It is important to think about the metrics we measure as they directly drive the behavior of our teams. In general you want balancing metrics such as customer satisfaction and gross revenue. Either of these metrics alone could cause an imbalance in your teams focus the same way only driving hold times could dramatically affect your average time to close a service request.

Service metrics that your team should always be tracking and looking to improve:

• Customer Satisfaction – we use Net Promoter Score
• Availability / response – hold times
• Average ticket age
• % of tickets resolved same day
• Open tickets per service employee
  
• Employee utilization rate
• Customer churn / retention

If you measure these service metrics regularly you will be able to see how your service levels are across time. Start by measuring and getting a baseline then make your entire team aware of the one or two metrics you want to drive by posting them on the wall daily and watch them dramatically change for the better.

Remember what gets measured gets managed

Start measuring these service metrics today.

Josh

I see this mistake all the time. Businesses in all industries, including ours, compensating their service teams on sales instead of service.

I know…sales are important. I get it.

But in a business where you are being hired to be a company’s trusted advisor, you must make sure that your employees are empowered to give advice that is actually trustworthy, not just based on what will bring the highest margin.

How do businesses in our industry mess this up?

• Paying their service employees for product sales
• Paying their service employees for selling projects
• Forcing service employees to come up with extra time to spend on customers to make sure they fill their 40 hour timesheet.

Doing any of these things put your employees in a bad situation: the client is expecting them to do what is in the client’s best interest, while the employees are looking to optimize their compensation. Don’t blame the employees – people do what they are paid to do. If you offer incentives that put sales ahead of service, then that’s exactly what they are going to do!

Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m just as much of a capitalist pig as the next guy! But you’ve got to put your employees in a position to be successful. Give your salespeople the incentives to sell, and your service employees the incentives to provide excellent service – this is the only way to be successful in the long term!

So how should they be measured and compensated?

• Customer feedback results
• Solved on first contact results
• Responsiveness results
• Client retention

There are many other options depending on the structure of your business and your current goals, but these are good examples. At Everon we measure over 80 service metrics and report them to the team daily – I’m sure you can find a handful that work for you as well.

MRC