This post was originally published on lessonly.com.
Sam and Jordan are best friends. They’re both also starting their first customer service jobs at large, fast-paced companies.
Sam’s company starts the onboarding process before he even steps into the office. He receives onboarding paperwork and company policies ahead of time—so he’s prepped and ready to receive job-specific training on his first day. Sam’s employee training plan features a mix of online and in-person training to deliver key information about products and processes. He also practices interacting with customers in real-life scenarios to put his new skills to the test. After his first week of onboarding, Sam is tasked with five daily support tickets for the next two weeks. Thanks to solid onboarding, he handles his five tickets with ease, receives high satisfaction scores, and meets his KPIs. His manager, pleased with Sam’s performance, raises his daily quota to 15 tickets. Sam continues to exceed expectations and within 30 days is fully ramped with a quota of 30 tickets daily.
Jordan is welcomed to her job with a week-long, in-person training regiment that features a large binder full of paperwork, procedures, and tests. After sitting through lectures, homework, and tests, she is also tasked with a quota of 5 daily support tickets. At the two-week mark, she is not adequately meeting her KPIs, so her manager reduces her quota to three tickets. By the end of her first 30 days, Jordan is still struggling to find her footing and receiving sub-par satisfaction scores. Frustrated, discouraged, and without a way to hone her skills, she decides to leave the company while her best friend continues down the path to productivity.
Measure KPIs that matter
Customer service teams experience situations like these every day. However, forward-thinking companies and managers like Sam’s use the power of data to inform customer service training initiatives and drive rep performance. According to a study by Dimension Data, 72% of customer service leaders say analytics enable better performance; yet, 20% of contact centers don’t measure the benefits of training. In the midst of demanding team responsibilities and increasing customer demands, it’s difficult to set training goals and measure the impact on rep performance. While there are plenty of valuable KPIs, here are a few that provide actionable insights for customer service training efforts:
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is an index score, rated on a 0-100% scale, and is calculated by surveying how the customer values the quality of the interaction. CSAT is helpful as it measures the customer’s satisfaction regardless of channel—whether it was a phone call, online chat, email, or anything else.
Net Promoter Scores (NPS) measures customer experience on a 0-10 scale. Customer service reps ask customers how likely they are to recommend the company to a friend or colleague. A 9 or 10 rating means customers are promoting the company and is a fantastic indicator of customer service team improvement.
Churn, also known as attrition or agent turnover, measures the percentage of employees leaving a company. Call centers have a bad reputation for high turnover, both from voluntary and involuntary termination. If customer service teams are experiencing a high churn level, it may be time to review onboarding and training to ensure reps are equipped with the skills they need to be successful.
Training that drives KPIs
We work with a variety of customer service teams that leverage Lessonly’s training software to drive higher CSAT and NPS scores. They’ve also seen higher retention rates when reps complete training with Lessonly. In fact, one such company saw remarkable KPI progress, including:
- Reps who received training with Lessonly have average CSAT scores of 81%. Reps who didn’t received a score of 70%.
- New reps trained with Lessonly see NPS increase by 16%.
- Attrition rates for reps onboarded with Lessonly were 15 points lower than reps without Lessonly.
We asked our customers what training topics contribute to improved KPI scores—here are a few of their favorites:
- Going Above and Beyond for the Customer—Nothing helps explain the lengths that reps should go to for customers like first-hand stories. Crowdsource stories from existing reps that detail times they went the extra mile to deliver excellent service. This makes the content more real and engaging for other team members.
- How to To Deal with an Upset Customer—The way reps handle situations with angry or upset customers makes the difference between redeeming the relationship—and earning a good CSAT—or losing their business. Take the time to train reps on what not to do to keep complaints from going from bad to worse.
- Why We Want Active Promoters—NPS can be difficult understand. Explain why it’s important to track it and how it benefits the entire business.
- How to Ask Customers to Take Their Survey—NPS lives and dies on the willingness of customers to take the survey. Train reps to guide customers through the surveys to ensure that NPS is correctly calculated.
These are just a handful of training examples to help customer service teams meet their KPIs performance. Regardless of what metrics your team uses, remember that the best customer service leaders focus on measuring the progress that reps make against each KPI. The data will provide valuable insight on training efforts and how it impacts rep performance—and business success.
Improve your customer service KPIs with Lessonly by Seismic
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