How are you measuring your support team’s potential? B2B companies worldwide are incredibly adept at being data-driven and goal-oriented when it comes to their sales and finance departments. But what about the rest of the company?
All departments need to have clearly defined targets and objectives to understand their performance, as well as their weak spots. And you better believe your support team is one of them.
As you know, support agents act as both the voice and face of your company when dealing with clients. They are usually the ones responsible for your clients’ churn and upgrades, and, overall, your users’ experience with your brand.
Furthermore, A research study carried out by American Express showed that consumers are willing to spend 17% more with a company that offers excellent customer service.
Isn’t this reason enough to set some effective KPIs for your support team?
What are KPIs useful for, anyway?
KPIs are used as metrics to measure a specific outcome for a company. Every organization has their own KPIs to track their progress towards very specific objectives. That’s why the more accurately you can define them, the more insightful your learnings will be!
It’s not enough to just set them once and let them be, though. When defining your KPIs, it’s important that you and your team are able to review them progressively, and even readjust them if required.
The 5 most powerful KPIs for your support team
Now that we know that KPIs are so vital… where do we begin?
To give you better insight into your support team’s performance and progress, we bring you the 5 most important KPIs to track:
1. Save Rate
This is highly relevant for support teams that deal with churn, downgrades, and upgrades on a daily basis. You definitely want to know the percentage of saved customers from those that requested a cancellation.
Why do you need this? Well, it will basically show you how well your support team is doing!
How successful are they at re-engaging the customer with your brand or product? Do they offer solutions to the issues addressed by the users, saving them from turning to a competitor?
Knowing your Save Rate is not only interesting for you as a manager, but it’s also a very motivational metric for your support agents. After all, the first step to improvement is knowing where to focus your efforts!
2. Churn MRR
Simply put, Churn MRR is the monthly revenue that you are losing due to customers’ cancellations.
It goes without saying that you want to pay close attention to this KPI! Your bottom line depends upon it…
The Churn MRR can give you much more information than simply looking at the lost revenue. Don’t get me wrong, this is important too, but the Churn MRR is a great indicator of larger issues that may be arising. It can act as a touchstone to keep you up-to-date on your competition in the market and push you to innovate and improve.
The goal in an ideal world would be to have little to no Churn MRR because this would mean that all your clients were happily committed to your product, no matter what. But how realistic is this?
Trends change, companies evolve or dissolve, and competitors are constantly on the hunt. Taking all of that into account, this KPI gives you a good indication of what your future as an organization might look like.
If your Churn MRR is progressively increasing, it might be time for your support team to jump in to investigate the underlying cause: Your product might be outdated, your prices might not be in line with your audience’s buying power, or your customer service team might need training to help them deal with churning clients in a more effective way.
The reality is, there are endless reasons clients might churn and they vary from business to business. However, this KPI will give you a good starting point, either to improve or to keep on working your magic!
3. Completed vs. Pending Inquiries
This one evolves around your support agents’ daily tasks. It’s not always about the big goals, you also need to keep an eye on the regular routines in your support department.
A substantial part of your customer service agents’ routine at work is answering customer inquiries. This could be by phone, live chat, email, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, etc.
Having an overview of the inquiries completed vs. the pending ones, especially in a hyper-visual way, is a clear way for your agents to own their own performance. It’s incredibly motivational to keep a close eye on your day-to-day progress.
As a manager, this gives you an idea of your team’s rhythm with the workload. As a support agent, you are able to track your progress and plan your day according to the target.
Remember, the more accurate overview you have of your metrics, the better insights your team will be able to get from them!