Good customer service experience drives customer loyalty and business success. A data-first approach is key.
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Customer Service Experience Done Right
Power your customer service experience with smart data analytics
Data analytics underpins the heart of customer service success. Are your customer service teams capable enough to transform data-driven insights into actionable goals to improve your service performance?
Download this report to:
Unlock the power of data analytics for customer service success
Assess your team's capability to turn insights into actionable goals
Enhance customer experience and loyalty through data utilization
Boost customer service experience with data-first insights
Benchmark and transform your current customer service analytics maturity to develop an improvement plan that works efficiently to drive value and meet your goals.
Customer Service Data
Audit the Metrics Roadmap
Drive Value From Feedback
Define Clear Goals
Grow your customer service capabilities with an analytics maturity model
The success of your customer experience strategy hinges on being able to proactively and predictively solve problems for customers to meet expectations and avoid issues before they happen.
This requires data-driven insights on customer behavior and expectations — which takes capabilities that not all customer service teams have.
Gartner breaks downs the levels of maturity in service analytics into five levels,from least to most mature as follows:
Ad hoc: Little has been invested in analytics, and there are few or no structured teams, processes or deliverables.
Developing: The service and support function has recognized the value of analytics and may have a small number of dedicated resources working on structuring the practice.
Intermediate: Investment has grown along with the value the team offers, turning the focus to standardization and coverage of use cases.
Advanced: Significant investment has been made in people, skills and technology to answer complex questions.
Mastery: Investment and strategy have been aligned across the organization to maximize efficiency and impact.
Organizations that improve their maturity can reduce the time that elapses between collecting data and making a decision — and enable you to answer more complex questions that arise in the increasingly dynamic customer environment.
As you advance in your analytics journey, you will unlock the ability to answer four key questions:
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What will happen next?
How do we make the desired result happen?
These milestones roughly align to maturity levels and offer a quick estimate of your analytics maturity.
Reevaluate the current metrics to support new customer service initiatives
The best way to clear a path for improved customer service experience initiatives is to start with an audit of your current metrics roadmap. Many customer service and support leaders find their performance and customer experience (CX) metrics no longer align with their functional and corporate objectives, making it hard for them to demonstrate the value of customer service experience initiatives to the organization. A more effective approach to proper metrics selection should include ways to do the following:
Articulate your business objectives first. Define desired business objectives before an audit of support metrics.
Utilize a metrics hierarchy to show progress. Identify a few strategic metrics to demonstrate business impact to the
C-suite.Drive functional performance. Ask the operations management team for key operational metrics that directly impact overarching CX.
Identify appropriate metrics and qualitative competencies for your back-office teams and frontline representative scorecards.
The impact of metrics trends on customer service
The function of customer service has evolved from a reactive and responsive focus to reduce operation costs, toward the inclusion of knowledge via advanced data insights that mitigate potential impacts through efficient proactive and predictive issue resolution.
Customer service and support leaders and their teams play a critical role in the wider company’s growth. Loyalty improves along with data insights that can easily translate into actions to improve customer journeys, and take some of the burden off of the customer experience management teams that handle reactive responses.
Despite the evolution from a more reactive response to proactive growth-driven strategies, many customer service and support functions are still measured by the same, somewhat limited things (e.g., dated experience, cost savings and resolution metrics).
Better-suited metrics are often not considered, or are bolted on to an already overwhelmed metrics dashboard. This leads to poor prioritization to improve the core value of the customer service experience and solve problems or, better yet, ensure they don’t occur in the first place.
Make a strategic plan to drive enterprise value from customer feedback
Customer service and support leaders can influence strategy across the enterprise by sharing voice of the customer (VoC) insights captured by their team. Leaders can demonstrate the value of their function, influence the decision making of other functions and turn customer service into a VoC intelligence hub.
The power of VoC insights
Service and support leaders want to increase their influence within the broader enterprise. In addition, cross-functional leaders outside of customer service rank customer service as the top function to collaborate with on customer experience (CX) initiatives. Yet, despite this apparent opportunity, customer service leaders are less likely than any other functional leaders to spend time collaborating with cross-functional teams on CX activities. Service and support leaders frequently report that their function struggles to effect change in portions of the customer journey that are outside their control.
To expand their influence and directly impact the decision making of other functions, service leaders can leverage a powerful asset that is unique to the service organization: customer data gathered through service and support VoC.
VoC feedback received during and after service and support interactions contains a wealth of information that the wider organization could benefit from understanding and acting on. However, most business functions do not use service and support VoC insights.
Drive enterprise value from VoC
Service and support leaders and their cross-functional peers must look at deriving insight from VoC as a continuous process, rather than one-off or periodic activities. To drive enterprise value from VoC, customer service and support leaders should follow this four-step process:
Collaborate with other functions to understand their knowledge gaps and VoC insight needs. Today, 36% of customer service or support organizations report lack of collaboration as their biggest challenge when using customer service data and insight from VoC to influence other business functions.
Capture and maintain access to cross-functional data that helps analysts derive insights on behalf of other functions. Today, 45% of customer service or support organizations report an inability to connect data from customer service and support to data owned by other functions.
Communicate insights that link to other functions’ business objectives, thereby compelling other functions to analyze VoC in greater detail. Today, 42% of customer service or support organizations report the inability to tie insights to other functions’ business objectives as a major challenge.
Confirm that other functions benefited from VoC, by asking cross-functional peers to demonstrate how the insight drove improvements in both departmental and enterprisewide objectives. This confirmation helps the service and support function demonstrate its own value and increase its influence. Today, 36% of customer service or support organizations report other functions’ lack of interest in VoC as a big challenge.
Optimize goal-oriented journeys for positive customer service experiences
Customer service leaders must set clearly defined goals and objectives to get the most out of the customer journey analysis. Common business strategy tasks are often difficult for customer service leaders but are necessary actions that:
Reduce unnecessary demands for service
Contribute to business growth through cross- or upsell opportunities
Manage the customer journey to design, deploy and continuously improve customer experience
Map the customer journey: a collaborative, business-led process to illustrate as-is or future-state customer journeys from the customer’s perspective
Include customer journey analytics: the process of tracking and analyzing customers’ and prospects’ interactions with an organization across multiple channels
Orchestrate the customer journey: steps taken during the course of individual customer journeys, across channels and touchpoints, to optimize the customer journey
Use a customer journey management checklist to initiate changes and include measures to do the following:
Hire the right people: user experience and service designers, business and data analysts, and customer experience (CX) leadership.
Decide your strategic process: customer journey mapping, design and orchestration, a link into VoC, and others.
Choose the right technology: customer journey analytics and orchestration tools
Efforts to improve CX start with the customer journey. But the terms used to describe journey management practices are often conflated, which can cause internal confusion. Optimize team alignment with the customer journey by leveraging commonly defined terms.
Customer journey maps
Customer journey maps work to gather qualitative and quantitative data to understand your customers’ desired outcomes and identify the gaps between customer expectations and their perceptions of the experience along the customer journey.
Customer journey management utilizes journey maps that represent the ideal or intended customer use case. CX leaders can also measure the current condition of the customer journey. A range of journey-mapping software enables collaborative work in virtual or in-person environments.
Customer journey analytics
Customer journey analytics is the process of tracking and analyzing customer and prospect interactions within an organization across multiple channels, with precision.
This process is a collaborative effort and requires business users to engage with solutions designed to support journey analytics. Leaders must have knowledge of the business goals and customer needs to turn insights into actionable improvements.
Customer journey orchestration
Customer journey orchestration refers to the actions taken by customers on the path of their individual journeys across multiple channels and touchpoints. The end goal is to optimize and align customer and business incentives to maximize the value of both.
Optimize data-driven decisions and actionable insights with customer journey analytics
Customer journey analytics are a requirement for orchestration that is more complex than a linear CX progression. Customer service leaders who align CX with data-driven findings and actionable insights are bound to succeed.
With an optimized platform, the expression “know your customer” becomes a microlevel of data insights your organization can use as the fuel for the creation of best practices and plenty of opportunity for future growth.
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FAQ on customer service experience
Why is customer service experience important?
Every customer service interaction, whether inbound or outbound, self-guided or assisted, can play a crucial role in shaping a customer’s perception of a brand, organization, product or service. Successful service interactions go beyond simple problem solving; they offer opportunities to deepen customer relationships, drive product adoption and contribute to business success.
What is a good customer service experience?
A good customer service experience exceeds expectations; involves personalization, responsiveness and empathy; ensures consistency; proactively addresses needs; and offers ease of use, knowledgeable support, trust and security, continuous improvement and omnichannel support.
How can companies improve their customer service experience?
Companies can improve their customer service experience by actively seeking and incorporating customer feedback, investing in training and development for customer service representatives, adopting technologies that enhance responsiveness and personalization, and implementing consistent and seamless omnichannel support. Additionally, companies should prioritize empathy and understanding in their interactions with customers, continuously strive for improvement, and ensure transparency and ethical practices.
Drive stronger performance on your mission-critical priorities.