Support metrics my C-suite likes to see and how I cascade it to my team
Kenji Hayward
Leading Global Support @Front | Creator of AXIS | Scaling CX teams of the future and sharing my journey
Last week, I talked about the importance of championing the right KPIs, no matter who you report to. This includes every stakeholder, so when Dan O'Connell joined as Front’s new CEO earlier this year, I knew I had to understand his expectations.
I asked him what he looks at first when I send my weekly updates on support performance. These made the list:
As Dan puts it, “In a saturated market, your customer experience is what sets you apart. Every touchpoint — from support to sales — is a chance to prove why customers choose you. Solid support is what separates good products from great ones.”?
Meanwhile, my direct manager, Chief of Engineering, Product, and Design Officer Mohammed Attar , favors the JIRA bug report in my reporting — specifically how many issues support creates in comparison to how many issues engineering resolves. If the gap is widening, then we dig into why.
Once I’ve got exec-level goals locked, it’s time to translate them to my team into objectives and key results (OKRs). It’s an exercise of taking the higher level, more business outcome-driven goals from leadership and distilling them into more detailed tactics owned by the agents.
Cascading goals to my team
Whenever I’m setting OKRs with my team, whether it’s for our quarterly planning or a shift in priorities due to new leadership, I use a similar framework as when we decided to make our support metrics public:
My team is remote, so they appreciate weekly highlights showing their progress toward our OKRs. Everything is summarized in easy-to-read charts that are color coded so the data can be understood at a glance. I use a leaderboard showcasing the top two agents who were crushing it that week across three categories:
??Queue Crushers - Top number of messages sent (segmented by support tiers)
??Speed Racers - Fastest average response time
???Happy Campers - Most 5-star CSAT scores (segmented by support tiers)
This is where understanding your team’s strengths can help you build a more balanced team. Find out which support personas make up your team with our support archetype quiz!?
While queue work is important, I also like giving public kudos to teammates who went above and beyond — whether that’s covering when a teammate is OOO or troubleshooting a broken step in our workflow. So I name a GOAT (greatest of all time) of the week that helps strike a balance.?
I also try to make the data fun by sprinkling in shout-outs, celebrating birthdays and work anniversaries, sharing a support meme, and including emojis and GIFs. Let me know if you want me to dive deeper into team motivation, and I’ll consider going into more detail in another edition.
At the end of the day, effective reporting is all about knowing your audience. Who is going to read the report? What do they care about? What do you want them to understand from the overview? Ask the audience directly what they want to see or if they think something is missing. Even if your audience might not know what you should be reporting on (and that’s a larger challenge), as long as you’re open to learning, adapting, and iterating, you’ll get to a useful and actionable report. What’s worked for you?
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Helping Customer Pros be better at what they do - Head of CX @ AIHR - Host of Growth Support
3 个月As I went through our data and reporting with our new team members (literally today) there were a few things that cane up in the conversation as well. There are metrics that the C-Suite likes to see, but there are also points where teams may not need to (or should) see Some comments that came up: 1. Just because they are on this report does not mean they are what we base personal performance on — PLEASE do not game them. 2. The data does not know what is going on outside the systems — it’s up to us to translate them within the context of the business changes 3. (Comment from my team) “I’m gonna have to hold myself back from checking this every week” — ?? because we shouldn’t hyper-fixate on it, we should aim to deliver the best service possible in a healthy way. Depending in the type of team you have, what you measure, and how you use it will change and evolve. Whether that is to the C-Suite, or your team. Nice edition Kenji Hayward