Every respectable company must have an efficient customer support service. Most businesses operate in a very tough competition. Thats why they do not only have to offer customers high quality products and services, but also provide them with post sale support. What does it mean? It means that once a customer has purchased a product or a service he or she is eligible for support. For example, if you have purchased a brand new laptop or cell phone you should make sure that you can actually call customer support service of the producer company and ask questions as to products features, potential problems, bugs and other drawbacks. You can call even if you simply do not understand how to make use of a particular feature. There are two options here: you either get your questions answered and problems solved, and you stay loyal with the producer company, or customer support specialists failed to answer your questions and solve problems, and in such a case you will probably not buy this product ever again.
Thus, a particular company loses a regular customer in your person. If there are many people who are not satisfied with quality of customer support service the company loses many customers. By the way, one should know that if a customer decides not to buy from company A, he/she will most certainly buy with company B. This is how modern market works.
Why did we start with importance of customer support service? As you have understood this is a very important business unit in the company that directly contacts customers. Thats why it is very important and vital to evaluate customer support service performance and optimize it in order to deliver high quality services to end customers. You should know that many customers form their judgment about the company based on their communication experience with customer support service. This especially concerns webhosting and Internet service providers. So, evaluation of helpdesk performance is a must. So far, Balanced Scorecard is probably the best tool to be used to evaluate performance and communicate operational and strategic management. Why strategic management? Every business unit has its own goals in the company. The same time such goals should comply with general strategy, mission and values of the company. Balanced Scorecard helps align strategies of various business units in order to achieve ulti
mate strategic goals.
When talking about customer support service optimization and evaluation, key performance indicators from all four categories of Balanced Scorecard are vital: financial, customer, internal business processes, learning and growth. In order to correctly evaluate performance of a customer support service or a call center it is necessary to choose the right indicators. The right focus on most important things and proper analysis will provide top management of a call center with correct information to be used in decision making. For example, such indicators as customer satisfaction, abandoned calls rate, one and done calls rate, average waiting time, number of calls handled, number of problems solved, number of angry customers and many others may greatly help evaluate current performance, and locate weak points.