Importance of Customer Service Analytics
Providing good customer service is an art. Typically, someone calling into a customer support department is already angry and frustrated with the services your company offers, and it is the job of a skilled customer support agent to diffuse that issue and help that customer leave satisfied and smiling.
Blindly fumbling about or taking a one size fits all strategy toward the happiness of your customers is a perfect recipe for failure. Customer support services succeed when backed by hard data in the form of customer analytics.
Customer analytics are data taken on individual customers, detailing their history with your company and what you can expect to see from them going forward. Customer service analytics study the past in order to predict the future.
Through customer analytics, you can transform your support staff into experts who understand how to solve different kinds of problems that customers encounter. As a company, you’ll be able to predict behaviors and issues that might arise. These analytics can also help you take a more proactive approach toward customer relations.
Here are three ways in which customer service analytics could be used to reshape the efficiency of your support department.
#1 Predictive Modeling
Predictive data allows businesses to analyze the behavior of their customers in order to accurately predict their future behavior and the behavior of other prospective clients. This data is ascertained by compiling purchase transactions and customer support inquiries. All of this data is compiled to create an accurate portrait of the common customer lifecycle.
This helps companies create detailed and helpful knowledge base pages and is beneficial in collating frequently asked questions that customers typically have.
Predictive modeling is vital to the analytic process because it shows businesses where the customer learning curve is with their service and gives them a chance to anticipate issues before they become huge problems that impact customer retention.
One major benefit of predictive modeling is proactive support. This customer support strategy is when businesses reach out to their customers before they take any kind of action. For instance, if a company is experiencing a large outage in their service, reaching out to their affected customers is a great way to get out in front of the issue and set it right before anyone has a chance to complain.
Proactive support will inspire your customer base to believe in the company, thus increasing overall brand loyalty. If you’re being proactive in your support, customers will feel taken care of and will trust your company more.
Predictive modeling also arms your customer support agents with knowledge of some of the most common issues plaguing your audience. This will allow them to address these problems efficiently when they come up.
#2 Market Segmentation
Another analytic that is vital to the continued success of your customer support department is market segmentation. Customer support agents receive hundreds of calls every day, and a lot of that information can be documented, organized, and used to segment the customer base.
Market segmentation gives businesses the opportunity to group customers together based on their recorded personalities and the tendencies that they have previously shown.
For example, if you have a particularly difficult high-value customer that requires a lot of attention, segmentation allows you to ensure that this customer is connected with agents that have a history of responding well to such issues. Such difficult customers who have a history of being verbally abusive can be bunched together and sent off to more seasoned and level-headed agents who won’t be shaken by their angry outbursts.
Certain customer service agents will always be more experienced or skilled with various segments of your market. Strategically assigning specific agents to specific audience segments can go a long way toward creating a positive experience for customers.
#3 Individual Customer Profiles
You can use analytics to help ensure that everyone in your company will know everything there is to know about a specific customer. By keeping a detailed record of every interaction your agents have with a customer, you can create individual profiles for each member of your audience. These profiles can then be used to improve the customer’s experience every time they call in.
By doing this, you’re creating a vast profile network that spans your entire organization and can be easily referenced by any department in the event of an issue. With this, when someone calls in with an issue, you can instantly see the history of everything they’ve done with your company.
If an agent instantly knows that a particular customer is difficult, they will be able to approach the situation with a calming hand. If the agent sees that a customer has had multiple issues with the service they can acknowledge the continued difficulty and apologize for it, making sure to try and help them to the best of their ability. Such proactive measures not only make the business look better but also makes the customer feel as though they have been listened to and appreciated.
In Conclusion
Guesswork has no place in the modern business world. Everyone is different in their own way and the acquisition and leverage of data is one of the most accurate ways for professionals all over the world to serve an increasingly diverse clientele.
Make good use of the data that you gather from your customers and you will start to see your satisfaction score skyrocket.
