back and ask again.

Educate customers, don’t just answer

Being purely reactive isn’t the best course for customer service teams. Knowledge base articles, webinars, video guides, and other resources help people before they even know what to ask. More importantly, it offers a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction to the customer towards the purchase as well as an understanding of the product. 

Personalize the experience

Customers love to feel seen and valued. Personalization is a good way to create this feeling for customers. There are a number of ways to add personalization to your customer support interactions.

For instance, my bank always picks up my calls and addresses me by name. They have my contact saved along with additional information. So no matter who the agent they already have my name and previous history.

The last time I called, it was on my mother’s birthday, they promptly asked about her and provided a greeting on behalf of the company.

All this adds very little value to the service that I want from them. All it did was make me feel a little more valued and appreciated. This is what separates good support from great support.

Reduce customer effort

Improving responsiveness and self-service options with the knowledge base and workflow automation can directly reduce the effort a customer has to put in to use your product or service effectively. Customer effort is a key indicator that signifies how intuitive the experience is, affecting retention and the overall evaluation of your integrity.

Hone recovery

We’ve already said that support interactions are an opportunity. When something isn’t working, your customer service team has a chance to create a loyal customer. Firstly, by making the problem go away and secondly by making the customer feel valued. A customer who faced problems but got the support they expected is way more loyal than a customer who never had expectations that needed to be met.

How to measure the impact of customer support

Understanding the precise impact of customer support on retention is complex. Only when you combine several quantitative and qualitative measures can you see the big picture. Here are some to get you started.

Find correlations between support and retention

One of the questions that really make things clear is, are customers who interact with your support team more likely to repurchase or continue a subscription compared to those who don’t?

If the answer’s yes, that sets the stage for you to go and check what the interactions were exactly. This will help you find the aspects that retain customers.

Similarly, if the answer is no, then you have to figure out if there are other factors that are driving customers away. 

Review “lost customer” feedback

Customers that leave you usually have a much more concrete reason than the reasons a customer might have for staying. Hence, lost customers’ opinions and feedback is a treasure trove.

It’s usually good to ask customers why they chose to leave. The reasoning can point to the fronts where you need to tweak your strategies to improve customer experience and retention. 

Read external review sites

Review sites are your friend. G2, Capterra, Yelp, Booking.com provide loads of qualitative commentary and valuable insight. Especially on why people choose to use certain products or choose to dump others. Recurring themes in the way customers describe a service or experience can tell a lot about where to improve customer interactions.

Personal Experience

Customer support is a playing field of impulses and sensitivity. Pre-emptive actions can change the game, whereas sloppy workarounds can get you ditched. But there’s no way to deny the huge impact customer support can play.

I’ll go ahead and end with a personal insight. I had to switch ISPs when I relocated. While the previous ISP was great in terms of service, they were terrible at customer interaction, to say the least. The ISP I switched to offered somewhat standard service but picked up my calls whenever I had issues. Now after relocating again, guess the ISP I stayed with.

Yes! The ISP that picked up my calls and notified me beforehand of expected issues. I hope this point motivates you to strive for better customer support.

Until next time, happy serving.

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