A Swedish fiber broadband provider did an experiment in which they had 4 people do everyday tasks while wearing a virtual reality headset. The headset would use a camera to show them everything they would normally see, with a slight delay. It’s an amusing way to show what happens when you see things with a time lag - each participant failed at everyday tasks because they weren’t seeing the world around them in real time.
Why then, do people expect to successfully manage a customer service team without real-time metrics to guide them?
Since tracking metrics in real-time is one of the most important parts of managing a successful team, we’ve put together a list of the top 4 benefits of monitoring live Zendesk metrics throughout the day:
1. You Will Understand How Your Support Team Is Performing
Without real-time metrics, you’ll never understand how your support team is performing. Only how they have been performing.
There’s a big difference between those two scenarios. It’s like driving a car by only looking in your rear view mirrors. Sure, you may drive for a little without crashing, but you’re bound to crash the second something unexpected happens.
Using real-time metrics allows you to see both what’s in front of you and behind you. By monitoring how your team is performing in real-time, you are able to correct course much faster if you happen to stray from your targets. It also enables you to better predict what will happen in the future by combining current data with historical data.
You’ll have a better understanding of how your support team is performing. Additionally, you'll better manage and correct your team when they aren’t performing well.
2. You Can See Where Tickets Are Getting Stuck in the Process
It can be tricky to identify where tickets are held up during the support process. There is almost always one or two bottlenecks in the ticket process. A bottleneck could be something your team needs to work on, or it could be the result of your customer's actions.
Our sister company, Compuquip, identified two bottlenecks by using real-time data. The first was in the way that customers submitted tickets. Customers would submit tickets via phone, which slowed down the process.
They also noticed that their engineers were not triaging tickets effectively. By fixing their two bottlenecks, Compuquip lowered their response time to under 8 minutes.
3. You Will Identify Problem Customers Early with Repeat Ticket Openers
There's always one problem customer who your whole team knows by name. Some teams are luckier than others, and it takes them a while to identify who that problem customer is, but every team finds their problem customer eventually. Although when you monitor your metrics in real-time, you won’t need to wait to identify problem customers because you’ll see the data almost instantly.
Identifying problem customers early will allow you to identify opportunities to train a customer. This can go a long way in protecting your service team's valuable time.
4. You Can Track How Fast Your Team Is Responding
When it comes to responsiveness, we can’t stress the importance enough. The response time of your customer service team can cause a company to sink or swim, because just one dip in responsiveness could result in lost customers. Check out these eye-opening metrics (pulled from a previous blog):
- Failure to resolve an issue quickly is one of the top 2 reasons for a customer loss.
- 41% of customers expect a response within 6 hours, and 24 hours is often considered the maximum acceptable response time.
Tracking responsiveness in real time enables you to speed up your team’s support right away. You'll be able to prevent your team from slipping on response time in the first place as opposed to realizing and addressing the issues weeks later.
with a service ticket dashboard, it's easy to monitor your metrics in real time
The Best Way to Track Zendesk Metrics in Real Time
There’s no better way to monitor metrics in real time than with BrightGauge and Zendesk together. Using both dashboards and automated reports in one simple solution allows you to display all your key metrics for everyone to see - a surefire way to encourage your team to rally around your company’s goals!
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