Guide to Customer Service Analytics

Businesses should always be seeking to improve their customer service offering. They are no longer competing on price and product alone, but also on the quality of the service that they offer their customers.

72% of companies believe they can use analytics reports to improve the customer experience. Customer service analytics refers to the process of collecting and analyzing customer service data. The goal is to come up with actionable insights that help you to create better customer experiences.

72% of companies believe they can use analytics reports to improve the customer experience.

Customer service data can be collected from every point in the customer journey with your support team. From support ticket interactions to CSAT surveys, to emails, to social media comments, every interaction is a chance to gather customer data for your customer service analytics.

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Customer service analytics is the way that your business can differentiate itself and provide an outstanding customer experience. 

The importance of customer service analytics

Without using data to gain insight into customer behavior, businesses can be at a loss to know what makes their customers tick. When you grow from hundreds to thousands of customers, it’s difficult to retain that personal insight into each and every customer. That’s where customer service analytics comes in.

You can use key performance indicators to manage large volumes of data to identify patterns, trends, and valuable insights. You can even make predictions like when a customer is about to abandon your business and take steps to prevent that from happening.

When you invest in customer service analytics you increase customer satisfaction and retention. You’ll be able to more easily meet customer needs and deliver the right message, at the right time. It costs you less to generate new leads and acquire new customers because you understand exactly what your customers are looking for.

You see higher sales and revenue generation from existing customers because you get better at cross-selling and upselling. It’s important to use customer data to improve your relationship with customers and make sure it’s a mutually beneficial experience. 

6 types of customer service analytics

We’ll now go through the types of customer service analytics that you should be aware of.

Customer journey analytics

Customer journey analytics promotes the understanding of a customer’s total sum of interactions with your brand, from product research, to purchase, and more.

89% of successful businesses say that anticipating customer needs along the customer journey is essential to growth. It’s critical to have a broad overview of the customer journey in order to deliver a better customer experience. You need to know a customer’s history of shopping with your brand, how they tend to use the products, and their rate of cart abandonment.

It’s important to gain insight into your customers’ conversations with customer service, answers to surveys, and so on. Think of metrics that will drive your understanding of the customer journey and allow you to improve key touch points and glean valuable insights.

Customer experience analytics

This is a type of descriptive data which tells you “what happened” during the customer journey. This type of customer service analysis involves taking raw data and summarizing into something that makes sense for the company.

86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience. Customer experience analytics give you insight into the way customers are feeling when they have an interaction with your company. The important point here is to focus on customer support metrics such as Average Handle Time (AHT) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT).

CSAT allows you to gauge the performance of individual support agents and see where they could make improvements. Average Handle Time tells you how long it’s taken for you to resolve customer queries, and you can work to improve this metric if it seems a little high.

Customer lifetime analytics

Customer lifetime analytics measures the total value a customer represents to your business throughout their entire relationship. The metric to calculate this is Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV).

Existing customers spend 67% more on average than new customers, which is why it’s important to emphasize CLTV. Customer support teams can directly influence this metric by solving problems and increasing customer loyalty, so customers stay with the business longer and spend more money.

There are different ways of calculating this metric but one way you can do it is Customer Lifetime Value = (Customer Value * Average Customer Lifespan).

Voice of the customer analytics

Voice of the customer analytics is anything that allows you to gain insight into the thoughts of your customers as relating to your business. This type of analytics allows you to collect data on customer beliefs, desires and assumptions.

47% of customers with a product or service complaint are likely to voice it on social media, but only one out of 26 customers is likely to bring up their complaints. This makes it even more crucial for you to listen to customers who choose to share their feedback.

Qualitative data that you can gather for this type of analytics is NPS surveys, CSAT surveys, social media posts and messages, and anything else that allows you to tap into your customers’ thoughts.

You need to proactively survey customers to find out their thoughts and opinions. Make sure you collect qualitative as well as quantitative data so you can analyze customer sentiment.

Customer retention analytics

Customer retention analytics refer to how many customers your company is likely to retain over time. 89% of companies agree that excellent customer service plays a huge role in customer retention. 

Customer retention is closely linked with customer loyalty, with more satisfied customers likely to stick with your brand if they feel a sense of loyalty. The way to measure customer loyalty is typically with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, asking whether customers would recommend your business to colleagues or friends.

Another metric you can measure is Customer Effort Score (CES), with low customer effort correlating with a better customer experience because customers find it easy to interact with your support team. This creates more loyalty and increases the likelihood that customers are to buy from you again.

Customer engagement analytics

Customer engagement analytics track how customers are engaging with your brand across all communication channels. This could be customers talking to you on social media, customers having service interactions, or answers to surveys.

83% of customers now expect immediate engagement when they contact a company, but 65% of customers would rather help themselves through self-service for simple issues. It’s up to you to track the metrics across channels to ensure you are providing the engagement that customers expect.

Customer engagement analytics is closely related to the customer journey, as engagement happens along every stage of the journey.

Metrics to track

We’ve already written a whole post on the customer service metrics you should be tracking. Here is a list of just a few for you to pay attention to:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) – measures how likely a customer is to recommend your business to a friend or colleague, and is a good indicator of how loyal a customer is to your brand.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – measures how satisfied a customer was with the experience they received, and can be used to report on an individual agent’s performance.
• Customer Effort Score (CES) – measures how much effort a customer had to put into finding what they were looking for or to resolve an issue, which gives insight into the quality of the customer experience for a particular interaction.
• Customer Retention Rate (CRR) –  measures the number of customers a business retains over a select period of time.

Top customer service analytics software

Here’s a list of the top customer service analytics platforms out there. All will help you uncover valuable insights with your customers.

Keeping

Keeping is a customer support help desk software built on top of Gmail. It helps you manage all of your customer tickets by turning every support email into a trackable ticket, assign requests to team members, and open and close requests.

The software comes built in with analytics and a reporting tool that give you insight into your customer support activity. Take advantage of detailed support metrics that help you track your team’s performance.

Keeping’s classic reporting allows you to measure total support requests, average requests per day, average first response time, and per agent response time and number of tickets responded to.

Keeping’s advanced reporting provides detailed statistics by mailbox, tag, and agent, and also offers the ability to export the results to a CSV file. You can track total new tickets, average new tickets per day, busiest times, and individual agent performance.

Geckoboard

Geckoboard is a professional KPI dashboard that integrates with over 80 different apps to provide you with actionable data for your company.

For customer support teams, you can closely monitor all your support channels in one real-time view. You can see how many tickets are in the queue, which ones are unassigned, and which ones have been solved.

You can view the top customer support ticket solvers to encourage a bit of healthy competition and reward those agents who have performed best. You can identify trends, changes or spikes in activity that could indicate an issue and take steps to solve it.

Zendesk Explore

Zendesk Explore is part of the Zendesk suite of software which allows you to keep track of all your customer communication channels in one place. It’s reporting and analytics software that you can use to measure and improve the entire customer experience.

You have instant access to customer insights that can make your business better – from agent performance to customer interactions, Zendesk lets you monitor everything without having a statistics degree.

Zendesk Explore integrates data from every customer communication channel, including email, chat, phone and social media. You can keep an eye on tickets created through every channel so you can measure how customers interact with your brand.

It comes with pre-built dashboards for every channel that are pre-populated with best practice customer service metrics. It also allows you to customize metrics in thousands of ways which means you can build dashboards that suit your business.   Keeping in mind that Zendesk Explore is tied into the Zendesk suite of products, so it can get expensive.

Zoho Analytics

Zoho Analytics is a modern self-service Business Intelligence and analytics platform. It boasts more than 500 integrations with popular apps that you can use to start analyzing data with the Zoho platform.

You can connect, prepare, and analyze your data, create data visualizations and discover hidden insights, all within minutes of setting up the software. After connecting all of your data sources such as files and feeds, and popular business apps, you can start preparing your data for analysis.

Zoho Analytics has an augmented, self-service data preparation and management module that allows you to cleanse and enrich the data you want to analyze. You can augment your analysis with Zoho’s AI feature, which holds conversations, generates automated insights, and predicts future trends.

You can visually analyze your data with Zoho’s drag-and-drop interface. Take advantage of its wide variety of charts, pivot tables and widgets.

Final remarks

The more we know about our customers, the better. The importance of customer service analytics cannot be underestimated.

The only way to start seriously improving your customer service operations is by collecting and analyzing qualitative data. Customer service analytics allows you to do just that and take the performance of your business to the next level.

Dealing with data allows us to get closer to our customers and find out what they are really thinking. Crunching the numbers means we can identify key patterns and trends that will make our customer service efforts much more effective.

Invest in the right software to allow you to successfully implement customer service analytics and start collecting actionable insights right away.