92% of chief executives believe that improving customer service is a top priority for their business. However, only a fraction of companies have systematic support Quality Assurance programs in place. Are support QA costs putting you off?
Conversation reviews and consistent agent feedback can give your support quality a major boost. However, some managers find it hard to justify the costs of hiring QA specialists or investing in decent support QA tools for the executive team.
To make the case for investing in quality assurance programs, we dug into the hard facts and numbers to showcase the potential return on investment. Here are five key customer service stats that will prove the value of a proper quality program to your leadership team.
Excellent customer service can be your main competitive advantage
If you want to make people consider buying from you, you need them to trust you. Excellent support is not just a nice-to-have department in your company but also a key enabler in your customer acquisition journey.
What does “excellent customer service” mean to you and your customers? If you haven’t defined the quality criteria for your support interactions, how do you know that you’re delivering the level of service your customers need?
To make sure that every interaction your team has with your users is of the highest quality, start doing systematic conversation reviews:
- Build a conversation review scorecard that includes all of your key quality criteria as rating categories;
- Start assessing how well your agents’ responses perform against those standards;
- Provide feedback to help your team become better at what they do.
If you play your cards right, you’ll be able to make customer service your unique selling point.
✨ Investing in your team boosts the quality of your customer service, which, in turn, builds customers’ trust in your business. Support QA costs pay off.
Read on: Everything You Need to Know about Customer Service Quality Assurance
Customer retention is cheaper than new customer acquisition
Customer retention is all about keeping your customers happy and engaged. Undoubtedly, your support team, who talks to your customers on a daily basis, plays a key role in this.
There are two techniques your team can implement to drive retention:
- Introduce customers to helpful additional and premium features to grow their product engagement,
- Provide proactive help to prevent your customers from getting stuck in the product.
✨ Support QA and coaching help your support team master customer retention techniques.
High-quality customer service creates customer loyalty
Your loyal customers can be some of the best advocates for your business. If you invest in building loyalty through quality customer service, you’ll be rewarded with customers that stick around and spread a good word for you.
Personalized customer experiences and the human side of the support interactions are some of the most popular rating categories used in support QA scorecards.
✨ Support QA improves the appropriate use of empathy and tone in support interactions which grows customer loyalty.
Lack of personalization drives churn
Customers want to feel that they matter and that they are cared for personally. If support agents focus solely on giving short and precise answers without putting any human touch into the conversations or offering any personalized solutions, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to build strong and long-lasting relationships with your users.
Support QA is the number one way to boost the quality of human-to-human interactions. Use regular conversation reviews and feedback to coach your agents to improve these aspects of their interactions that can’t be explained in facts and figures.
For example, Wistia has a dedicated quality criterion called “Not a robot” in their QA scorecard to give peer feedback on the personalization of support interactions.
✨ Support QA pushes agents to deliver personalized customer experiences that prevent your users from leaving.
Stop losing customers because you are scared of support QA costs
Unless you have a monopoly in your industry, you can’t afford to deliver bad customer service. If your competitors deliver excellent support while your customer satisfaction is unbearably low, you’re running at a high risk of being outcompeted.
Regular conversation reviews help you gain control over the quality of your support interactions. To discover and eliminate potential bad experiences:
- Assess a random sample of your tickets based on your QA scorecard to understand the overall level of your support quality;
- Analyze the conversations that received negative feedback from your users to understand what went wrong and how to prevent this from happening again in the future.
The more competitive your market is, the more important it is to provide excellent customer service. Read more about how lousy support affects your competitiveness in different market situations based on the Jobs-To-Be-Done strategy matrix here.
✨ Support QA boosts your support quality and, through that, reduces churn.
If you add up the revenue you’ll gain from attracting potential customers, retaining your existing customers, and reducing churn with high-quality support, investing in a QA program becomes a no-brainer. The costs of doing regular conversation reviews are far lower than those of losing your customers.
Use the stats above to demonstrate the impact great customer service can make on your business results and revenue. Invest in support QA and start reaping the sweet results of improved customer relations.
Still not convinced? Read about how Rentman stays ahead of their competition with a CSAT of 96%.
