Do you benchmark your customer service? You should. Here’s why.

[Update: Since we wrote this blog post, we’ve launched the Zendesk Benchmark. Check it out to learn how your support stacks up against your peers].

Compare Your Performance

Benchmarking is an opportunity to measure how your performance compares to that of your peers and competitors. It’s also a way to see whether your organization is reaching its goals and how its current performance compares to past performance. It’s a really great way to see just how well you’re doing and who has the competitive edge. From there, you can create a plan that will help you keep your leading edge on the competition, or if you’re lagging, help see what you can do to push ahead. Many of you have told us you’re interested in benchmarking your support metrics against other, similar organizations. As a result of that feedback, we’re preparing to integrate benchmarking features into Zendesk, and we want our customers to be a part of it from the very beginning. As a first step, we have collected a top view of data across our entire customer base, which produced great data, but as you’d expect, isn’t as relevant as if we, say, displayed it per industry. That’s why we’d like to collect a few profile characteristics about your organization so we can produce data sets that are more meaningful, relevant, and geared toward your organization. To get started, account owners should go to Account and select the Benchmarking menu in your Zendesk. All you have to do is tell us a few simple details about your organization, we’ll have a look at the information you’ve provided, and begin preparing an appropriate peer group for you to benchmark against.

4 Basic Tips to Benchmarking Customer Service

Benchmarking anything, including your customer support teams, requires that you collect data on it. You might already be collecting data on your support process, or you might just be starting to think about it; either way, it’s easy to drown in all the data available to us. Anyone who has opened Google Analytics knows you need a way to slice through what’s out there. Numbers can make more sense when they are connected to a story, and that’s where the art of data visualization–revealing relationships between numbers, people, and actions–comes into play.

Tip 1: Compress Data Knowledge Into Numbers

We want to inspire you to begin a benchmarking program for your organization’s customer support team, by providing you with insight into two of your customer support must-watch benchmarks: Ticket Throughput: The raw number of new tickets being generated in a period. Agent Efficiency: The time it takes an agent to close a ticket. We performed an anonymized analysis of our 5,000+ customer’s aggregated data and found that the highest density of tickets are created in the 4 hours before noon (see featured graphic at the beginning of article). In addition, 37% of all tickets are resolved within 4 hours while 43% of tickets take longer than 24 hours to solve. These data points reveal that timing and scheduling your support team’s “on duty” hours can have a profound cost-savings effect on average agent productivity.

Tip 2: Apply Your Numbers to Ideas and Concepts

Both ticket throughput and agent efficiency show: morning hours matter most! Looking at the incoming latent demand for customer support, two distinct measures that matter in ticket creation are day of the week and time of day. Daily distribution is fairly consistent across the work week. Roughly half of the relative demand occurs on the weekend. As shown above, demand across the day skews heavily towards the first few hours of the morning from 9 to 11 a.m.

Larger Ticket Volumes Inspire a 400% Increase in Per-Agent Productivity

We noticed stark differences in support agent throughput across Zendesk’s different plans (Starter, Regular, Plus+). Our interpretation of this trend is that organizations with high volumes of data to process tend to choose Plus+ for its advanced features that enable managing high volumes of data. These same organizations also tend to have agents dedicated on a more full-time basis to manage customer support, therefore leading to efficiency gains. In fact, a well-resourced support team with a dedicated support staff can expect, on average, a 400% increase in agent productivity when compared with an organization that utilizes part-time or single-operator support agents as shown below.