3 Ways to Measure Quality in Support Emails

In the past, support was just answering phone calls coming into a call bank. The customer didn’t expect anything other than getting the answer to their question, and as long as they did, they were satisfied. However, as support has grown more prolific,  the bar for customer loyalty has become higher as well. Being able to measure and understand the quality of your support responses has also become more important. 

According to The Effortless Experience, 80.5 percent of service organizations say their representatives’ performance has not improved noticeably over the past couple of years. What this means is, despite the rising tide of customer expectations and needs, customer support agents’ quality is not rising with it. Focusing on customer insights and coaching quality throughout your company’s support experience is incredibly important, especially to maintain customer loyalty and drop churn. Let’s look a bit more into why and how you can use customer reach out and quality review to boost your team’s success:

What Does ‘Quality’ Mean?

Quality interaction with customer support is not just about the customer’s satisfaction with the solution—it’s about  the response. Is it enough to instill confidence and loyalty in the customer and keep them coming back? 

Trust is key when it comes to customers. With a variety of options to choose from, customers look for a brand with which they can resonate emotionally. In fact, when a brand touches and aligns with a customer’s value system, the company has the opportunity to increase ROI and sales growth as much as 50-100%, according to Gary Reisman. Quality and consistency in your support responses and branding cultivates trust with your customers, allowing them to get comfortable  with your team, and keeps them coming back. People are more likely to continue doing something if they are familiar with it and already know how it works—and each time they do, if it continues to work as expected, they grow more and more attached.

Quality control is also important because it creates an expectation benchmark for your employees. By understanding expectations, they are better able to measure themselves and their performance outside of developmental or one-on-one conversations. Just as regularity and knowing what to expect creates a sense of peace with your customer, it does so with your employees as well. So, what are some of the best ways to measure quality in support emails? Let’s get started.

Peer Review

While there are a number of excellent methods for measuring customer happiness and satisfaction from the customer themselves, one of the easiest ways to measure quality is by having someone who knows what quality looks like going through responses with a fine tooth comb. Peer review is a resource that can be implemented fairly easily on most support teams and, unlike a managerial review, this has the benefit of being a bit more ad hoc and casual. There are a few ways that you can get peer review implemented in your team, depending on the structure and your needs:

  • Group peer review: have one person bring in a ticket or phone/video recording and everyone on the team says how they would have responded to the ticket, and they also review the original agent’s response.
  • One-on-one peer review: allow team members to review each other’s tickets on an ad hoc basis while going through the inbox and looking through their own tickets.
  • Internal automated peer review: build something internally that automatically assigns randomized tickets out to other agents for review.
  • Outside service for peer review: there are tons of tools out there that systematize peer review and make it easy to conduct. If you have the budget, this may be a good option!

While each of these has its own individual benefits, peer review as a whole is excellent for fine-tuning brand voice, grammar, and spelling issues. It also assures that team members are providing the right information for your customers. The people emailing in for support are not the best people to judge whether they got the best answer: the members of your team are. Maximize your ticket quality by fostering a uniform understanding of brand voice and methodology for providing support.

CSAT

Customer Satisfaction, also known as CSAT and sometimes Customer Happiness, refers to a customer’s feelings about a specific interaction with your support team. It’s commonly measured either by linking the option to provide insights right in the signature of an email or by sending a survey to the customer after the interaction. It’s an excellent way to get an episodic, rather than overhead, view of how your customers feel about your support. To truly maximize your learning, it’s best to include the option to leave a comment so that the customer insights don’t exist in a vacuum.

Measuring CSAT is useful because it allows you to get in the moment insights on how customers like your service. As opposed to peer review which gets into the nitty gritty technical side of how a customer support agent should be responding, CSAT gives you and your team an understanding of how the customer feels about how you present the information, rather than whether the information is correct or not. However, because it is so episodic CSAT doesn’t provide a good overall view of customer loyalty. 60-80% of customers who churn said they were satisfied or very satisfied in their last CSAT survey. So, it is best used in combination with another quality assurance method that also measures loyalty on a grander scale. The Nicereply + Freshdesk integration offers a great way to gain insights into your CSAT while also allowing you to view other metrics from both platforms. So, by monitoring both, you’ll know if you are continuing to maintain or boost quality in your responses and product if your CSAT is going up.

Customer Effort

An individual’s customer effort score, or CES, measures how much effort they have had to put in in order to get to an answer. Support should be easy. When you start to see your average or overall customer effort score rise, you’ll also likely start to see more churn. In fact, when in comparison with CSAT, CES is 1.8x at predicting customer churn and loyalty.

CES and CSAT are measured similarly, in that they both can come in the form of surveys sent post-interaction. However, CSAT asks about how a customer feels after an interaction, whereas CES helps you to pin down where in your support process (or product itself) customers run into trouble. CES helps you find things which, if you resolve in the long run, helps to remedy many things with the potential to be detrimental to loyalty and stickiness of your brand, CSAT just helps you pin down customer emotions in the moment.

Use CES to increase quality by understanding where you could better things like documentation or methodology of the support process in order to make the customer work less. Take stock of the areas where customers are having the most pain, and start to shift the experience to make it easier for your customer. While many people think of quality as being specifically part of the support response, quality of experience also comes into play and is important to consider. Create a quality experience for your customers by encouraging low effort interactions and you’re doing something right.

Conclusion

Surveys, CSAT, CES, and peer review are excellent ways to ensure that your team is maintaining quality in their responses. While they all work well on their own, when used together to create a story of the customer experience, they’ll be much more effective. Utilizing tools like our Nicereply + Freshdesk integration helps you collect important data and customer insights to positively impact your support strategy and quality. By combining the insights that you receive from each one, you gain an even more solid understanding of what you could be doing better in your support strategy to promote loyalty and trust, and what you might be able to change within your product to make it a bit more intuitive. 

Maintaining quality and giving customers a uniform, excellent, easy experience every time is the best way to ensure that people continue using your product.