I stumbled across this tweet from a friend the other day. It got me thinking about some of the biggest mistakes that support team leaders can fall into when thinking about customer support communities.
What drives you THE MOST CRAZY about customer support communities? Seriously, what are your biggest gripes? #cmgr #custserv #custexp
”” Caty Kobe (@catykobe) August 19, 2015
I instantly think of all the ways that many companies initially try to measure their customer support communities.
Customer support communities, while inherently more transactional than say enthusiast communities, exist to help your customers solve problems or pain points they are having with your product(s). Plain and simple. They are also probably there to take some of the load off your support team. (Less tickets. phone calls, etc in the name of self service and community! What could be better? It’s a win-win!)
Now because of this, most support team leaders think the core KPI should be deflection. If a customer support community exists to offload some of the load from your support team, deflection seems like a viable metric. Besides % of would-be support issues deflected in the community, you can also get into more complicated metrics like cost per call, cost per ticket, cost per chat, cost per question answered in your community, etc.
While there is value in this metric, this KPI is short-sided by itself. That’s exactly where most customer support communities stop.
The real two KPIs metrics that matter are resolution and churn. These two loyalty-based metrics are harder to measure, but tell the full story.
It’s far too easy to think deflection and resolution are one in the same. A deflected support question means absolutely nothing if the answer they received in your community was wrong, the customer didn’t want to go to your community in the first place or the customer was tricked or resigned to the community b/c there were no other options.
Or, let’s use this example. When a customer calls into a support call center, instead of getting the answer in 5 minutes over the phone, the call rep answers the phone, reads from a script, sends the customer to the first community forum link that remotely resembles their problem and tells them to essentially go fuck themselves and hangs up in 30 seconds. For the call rep, this looks fine. He followed his “script,” his average handle time is low (30 seconds) and he gets credit for deflecting an issue to the community. The rep looks great. Meanwhile, the customer is probably getting angrier when he realizes that the issue is still unresolved. So, maybe he calls another rep, hoping for a different outcome, tries to submit a support ticket, etc. Only to be pointed back to subpar answers in the community. Again, this is still considered a win for each rep, because it’s a “partial deflection” and a lower handle time. At some point, the customer is either resigned to try and make it work in the community they didn’t want to go to in the first place, or they give up on solving the problem altogether and become a detractor or even worse they churn from the product shortly thereafter.
While this scenario is technically a “deflection win,” they went into the community and got some help. But, this would absolutely count as a major fail in terms of resolution and could likely turn into a churned customer later on. That short term deflection gain turned into a longterm bigger negative cost down the line.
While it’s okay to measure deflection, make sure it’s not your sole metric. Measuring resolution (usually done in a survey form and can be as infrequent as quarterly) and churn are much stronger indicators of the success of a customer support community.
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