How to Measure Customer Service Performance
When you’re trying to achieve a goal, it is always wise to measure your progress. Otherwise, you won’t know if your efforts are paying off or where you could use improvement. Customer service efforts are no different. Measuring customer service in your business is critical to improving it, but how matters too. Customer experience is multi-faceted, so there are many different approaches you can take to measuring it. We suggest you track a handful of the metrics that are most important to you. Below, we’ll go over some of your most common options for tracking customer service performance.
1. Customer Service Ratings
This one is fairly straightforward: how do your customers rank the service that they received? Make it a part of your usual process to followup with customers and ask them to rank their experience. Once you have ratings for a few months of work, you can organize the ratings to get more insight. For example, which employees get the highest ratings? Which types of calls do you provide the best service for?
2. Retention Rate
Keeping customers is a good sign that you’ve provided great service in most industries. Higher retention rates also cost you less in new customer acquisition. However, in many contracting companies, you may need to measure the retention rate for a long time to get a fair sense of it. In roofing, after a properly installed roof, your customer may not call you back for five years or more. While in HVAC, you should retain your customer every year for their maintenance. The usefulness of this metric may vary for you.
3. Response Time
It is universal that a key part of great customer service is fast response time. This isn’t how fast you arrive at a customer’s home, but how fast you respond to their initial inquiry. That is, how quickly you call them back or respond to their email. Improving response time in every medium is important to provide the best service.
4. Resolution Time
Resolution time is how fast your customer’s issue is resolved, so how soon their pool is installed or their water heater is fixed. Measuring this can help you see which specific call types you need to improve on.
Remember to keep your measurement of resolution time customer-centric. Count the time until the customer’s issue is resolved, not until you’ve finished your work. For pest control companies, that might mean you measure the days until you drop by and empty out the traps. For HVAC companies, you might measure the hours until the heating or cooling is restored in the home.
5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
This is a critical metric for contractors who get their business based on word-of-mouth. It is a measurement of how likely your customers are to mention your services to a friend. To start, you have to ask customers on a scale (ideally from 1-5 or 1-10) how likely they are to recommend you. You average out these answers to find your overall NPS.
6. SERVQUAL
Qualtrics recommends SERVQUAL as the industry standard metric for determining customer service quality, and for good reason. The SERVQUAL model compiles tangible aspects of your business, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy into a single system for measuring your customer service as a whole, while also allowing you to break the components down into manageable pieces. While some may consider it overkill for locally-owned home service businesses, it doesn’t hurt to borrow tactics from enterprise companies every once in a while.