Your support team could be the holy grail of market research, but you just don’t know it yet. If you think about it, it’s a direct line to your customers and they’re usually giving you the gold on what it is they’re battling with or unhappy with. In some instances, they might even be telling you why they’re praising your name, so it’s always in your favour to pay attention.
Using customer support data to uncover trends about your customers is a sure-fire way to deliver the experiences they are hoping for when it comes to engaging with your brand.
Customer Satisfaction Ups And Downs
If your support team is being rated on their performance in the form of customer satisfaction, it pays to evaluate each ticket to ensure that you’re still living up to your promises. Where low ticket scores have been given to customer support agents, is it because the agent was rude and unhelpful, or is it because something just cannot be resolved the way the customer wants it to be? Check for similarities in responses and find the patterns that emerge. If there are patterns in negative feedback, then there are obviously areas of focus that can be improved upon. This is an opportunity for you to perfect your customer offering.
Customer Channel Preferences
You might have multiple channels for customer support, but which ones do your customers prefer using? Note which are favoured so that you can emphasise these in your customer experiences and user journeys. You can also add additional resources where they will be needed most to speed up any waiting time that customers might have to endure.
Customer Contact Times
When are your customers connecting with you for help? It could be simple to see why they are having difficulties, such as when a campaign went live, and your server couldn’t handle the extra traffic. For future campaigns you can ensure that you’re prepared by using an alternate server. Learning from these “mistakes” or issues can help inform a better experience further down the line. Always look at spikes in tickets and why they occurred. You will learn so much about your brand, the way it is perceived and also what your customers want.
The Effectiveness Of Customer Support Teams
As with the first example, ticket spikes can always teach you something about the way your offering is being received, but negative feedback about your customer support agents will too. If your support team is not effectively dealing with queries it could be down to either lack of training, lack of information or perhaps they’re just not very good at their jobs. This is always a tough call, but if your support staff are not finding solutions for customer complaints then they either need the right training or perhaps they are better suited to another role within the business.
There is so much more than can be learned from your customer support feedback. We’d love to hear how you’ve used customer support to solve customer issues.