Last year, we published the first-ever support quality benchmark report to try and show what a “good result” in customer service actually looked like.
Since then, support teams have had to further grapple with ever-increasing customer expectations, rapidly-growing teams, as well as the ongoing challenges presented by the pandemic.
To better understand how exactly the support landscape has changed and the direction in which things are trending, we thought it was the perfect time to compare the numbers from our recently published Customer Service Quality Benchmark Report 2022 with the findings from last year’s report.
So without further ado, here are the 5 biggest takeaways from our deep dive into the data.
Proactive support continues to be the holy grail
Proactive support is a customer service strategy to help customers before they need to get in touch with your support team.
This includes maintaining a thorough help center, scheduling automatic messages for known problems, or setting up automatic responses for common issues.
In 2021, we saw that 85% of teams offer proactive help.
However, a year later, many still consider repetitive requests and generating adequate help documentation as major challenges.
This is why in 2022, 70% of companies plan on investing even more in proactive support resources like creating a detailed onboarding process and accessible knowledge base for customers.
More teams tracking more metrics and reaping the rewards
Tracking the right customer service metrics is key to providing quality customer-facing interactions.
If you know how your team is doing, you know what needs to be changed and what should be praised.
So it isn’t surprising to see more support teams track a wider range of support metrics as compared to 2021.
The two exceptions to this rule are FRT and MRRT, where coverage has been reduced quite drastically.
However, the general trend still points to increased coverage of a wider number of customer service metrics.
And when you look at the numbers support teams have been able to hit, the reason becomes even more clear.
There has been a significant improvement in average numbers posted across the board, with the exception of MTTR.
Now, it would be ridiculous even to suggest that simply tracking more data can help you boost support figures.
However, it is probably fair to say that the best chance you have of improving your support KPIs starts with keeping a close eye on the metrics you want to improve.
Manager reviews are on the decline while QA specialist reviews are on the rise
In our 2021 report, we saw that 69% of customer service teams were conducting regular conversation reviews.
The numbers also pointed to another 11% rolling out support QA within the next year.
It’s 2022, and low and behold, we have 80% of teams confirming they conduct regular internal reviews.
There has however been a shift in who is actually doing the reviews.
While manager reviews still remain the most popular form, they’re on a downward trend (down 6% from last year).
With support teams growing quickly, more companies are now looking to free up managers from QA responsibilities and instead opting for the expertise brought in by dedicated Support QA Specialists, up by 16% from last year.
What’s more? Teams aren’t just sticking to one type of review but are increasingly combining different review formats together. In fact, this is now being done by 59% of support teams, up from just 39% last year.
Teams are understanding the risks of random sampling
A key factor that determines the success or failure of your support QA program is the conversations you select for review.
In 2021, we saw 82% of teams using a randomized sampling method.
However, a random sample does not always provide the best sampling for QA purposes.
As we explored in great detail in a previous blog post, the results from random samples may not really be as random as you’d think.
The numbers clearly show that teams are starting to get weary of the risks of random, with a 22% decrease in random sampling.
Instead, support teams are now taking advantage of the improved conversation discovery on support QA platforms (like our very own Complexity filter) to get a more representative sample of their support interactions.
The findings from conversation reviews are playing a greater role in 1:1 and team meetings
Conversation reviews have always been an invaluable tool to understand how your support agents are performing.
But it is so much more than that.
It can form an integral part of the professional development of your team members. In fact, the majority of teams who conduct reviews use the results to provide actionable feedback to customer service agents.
77% use the results as input in 1:1 meetings between managers and agents and 43% use the results as input for team meetings (up from 69% and 40% respectively).
And that’s not all!
Listening to and understanding customer feedback is also clearly beneficial on a wider company level as well with 49% of the customer service teams with a QA process using it to report back to managers and executives.
Support your support team
Today, in an effort to keep up with growing demands, support teams are not only tracking more data but are also doing more with it to effect a positive change in their support quality.
Furthermore, teams are no longer just content with good-looking numbers but are instead trying to find actionable insights, that’ll help them further improve, with the increasing use of QA Specialists and dedicated support QA tools.
So, supporting your team with the right structure, tools, feedback, etc. is something you may want to consider yourself if you want to end up on the right side of the numbers by the time we publish our 2023 report!
