7 Steps to Monitoring and Evaluating Your Customer Service

Do you want to develop a robust customer service team? There is a great way to do so. Monitor customer service from a very close distance.

According to Forbes, “Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.” This is why monitoring customer service has become so vital. Here in this blog, we will cover some crucial segments like why it’s so important to monitor the activities of your support team, how to do that, and some important CS monitoring tools which you can use to retain your customers and make them loyal ones. So, let’s dig in!

What is Customer Service Monitoring?

 Keeping an eye on what your support agents are doing is very important for your business. No matter how big or small your company is, you just can’t afford to believe that everything is fine without even monitoring it carefully. Don’t forget that sometimes, your support department is the first one who interacts with customers and it plays a vital role in developing the first impression. So, monitoring customer service is very important in making a positive impression on your business. Here several management and customer service tools come into the picture that can help to achieve your goals.  

Well, there are several metrics you need to follow for customer service monitoring. Some of them are:

• First call resolution rate: It means to the percentage of customer calls or chats that your support agents resolve on the first attempt. In simple terms, when a customer calls or initiates a chat for assistance, and it gets resolved at the very first attempt then it’s called first call resolution. 
• Percentage of escalated calls: Sometimes, the agents cannot resolve issues at the very first attempt, and transfer that chat or call to his hierarchy. There is nothing wrong with this. Managers here come into the picture and try to resolve it. You need to keep an eye on this number of escalated calls. It shows a sign that something is wrong and you need to update your training programs.
• Average Queuing time: Monitor the average waiting time for customers. If it’s quite long, then increase your manpower to solve the issue. Otherwise, no wonder customers might get frustrated and go to your competitors. 
• The average time your team takes to resolve the calls: Also, please take a note of this. The shorter it is the better. Otherwise, you need to arrange training sessions more frequently. 

If you can track all these metrics, then trust me, you are going to have a great insight into the overall customer support activities.

Importance of Monitoring Customer Service

Companies lose billions of dollars every year because of poor customer service. The equation here is very simple. If you cannot assist customers, you are going to lose them.

It’s tough to understand, what will work and what will not if you don’t monitor the whole customer service process closely. It also allows you to pinpoint the shortcomings much earlier to avoid big escalations. These are important factors in today’s highly competitive market, where every single company is fighting hard to grab a place. Repeating the same mistakes, again and again, may lead to the end of your journey.  

Monitoring customer service closely gives you a lot of information regarding your customers and support agents. You can combine all these analytics to improve the overall performance which in any way leads to customer satisfaction. 

How to Monitor Customer Service? 

You can monitor the activities of support agents across multiple channels, collect, analyze reports, and make critical decisions more effectively. This whole monitoring, analyzing, and managing process should be your topmost priority all the time. 

Here, we will share 7 great tips to help you monitor customer service more efficiently. Let’s discuss:

1.  Ask Your Customers for Feedback

As per Forbes’s recent survey, “68% of customers say the service representative is key to a positive service experience.” and “The top reason customers switch brands is because they feel unappreciated.”

 So, to get an idea about the quality of support service, customer feedback is really important. Now the question is how to ask for customer feedback. Will it be product reviews? Many of the customers are not interested in writing long analyses.  

Well, there are other ways to ask for feedback from them. Let’s discuss:

• Ratings: The support agents can ask customers to rate the quality of assistance at the end of every call or chat session. It helps to get instant feedback.
• Surveys: You can develop interesting surveys or comment cards and share them with the customers. Regular surveys help to find out what the consumers think about the business. The survey sheets should be easy to fill up. It helps to gather several important pieces of information which you can use for further improvements. 

• Complaint log: Take it as a written or oral dissatisfaction of your customer and work on to resolve. It’s a great way to understand what the customer does not like about your product or business.

• Interviews: You can prepare a set of questions related to your company or products and take interviews with customers. The key benefits here are you are getting enough valuable feedback, and also the customers will feel that you are taking them seriously and their thoughts are important to the company.

• Focus group:  This is basically an interactive group where the respondents share their thoughts from different aspects. You can ask questions to the group members and they are free to talk. Focus groups help to gather important information and feedback regarding any new or existing product offerings, your company, or any other segment.

• Questionnaires: This is one of the greatest ways for getting customer feedback. You can prepare questionnaires and distribute them among your customers on a regular basis. 

• Social media: Customers do comment and share their feedback on your company’s social media pages. It’s a great way to understand what they think of you and your service. They also mention and suggest which part of your support service needs improvement. 

  There are tools available in the market with which you can track those comments on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. If you are providing support services through Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber, etc,  these tools can also help you to manage the whole process from a centralized platform. It’s a very important segment of monitoring customer service. 

• Online submissions: Many times, customers purchase something from a website and leave feedback there. So, if you include a survey section available at the end of every successful signup or purchase, you might get quality customer feedback from there as well.

Tool to consider: Survicate

Survicate helps you monitor customer service from a very close distance and gather customer feedback from all the digital channels. Here you can create survey forms and send those via links, email, chats, etc. It also allows you to run various segment-wise targeted surveys on the website and within mobile apps. It can be integrated with several CRMs, CS tools, Analytics, and so on. And most importantly you can automate the whole process of collecting customer feedback and analysis.

 Key features:

• Offers different kinds of distribution channels like chat, email, link, mobile app, in-product, etc
• Different types of survey questions including NPS, CES, and CSAT in one single tool
• Completely customizable survey forms that too without any kind of coding
• Integration with HubSpot, Intercom, and many more.

2. Get Feedback from Your Support Agents As Well

 Want to know what works for your company and what does not? Well, your support agents can probably give you the best answers because they are the ones who directly deal with customer issues. They are most like to know what drawbacks your products and the company have. So, always welcome their opinion. You can ask them some simple questions like

• What are the problems they face most often?
• Do they need more manpower?
• Do they have any suggestions or new ideas for the company?
• Ask them for some valuable tips to handle critical situations

 You can incorporate these answers in the customer service monitoring strategy and easily spot the pain points that are causing dissatisfaction amongst your customers and employees. Trust me, it will boost the confidence of your support team. 

If they feel that their options matter to you, you will get more valuable tips and ideas from them.

3.  Set Metrics and Analytics to Measure How Your Agents are Performing

You need to get reporting and analytics to monitor customer service and measure the effectiveness of your support team. Various software or tools are available in the market that offers detailed analytics to enhance your agent management techniques.

The analytics and reporting should include some important features like:

• Agent login and logout time
• Number of call and chat handles for every agent
• Number of calls or chat transfers
• Number of escalations
• Average time to resolution
• Number of offline messages

Tool to consider: REVE Chat

REVE Chat is a live chat software through which you can directly engage with your website visitors in real-time. It has several valuable features to choose from like, live chat, voice and video chat, chatbot, co-browsing, etc. As here we are talking about monitoring your customer service, let me describe how REVE Chat can help you out here. Here you can manage the support service from a centralized dashboard. It lets you monitor your team members in real-time. 

The best features include:

• Login and logout time of agents
• Total number of missed, handled chats or calls
• Total number of chat or call transfers
• Number of used canned responses
• Total number of offline messages
• Maximum queuing time for customers
• Providing instant customer feedback
• Visitor analytics like the geographic location of customers, used operating systems, page views, etc

4.   Establish a Goal or Objective and Measure it

 Now you have feedback from customers and all the required data regarding the activities of your support team, it’s high time that you use these in the customer service monitoring strategies for further improvement. You also need to set goals to achieve and track your progress. In short, you need to track (KPIs) Key Performance Indicators regularly. 

There are so many KPIs around, which one to pick? You should choose the metrics which are related to the company’s objectives. Let’s look at some of the primary metrics:

• First Call Resolution (FCR)
• Average Wait Time (AWT) 
• Average Handle Time (AHT)  
• Customer Satisfaction Score(CSAT)  

 Tool to consider: Engagedly

Being one of the best performance management solutions, Engagedly helps to set effective goals for your support team, track achievements, and provide instant feedback. It allows you to align effective business goals for each of your employees.

Engagedly, helps managers to encourage team collaboration, effective conversations and several other project discussions. Your employees will get to understand each other and feel more boosted.

 Key features:

• Instant feedback
• Employee surveys
• Social praise
• LMS lite
• Prizes and recognition
• Motivating gamification to keep employees uplifted
• Employee social 

5. Collect Analytics and Measure Your Omni-Channel Customer Service

First, identify all your channels where customers come to contact you. Your social media channels come first in this list. When you are offering customer service on social media channels, and responding to customer queries and complaints, monitoring this area is also very important to get a clear picture of how the support agents are performing here. It also helps to restructure your omnichannel strategies in a better way. These include all the social media comments, mentions, reviews, chats, or calls on Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. 

 Monitoring customer service over all the social media channels is important because they frequently reach out to your support team through these platforms as they are already using these. You can use several social tools to resolve customer queries easily. Many tools are available in the market to help you with measuring social media customer service. 

Tool to consider: SproutSocial

It is a great solution that offers an all-in-one dashboard to manage social media activities in a centralized manner. Here you will have a unified box for responding faster to all customer

queries. It also gives valuable social data for taking strategic decisions. 

Key features:

• Chat history
• Review management
• With a single click, schedule and publish content across all your social media channels
• Use discovery tools to connect with your
• targeted customers
• Reporting and analytics for measuring success
• Monitor visitor loyalty
• A mobile app is available
• Customization of reports and analytics
• Engagement and team productivity reporting
• Helpdesk integration and many more

6. Test IVRs Regularly

We all love a good IVR. It saves our time and the organization can route the call or chat requests to the right team for providing better assistance. It not only decreases the call or

chat volumes but also makes it easier for agents to get instant customer feedback,

The best part here is the whole process is automated. 

 But the truth is we love IVR as long it works perfectly. What if it does not? Customers get frustrated. We all know that customers don’t reach out to the support team to praise your company, they always have some queries or complaints and need assistance. They are already mad because of some issues and if the IVR does not work at that time, the whole situation gets worse. 

So, what is the solution here? TEST your IVR system regularly. It helps you to solve technical problems much before the agent starts taking the calls. Several tools are available in the market that can help you to test IVR regularly. 

Tool to consider: Empirix

Empirix is one of the best open-source IVR testing tools available in the market. The world’s largest call centres prefer Empirix to monitor and test IVR for providing a better customer

experience. 

 Top features of Empirix

• Testing throughout the development of a software lifecycle
• Rollbacks prevention
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Helps to test peak traffic volumes
• Increased test coverage

7.  Review the Effectiveness of Your SMS Service

“66% of people prefer texting over phone and email.”

 Several companies use text message services for providing more effective support options to customers. Text message communication can be used to make customers aware of new updates, and product releases and for offering assistance. SMS customer service allows customers to get in touch with your company for any kind of help like placing a new order, special requests, inquiring about a product or so on. 

 So, here also you need to monitor the SMS journey to make sure that everything is working fine as expected and the service is properly integrated with all the other channels. 

 Tool to consider: SimpleTexting

It is one of the best SMS marketing platforms that cater to over 10,000 organizations worldwide.

SimpleTexting offers the easiest way to shoot messages to anyone be it your customers or employees. It is user-friendly and enables you to do several tasks like providing customer service, sending text messages to larger groups at a time, creating automated drip campaigns, conducting surveys, and many more. You can also scale and measure SMS efforts with its analytics and reporting features. All the campaigns can be managed on the go with the SimpleTexting mobile app on iOS and Android platforms. 

Key features:

• Reporting and analytics
• Segmentation
• SMS automation
• Two-way messaging
• Mass texting
• Link building
• Multiple user access
• Customized survey 
• Integration with MailChimp and Zapier

 Additional Tips

• Have your customer service plan ready to follow: Create a proper and structured customer service plan, so that every team member can handle customer support in the same way. Take a step-by-step approach and mention different types of situations that the team may encounter while dealing with the customers.
• You must monitor the results of your plans: It is great to check whether the plan is working or not. If it’s not working, find plan B. Regular monitoring can help you to understand the outcomes.

• Arrange training programs regularly for the betterment of support agents: You need to make it a point to arrange regular training programs for the support agents to brush up on their skills, give updates about product offerings, and new releases and hear their feedback and thoughts.

• Motivate your support agent for extraordinary performances: Always appreciate their efforts. If they are doing great, don’t forget to pat their back. You can offer gifts employee of the month tags, or some incentives to boost their motivation. 

• Monitor your competitors: Always monitor your competition. See how they are handling the consumers, and what new ideas they are applying. Make those notes and add them to your customer service strategies.

• Get a proper escalation plan in hand:  Make a strong escalation plan and share it with your support team. The agent should know when to escalate a problem. Escalation is very necessary when the customer gets aggressive, abusive, or out of control.  Sometimes, agents are not authorized to share several confidential information with customers. In that case, they have to escalate it to the hierarchy. 

Do you know that it costs more than ten times to get a new customer than to retain the existing one? The truth is customers are important to you. You along with your marketing team can spend thousands of dollars to get the attention of your target audience, turning them into leads and then finally closing the sales. Then you need more money to retain them.  But you will be surprised to know that if you monitor customer service closely, you can save huge money, and get and retain happy customers. 

Customer satisfaction plays a vital role in making your business alive. How to get happy customers? By assisting them and solving their problems. Your customer service department does that for you. If you don’t monitor its performance then how will you make your consumers loyal to you? Overall of these, customer service monitoring helps to compete with other organizations. So, understand what your customers want and cater to those requirements.

Here at REVE Chat, we help you to offer great customer service and track its effectiveness leading to happy and loyal customers. Start your FREE TRIAL today to learn more.