Measure the Success of Your Customer Support with VoC

Do you offer customer support and don’t even know what your customers think about it? Do you have a system in place that measures the performance and effectiveness of your customer support?

Customer support is a critical part of any hosting company and it’s a direct point of contact with your end customers. At any point of time if you want to know how well is your customer support department performing, you might look at the number of tickets opened during a certain duration, the average response time, mean time between creation and closure of the ticket. This alone will give you a big picture about the performance of your support function. But you still don’t know how well are they performing in terms of customer satisfaction. Would you know, out of 100 tickets that gets closed every day, how many were closed with complete resolution and if your customers were really delighted? Do you?

» How do I know if my customers are happy and measure the success of my customer support?

Happy customers can make a lot of difference to your business, not only they can bring in many more potential customers by referring to your service and products but stay with you for much longer than you can imagine. What else would you want?

VoC stands for Voice of Customer. It’s a true measurement of the success of your customer support and goes beyond just plain numbers of measurement. VoC can actually tell you if your customers are really happy or not. Depending on how you build your VoC system, you can improve your customer support and take it to the next level.

» How to build a VoC system?

It’s much simpler than you think. All you have to do is provide a way for your customers to raise their voice to let you know if they are satisfied with your support. How to do this? – One example would be sending an email to your customers as soon as their tickets are close, with a questionnaire that they can fill and provide you with a feedback. If your customers talk to you over phone, you can still send them a VoC form with questionnaire via email, post it or ask them about their experience with customer support while they are still on the phone. But you must then be recording those calls and listen to them to be able to determine their satisfaction level. And if you have outsourced your customer support, what other way can you think of to really know how well are your customers satisfied?

Since the focus of this blog is on hosting industry, let me give you some related sample question that you can put up on your form and have your customers select the satisfaction level when they receive the email with the link to your VoC form.

» Did the technical support agent understood your problem and offered a correct solution? (Rate 1-5)
» Was your ticket attended in a timely manner and resolution offered as per your expectations? (Rate 1-5)
» Did the customer support rep speak to you in a polite and professional manner? (Rate 1-5)
» Was your problem escalated to the 2nd level support in a timely manner? (Rate 1-5)
» Please rate your overall satisfaction with the customer support. (Rate 1-5)

Those were just some sample questions and you can change them or add more questions based on your requirement. But once you start receiving the feedback from your customers, immediately act upon them. If your customers do not see an impact of their feedback, they will not provide you with any further feedback and your VoC system will be of no use. Change your business model such that your business is feedback driven that your customers will truly appreciate.

If you need any help with building a VoC system for your business, please feel free to contact me.