Do You Know Your Customer Service Type?
times, teams in this category have the highest level of customer satisfaction because they are more focused on solving customers' problems than on rapidly resolving tickets.
Masters of Complexity
If you were more drawn to the second statement, your company falls into the Masters of Complexity category. These companies have customer service teams driven by detailed support requests with many moving parts. Made up mostly of business vendors, software providers, and consulting firms, these companies tend to work longer hours and strive to provide a friendlier customer experience. The customer service teams tend to be larger, which helps to keep the ticket-per-agent ratio low and allows for customer service experiences that shine through even the most opaque questions.
Late Bloomers
If statement three best describes your company, don't fret—companies of all shapes and sizes can be categorized as Late Bloomers. What these companies have in common is that there is a missing piece within their customer service strategy. One of the frequently noted issues in this category is the tendency to spread agents too thin. Late Bloomers have a low number of agents dealing with a high ticket volume, and this can lead to slow reply times and little room for personalization. These companies could benefit greatly from an investment in additional agents, deflecting tickets through self-service, and switching to 24/7 customer service in place of the traditional nine-to-five operation.
Captains of Scale
If the fourth statement best describes your company's customer service, congratulations; you fall into the Captains of Scale category. These teams set the gold standard that other organizations strive to achieve. They take advantage of multiple support operation strategies to handle large ticket volumes, usually have large agent teams, and can deal with the most complicated requests. The customer support teams run like well-oiled machines and provide a well-rounded customer experience.
Industry benchmarks—including company size and audience type—are still useful points of comparison for many businesses, but today's companies often traverse many industries and no longer fit into neat categories. The next generation of benchmarking will give companies the opportunity to examine how their customer service stacks up outside of their industry and will provide them with the right data to improve their customer experience. Comparing companies across operational dimensions, instead of just one or two based on your company profile, will result in a benchmark that better relates to your company's resources, constraints, and business processes.
Using operational benchmarking, Babbel was able to compare itself to companies with high volume, 24/7 customer service operations that more accurately reflected their business behavior than the education category they were traditionally associated with. By gaining a deeper understanding of their customer type, they were able to identify how to improve their performance and ultimately better serve their customers. Like Babbel, understanding your company's category though benchmarking will help you develop a plan of action for better customer service that will be as unique and specialized as your company.
Jason Maynard leads the data and analytics team at Zendesk, a cloud-based customer service software company.