Support Benchmarks

Introduction

Support Benchmarks give you an overview of the effectiveness, efficiency, and success rate of your customer support operation. Support Benchmarks can also refer to industry-wide data that shows the state of customer service across a sample size of companies. 

1. What are Support benchmarks?

Metrics are important to understand the performance of a business. However, simply measuring performance without setting the proper targets could be a futile exercise. To line the correct support benchmarks for your company, you need to look at standards across industries for various support metrics like First Contact Resolution (FCR), response times, etc., and discover how they translate to customer satisfaction. Tracking industry benchmarks will help gauge where you stand against your competition and can facilitate you to set the correct targets for your company year on year.

Examples of support benchmarks are:

1. Average FCR%
2. Average first response time
3. Average monthly tickets
4. Average resolution SLA%
5. Average CSAT

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2. What is a service benchmark?

A Service Benchmark is a process of measuring the performance of a company's products, services, or processes against those of another business that is considered to be the most effective within the industry.

3. What are support benchmarks in customer service?

Support Benchmarks give you a summary of the effectiveness, efficiency, and success rate of your customer support operation. Benchmarking can even refer to industry-wide data that shows the state of customer service across a sample size of companies.

Customer service benchmarking relies upon knowing which key performance metrics (KPIs) are important in the first place. Here are a number of the most important KPIs to appear for in customer service benchmarking:

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is typically represented as a percentage. It’s based on a query posed to customers that reads something along the lines of “On a scale of 1–10, how satisfied were you along with your most up-to-date support interaction?”
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) could be considered as a common metric for measuring customer loyalty. It divides your customers into those that promote your brand, those that are neutral, and those that are detractors, making use of a question like “Based on your experience, how likely are you to recommend Brand Y?”
• Customer Effort Score (CES) could be considered as a score of how hard the customer had to try to get in touch with the company to resolve their issue through any customer service channel.

These are just some of the metrics commonly utilized in customer service benchmarking. Some others could be average time to first response, average time to response, average time to resolution, and more.

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4. What questions should you consider while tracking support benchmarks?

• Are you tracking the metrics that concern your industry?

So that your customers can be provided good support, you need to know the right metrics by ensuring you do your due diligence.

• Are you setting the proper goals for your team supported by industry benchmarks?

Once you have got the metrics in place, the correct goals should be chosen. Have realistic goals that will help in motivating your team members.

• Are your tools and processes aligned together with your goals?

You need to figure out whether you have implemented your support team in a manner that permits you to visualize your goals.

5. What are some support issues faced by B2B Companies?

• The support team receives a smaller volume of tickets, starting from 500-30,000 per month.
• Complex service-oriented issues are faced.
• The issues require lots of collaboration between internal teams to come to a resolution.
• Many times issues are raised by members of the same company.
• Factors like resolving an issue can take time.
• Bad interactions can leave a negative impact on revenue.

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6. What is the ideal process of benchmark-driven customer support?

The key to implementing a successful Benchmark-driven customer network is following a bunch of steps within the right order. Such as:

• Tracking relevant metrics.
• Setting the proper support targets based on benchmarks.
• Using the correct CX software.
• Ensuring that you have satisfied customers.

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7. What are some useful trends to look out for in determining future support benchmarks?

• A good way to improve support benchmarks is to be better prepared for it by being proactive about it.
• AI bots built on the Engati platform are proving to be very helpful in improving customer experience. Many companies have implemented it into their CX strategy.
• Collaboration in Context: Support today has relevancy not only for one department but also for the whole business. Collaboration with other teams is commonly required to create the support best-in-class. Therefore, Engati with its many integrations and features would go a long way in improving the resolution process.