Managing Customer Satisfaction: The Help Desk Metrics Best Practices that you should be working on

In order to understand how to manage consumer satisfaction, it is very important to know what it means in today’s day and age. Today consumer satisfaction is a very non-quantitative term and quite difficult to measure and even more difficult to quantify.

Hence the only ways that a consumer can be kept satisfied is through genuine measures which are tried and tested to some extent and needs to implement at the earliest if you haven’t already in your organization.

What are some of the tools that you require to increase and enhance consumer satisfaction?

First and foremost you need a team of qualified people to work on increasing and enhancing your consumer experience. They need to be proficient in the language that they need to interact in and this factor is almost irreplaceable. For example if you are setting up a help desk to work on consumer satisfaction in Brazil and your team is not adept at the spoken language in that country, the purpose of setting up the help desk is lost.

Secondly you need trained personnel to handle customer grievances and address them in the correct manner. You also need a manager who knows the ins and outs of this help desk and can manage the people on board efficiently.

What are some of the help desk metrics that you should be working on and implement ASAP.

Work on reports as they make the goal more attainable

Each help desk should be able to churn out reports which are crystal clear about various activities, challenges and victories that took place over the course of the month. These reports will not only serve as a reminder about how a complex problem was solved or handled, but also pave the way towards a responsible work attitude. Reports can be very interesting and the idea is to document every little challenge and triumph so that the work that was done is always highlighted and replicated if necessary and situation permits.

Reports also give the manager a fair idea about what is going on at every employee’s desk and how well or how inefficiently the employee is handling a particular situation. It will also clearly indicate whether or not the personnel needs training towards better work performance. Hence reports can go a long way in improving the level of customer satisfaction at the help desk.

Focus on the conversation per agent

When you are about to take into the conversation per agent ratio in order to measure consumer satisfaction, you need to be aware that each case or challenge requires a varying amount of time to solve. Complex tickets or problems need more time to resolve and understand and simple tickets need less time to resolve and understand. Hence measuring all this on the same scale can be a little unfair and impractical.

You need to be able to see on an average how much time a person takes to work on a particular ticket and that can give you a fair idea about the person’s efficiency. Moreover, it should also be noted that less time taken does not really mean the job well done. It can also mean that the help desk personnel is not doing his or her job very well. Its pretty relative as you can understand and the only way to come to some amount of conclusion is to take an average amount rather than look for exceptions. There can be good days and bad days too and that too should be taken into account.

Feedback calls to find out whether the customer found his answer

The best way to understand whether or not the consumer found the solution to his problem is through feedback calls which are placed right after the consumer calls. It is here that you will know whether or not the consumer is truly satisfied and what can be done to improve the quality of the help that is being given to the consumer at the help desk. A consumer who is not satisfied will rate the call poorly and that is where you can hear the call which has already been recorded and find a solution to the problem.

On the contrary if the call has gone very well and the consumer is very satisfied, he will rate the call highly and that too needs to be dissected in order to replicate and set forth an example. Hence these feedback calls are very important and should be a part of each and every help desk in order to improve quality and help the consumers find the solutions. Many customers like giving positive and constructive feedback and this can be used to improve customer satisfaction through the help desk team, to a great extent.

Since there are no definitive numbers to show customer satisfaction many enterprises do not take it very seriously, but the truth is that many metrics which are in use nowadays can be very conclusive in determining how satisfied your consumer is with your product and service and these figures need to be taken into serious consideration to propel growth.