How support data influences customer experience

Think about the last time you had a positive customer service experience. What was it about that interaction that left a good impression? The service itself? The convenience? The quick resolution time? Maybe you googled a question about a product you were using and found the information right away. Maybe the contact info was easy to find, or you were able to send them a message from their website, then carry the conversation over to your preferred messaging app on your phone.

Positive customer experiences don’t happen in a vacuum. It’s likely that a lot of thought went into making that interaction positive. To inform those decisions, companies rely on support data. Support data is a beautiful thing, especially when it can be shared around the organization to create actionable insights that ultimately improve CX. Support data can tell you a lot about your customers’ experience. Being able to understand it is important if you’re looking to stay ahead while retaining existing customers!

Conversations are a data goldmine

When customers interact with support agents, they’re feeding companies with incredible insights that can transform CX — if you understand it, that is! Let’s break down the data that can be gleaned from your support channels, and talk about how it affects your agent workflow, your product roadmaps, and overall customer experience.

Every customer support interaction is a conversation! These conversations contain a wealth of data, like the topic of conversation — was there a problem the customer was trying to address? When was it? What channel did they use? What was the outcome?

One way of leveraging this data is by implementing a Voice of Customer program, where a data-driven view of the entire customer journey is informed by KPIs like CSAT (Customer satisfaction), NPS (Net Promoter Score), and FRT (First Response Time) that can be analyzed, shared, and workshopped into things like organizational changes, product roadmap changes, and efforts to improve customer experience.

Look for KPIs that are proven to improve CX

Customer experience is a key differentiator, with Accenture reporting that 64% of customers will go elsewhere because of a bad experience. Relying on data helps your brand stay ahead of the curve and retain customers. A dashboard showing real time analytics, for example, takes the freshest available data and allows members of your support team to make decisions on the fly. This might include allotting agents to a specific support channel, adjusting service hours, or implementing changes that improve First Response Time.

A spike in tickets over a certain channel, like live chat, might suggest a need to migrate to a an asynchronous messaging solution, which is more scalable. High volumes of one-touch tickets could become knowledge base material, allowing customers to access self-service articles before hitting up a support agent — freeing up time for agents as well as customers. According to the Harvard Business Review, 81% of customers attempt to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a live representative. A fully integrated omnichannel approach might see a chatbot that can automate help center articles before triaging requests for a live agent.

Spartan Race, a lifestyle and fitness brand, introduced Answer Bot after noticing a huge spike in one-touch tickets. Answer Bot allows live-chat agents to deflect queries to Knowledge Base articles before engaging in conversation. It was so successful that agents were able add the equivalent to three service hours onto their days!

Ultimately, support data can show you where your customer is, and where you can be to best support their experience. Omnichannel is about accessibility and the ability to choose. Trust the data.

Adapt your roadmap

Your product roadmap and marketing planning can benefit from support data too. It’s important to be adaptive and respond to the changing needs of your customers — whether that’s adding new support channels like we previously discussed, or even adjusting your advertising to speak to the specific needs and pain points of potential customers.

High engagement from channels like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp could mean leaning into a conversational support strategy. If your customers are Gen Z or millennials (your avocado toast-sharing startup could be a real game changer!), cultivating or refining a presence on Instagram and taking advantage of the platform’s unique eCommerce features can reduce the friction of juggling different apps or web properties. High engagement on a certain channel can be all the validation your team needs to create a targeted marketing campaign, or refine product strategy around a certain channel.

The support data doesn’t lie. Customers have high expectations. Don’t lose track of them because of a lack of transparency around data.

Zendesk Explore makes it easy to share support data. Learn more about it here!