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Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences.

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Ready set action One, two, three four.

Jeannie Walters: 0:31

It's the Experience Action Podcast, where we believe efforts in customer experience are not a cost center for your organization. They are the business builder. We have a great question from one of our listeners. Let's listen in.

Listener Question: 0:47

I am a new head of customer support, so this is completely new for me to manage a team. I was alone at the beginning to do the customer support and the company has grown and now I have a team of four people plus me. So my question is because I'm not really good on doing statistics, metrics using Excel, so what kind of tool do you suggest to use to do the reporting? What kind of data I should see or put in my reports? So I'm looking for any kind of recommendation to improve myself in doing reports for my company. Thank you.

Jeannie Walters: 1:36

Oh, reporting, reporting, reporting. We all spend a lot of our time as leaders reporting on what we're doing, what we're trying to do, what we hope to do and, frankly, what we can't do. So this is something to embrace. And when I say embrace, what I mean is, as customer experience leaders, as a customer support head, those types of roles we need to make sure that every time we are talking about what's happening with our teams, with our results, that we are tying that back to the larger organizational goals, because otherwise, what I see happen is that sometimes customer experience leaders become what I call number narrators. This is when we're reporting on numbers, things like well, yeah, our customer satisfaction rate went up an eighth of a percentage point, or we actually were able to reduce our time on call. There are different things that matter to different organizations. So, based on your role as a new customer support leader, I have a couple of recommendations.

Jeannie Walters: 2:52

You also asked about tools. That's a little trickier, frankly, so let's talk about the why first, which is what I always recommend to leaders. Start with why you're doing something, Understand the goal, understand the steps you need to take, so that you can both show what you're doing in a positive way as well as how it's connected to your overall organizational goals. Now, when I say positive way, remember sometimes we don't always have positive results. So the whole reason that we report, that we collect data, that we have numbers to watch, is so that we can gain valuable insights that we can turn into improvements. What can we learn when things don't go well, when numbers are going down? That is a signal to us, that is an indicator. So make sure that you aren't shying away from this idea of why data is important. It absolutely is important. So here we go. If I were you, I would think about a scorecard that matters to the leaders of the organization. I would also think about what do you need to know as the leader of your team so you might have a scorecard within your team. That is performance tracking. So within most customer service or customer support organizations, there are numbers that we track, like first response time how quickly are customers receiving an initial response? Sometimes it's called first call response. There are different ways that people track this, but essentially, we don't want our customers having to call back again and again for the same issue. We don't want our customers being transferred from one agent to the next, to the next and not getting their problem resolved. The faster and more efficiently we can resolve a customer issue, then we're being efficient, we're getting more return on that investment, we are saving our organization expenses and that is linked to happier customers as well.

Jeannie Walters: 5:04

You might want to look at average handle time, but I want to make sure we put a little asterisk here. If we get too obsessed with the time that we are serving a customer, sometimes that can backfire pretty dramatically. If you've ever been hung up on as a customer, if you've ever had those experiences where you feel rushed through the process, where they don't really understand your question, sometimes that's because those agents are being watched on time and not quality. So make sure that if you have this as one of your metrics, you understand why time is important. How long should things take? We need to make sure we have those baselines so we're not just arbitrarily telling people keep your calls under three minutes. We don't know if that's good or not, based on the different issue. So that's a tricky one. Resolution rate how many customer support tickets are we able to actually resolve in a single interaction versus follow ups and needs?

Jeannie Walters: 6:07

Of course there are the customer feedback metrics. In a lot of cases you might have transactional metrics like customer satisfaction or net promoter score for specifically that interaction in support. Again, we have to be careful about how we do this. If we are doing it kind of just asking at the end, we might not get exactly valuable data. We have to make sure a certain percentage of the people we're serving are actually responding to those questions. We have to make sure that we are really embracing the spirit of it as well as just the numbers and giving customers a chance to tell us what was great or what wasn't great. The numbers alone don't tell the whole story, so let's just make sure we're understanding the nuances of that too. And then, of course, if you do have a team of four and they're all doing similar or the same jobs, you may have agent productivity metrics. You may have things like the number of tickets handled per agent, the backlog trends, things like that.

Jeannie Walters: 7:16

So all of these I want to offer with a little caution, because any of these there are going to be exceptions to the rule. Sometimes you get a really nuanced, complicated issue that you have to really spend time with the customer to resolve. So if we're only focused on time on call, for instance, then we're going to punish the people who are really spending high quality time with customers. If we're only relying on the numbers, the objective, quantitative responses to net promoter score questions or customer satisfaction questions, then we're going to be missing an opportunity to really get more valuable information about the why why did it not feel great, or why did we do a great job. That's what we want, because we want to learn. We want to make sure that if we hear again and again that one agent is just providing an exceptional experience, we want to start looking into okay, what is it that they're doing that we can start bringing throughout the customer journey? We can train our other agents. We can make sure we're hiring a certain way. We can make sure that we are delivering in a very consistent way across the experience, based on something that our customers are telling us is working really well for them. So that's your team. That's really performance tracking.

Jeannie Walters: 8:44

Where I see most customer experience leaders kind of fall down, frankly, is when they don't tie what they're doing with customer support, with customer experience design, with all of the things that we do, back to organizational goals and outcomes. So, being great with customers, getting those great responses is not enough. It's not enough Because after a while people start thinking, well, this is great, but what is this really doing for our organization? I've seen so many decisions that will baffle people, but really I've seen things like our customer service is going well, but couldn't they just do that on chat? Instead of spending all this money on agents, why don't we just shut down the call center? I've seen that happen because they don't understand how the investment into high quality customer experience, proactive customer experience, high quality customer support, how that investment has a return for the organization. It's not a nice to have, it is a must have. Now, if you're listening, if you're watching this, you are probably one of the people who knows that. But we have to constantly communicate that and socialize that throughout the organization.

Jeannie Walters: 10:06

So a few ways to do this we like using a customer experience strategy success statement. This is where we really outline okay, what are the efforts that we're putting in and what are the ways that we expect to get a return on those efforts. So we break this up into understanding the organizational goals of your organization. What are the leadership goals and what are the ways that we can influence that? Where are the efforts put in around the customer experience to get those results?

Jeannie Walters: 10:41

So you can do this a couple of different ways. You can focus on efficiency, because it's not just about driving revenue up, it's about keeping expenses down. So service can be costly if we're not careful. So are there ways that we can make a case for efficiency? So, for example, a success statement might read like this by reducing first response time by X percent, we are planning to improve customer satisfaction and increase retention by X percent. So you are showing the connection between, you know what, if we have a problem with retention and we start looking at the data and we notice that people who call back again and again for issues they're not renewing, they're not retaining, then we can make a case that the better we get a first call resolution, then we will actually be able to increase retention.

Jeannie Walters: 11:42

If we increase retention, what does that mean for the organization? Pull that thread as far as you can to show that you are actually putting dollars and cents on the bottom line for your organization, and that can be done by both lowering expenses and increasing revenue. If you get 1% more customer retention. What does that mean for your organization? In some large organizations, that can mean millions of dollars. So really start thinking about this. If you need to, a great way to do this is to partner with your finance group. Say, hey, I really need some help figuring this out. Can you help me figure out what is the value of a retained customer overall? They love this stuff because they want this to succeed as well. So if you can create that partnership, that can really help you as well. The customer-centric success statement might be a 10% increase in resolution rate has led to a measurable lift in customer trust and repeat business.

Jeannie Walters: 12:45

One of the things that we need to talk about more in customer experience is the way that we protect the reputation of a brand. We want to make sure that we are protecting the reputation of a brand, and so the best way we can do that is by delivering great customer experiences. What is the risk of a bad reputation? Well, that's where you get poor word of mouth marketing. That's where you get people who don't even sign up. You miss even acquiring customers because the reputation is so bad that they don't want to do it. So whatever is most important to your organizational leaders. That's how you want to think about these statements, and then we might really focus on something more internal, the operational impact. That's where it comes, with something like with optimized workflows, we've reduced escalations by x percent, or we plan to reduce escalations by x percent, freeing up resources for proactive support.

Jeannie Walters: 13:43

So think about combining scorecards that really both track important things to your leaders and share the real voice of the customer. In customer support, we have the privilege of being on the front line, interacting directly with customers. We get some great quotes, we get some videos, sometimes some recordings. I encourage you to share that as part of your scorecard. Now, we've done different episodes on this, different things within our CXI membership and scorecards are tricky because a lot of them are just produced right, we just have them from software that we use or programs that we use. A lot of those are not as meaningful as they need to be to tell your customer story and to tell your story as a customer experience leader.

Jeannie Walters: 14:35

So when it comes to tools, the best thing to do is to first of all find an efficient tool. I see so many customer experience leaders really business leaders of all kinds who spend so much time building slides for weekly meetings or really trying to just get reporting figured out. We have a lot of tools available to us now that can customize this, that can automate this, that can help us really with that first draft very, very quickly. I encourage you to figure out what do you need on that scorecard. Think about that first and then think about what could help me with this. Well, you might have data that you can just grab from some of the programs that you use. If you have a CRM, a customer relationship management system. Pull from that. You can pull from different analytics tools, data tools. Once you have those things, that can help you figure out what's the easiest way I can build this report in the most meaningful way to share with my leadership.

Jeannie Walters: 15:40

So I encourage you to think about what do you need, both for your team those performance metrics and those performance insights and what do you need to tell your story within your organization. What can you do to share insights, to show this is what we're learning, this is what we're doing and these are the results we're accomplishing. So I'm sorry I don't have a specific tool because all of this is so nuanced and customized and I don't believe there's one perfect tool out there for every organization. It really has to be based on where you are with your budget, your resources, your needs, your time, everything else. But there are a lot of great tools out there. I would encourage you to check those out. And I would encourage you to just start simple. If you've never done this reporting before, start in whatever tool is most comfortable to you and then grow from there. Start with the why, then figure out the what. All right, I love this question.

Jeannie Walters: 16:44

I love that we're all thinking this way about how can we both get the best out of our team and really showcase what we're doing with our leadership. It is so, so important we have to communicate and socialize on an ongoing basis as customer experience leaders. So with that, I encourage all of you out there as customer experience leaders if you haven't already, check out our CXI Compass tool. That's a very simple assessment to help you really understand where to put your efforts, how to prioritize. And, speaking of that, we have a webinar coming up. So if you go to experienceinvestigatorscom, you can sign up for our webinar about what the C-suite needs to know about customer experience. I hope this will benefit not just customer experience leaders, but also the leaders who need to understand how to get this cross-functional, customer-centric approach to really deliver business results. So if you have other leaders that you want to invite, I encourage you to pass that on to them as well.

Jeannie Walters: 17:47

Thank you so much for listening and watching and being here. If you are listening, don't forget we have all of these episodes on YouTube. You can check that out at my YouTube channel. Just look up, Jeannie Walters. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you for all the work you do. Keep fighting the good fight on behalf of your customers and I will see you next time. Thanks everybody. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigatorscom where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.