UNSTUCK

Introduction

Delivering exceptional customer support is no longer just a differentiator – it’s an absolute necessity. Organizations are under immense pressure to provide timely, personalized and seamless experiences across various channels. Customer expectations are constantly evolving, and so customer service teams must be equipped and ready to keep up with them.

The problem is, customer support can often be a ‘firefighting’ routine that’s hard to break out of. In fact, when we surveyed Customer Support professionals for our research, one respondent shared that support teams are “often underfunded, understaffed, and left out of strategic planning.” How can Support teams brainstorm for new ways to get ahead when all their energy is spent on maintaining its current level of service?

We created Unstuck to give busy Support teams a playbook they can turn to for ideas and best practice around how to elevate your customer service game. From teamwork to tooling, Unstuck shares little tips, sage advice, and big ideas from our very own team, as well as Customer Support professionals, senior leaders, and even entrepreneur founders.

Whether you’re looking for better ways of doing things, or you just want to give your Support agents a fun new challenge to try, we hope Unstuck unsticks something for you.

Table of Contents

• Tips for Customer Experience
• Tips for Efficiency
• Tips for Happier Teams
• Tips for Recognition
• About Geckoboard
• Data Sources
• Wins from Our Customers

Tips for Customer Experience

1. Hold regular team retrospectives
   No one has more information on how to improve your Support team than your Support Agents themselves. They are also often the least consulted. Hold broad-reaching team retrospectives to determine opportunities for improving team frustrations. Brainstorm ideas on improvements, and commit to trying one out.

2. Model future ticket demand based on seasonality and trends to anticipate resourcing needs
   Be proactive in your staffing model. Think about upcoming changes to your business, such as seasonality, promotions, service updates, or feature launches, and forecast incoming volume based on the impact these changes will have. Find the average number of cases each agent can handle per hour, and then calculate the number of agent hours you’ll need to increase or decrease to handle the forecasted change in volume.

3. Close the loop on negative feedback
   As you track CX metrics over time, you might occasionally see dips in core KPIs (e.g. NPS). To help both your company and clients feel successful after customer feedback has been delivered, as well as recover poor CX metrics, you need to have an efficient process for taking action and closing the loop.

4. Monitor negative CSAT scores and follow up
   First step: implement a feedback system on your customer support tickets. Great! Now, you’ll need a way to monitor conversations that receive a bad satisfaction rating. Most help desks will allow you to set up notifications that email managers when a bad rating comes in. You can also set up a queue to see all of them at once. Monitoring the “drivers of dissatisfaction” will help you understand the common causes for customer unhappiness.

5. Expand your team’s availability outside of local business hours
   Offer weekend and evening support to reduce first response times, or get ahead of the Monday morning inbox explosion. You can do this a number of different ways, including scheduling agents into different shifts or scaling your team around the globe. A follow-the-sun model where agents located globally all work their own daytime hours can be particularly helpful if you support customers around the globe too, as it gives you local insight and language capabilities.

6. Optimize your CSAT survey for more responses
   CSAT surveys are a valuable source of customer information. But all too frequently, customers don’t fill them out. By improving your survey design, you can collect as many CSAT scores as possible.

7. Compare your metric with industry benchmarks
   While there are multiple methods for understanding if your NPS is good or bad, external industry benchmarking gives you another way to contextualize your score. Include benchmarks in your internal reporting for key stakeholders and specific departments to monitor how you’re tracking against your industry, and showcase your performance against the wider industry.

8. Use customer journey mapping to see your customer’s experience from their perspective
   Recreate the journey your customer goes on to understand things from their perspective. This can help you find opportunities to improve onboarding, make it easier to use your product, and create effortless support experiences.

9. Create an autoresponder
   Set up automated emails to respond to all new support inquiries. These autoresponders accomplish several things, including acknowledging that the ticket was received, setting expectations on when to expect a response, and directing customers to the help center so they can find their own answers.

10. Analyze help center searches
    The terms that customers search for in your help center are a source of data. Dissect this data to uncover many different insights, such as what search terms result in zero results being returned. Use this to improve things like your tagging process, make existing articles more discoverable, or to create new documentation to close the gaps.

11. Create a separate Twitter account for customer service and outage communication
    If you’re frequently communicating with customers over Twitter, you may want to create a separate Twitter handle dedicated to helping customers. This will prevent your status and customer service tweets from overwhelming your marketing material.

12. Follow up on customer feedback
    Customers leave feedback and CSAT ratings on only a fraction of your customer interactions and touchpoints. So, whenever you receive a review from your users, make sure to make the most out of it. Following up on CSAT and feedback is the easiest way to win back disappointed customers and build customer loyalty.

Tips for Efficiency

1. Help agents prioritize workloads by giving tickets a priority score
   While all tickets are important, not all tickets are urgent. Assigning tickets a different urgency level depending on the customer type and severity of the issue can help agents give fast responses when needed.

2. Set up chatbots
   Set up bots to direct customers to resources that may help them resolve their issue or that ask for more information to help an agent resolve their issue in fewer touches. Many help desks offer automated bots that you can simply enable.

3. Review your tagging process and build a taxonomy to ensure accuracy
   If you’re tagging tickets with details like product category, reason for contact, or any other data, regularly review if your tagging is accurate.

4. Use screensharing and co-browsing to see what your customer sees
   A picture says a thousand words, and a screenshare is worth millions. Tools like Screenjar and Median are invaluable for helping agents diagnose problems or walk users through more complex tasks.

5. Implement a ticketing system
   If you’ve not yet adopted a purpose-built ticketing system then it might be time to do so.

6. Use outsource partners to help during busy periods
   Outsourcing isn’t just a dirty word when it comes to customer service. Nowadays, many outsourcing vendors are dedicated to quality service and can actually elevate your customers’ experience.

7. A summary per mail keeps misunderstandings at bay
   Summarizing what you understood about the customer’s situation is your first signpost towards a solution.

8. Use BrowserStack to replicate customer issues
   If your product is supported on multiple devices, your support team will need to be able to test on those devices.

9. Choose data-driven insights to lead your decision-making
   Gather metrics, questions, and industry feedback. Establish which data sources are essential for your support workflows to enable decisions that align with customer care.

10. Set a feedback structure for your team’s activity
    Regularly review how your customer support teams are performing against your outlined metrics and feedback from relevant sources.

Tips for Recognition

1. Create a team dashboard
   Having all your most important metrics in one place that agents can easily access means everyone can quickly understand what’s going on.

2. Apply the Business Model Canvas
   Support may be a department within a company, but consider running it as a mini business within the business.

3. Offer work shadowing with other departments
   One way to build better relationships between support and the rest of the business is to work on raising awareness for the work support does.

4. Regularly surface CS KPIs and emerging trends to the rest of the business
   Use dashboards to surface your team’s KPIs and increase recognition of their hard work.

5. Celebrate those little wins to keep the team motivated
   In customer support, you are often too close to troubles, issues and frustrations, and those can get to you or anyone in the team.

6. Encourage the leap from CX to Product
   Did you know that the knowledge agents gain working in support makes them excellent additions to your Product team?

7. Build relationships with other teams
   How isolated is your support team from other departments? Connections between support and product, marketing, and sales are extremely valuable to any business.

About Geckoboard

Geckoboard is a software company that makes it easy for teams to build and share beautiful dashboards. Since 2010, we’ve been helping businesses put data at the heart of their culture and decision making.

Geckoboard allows you to select the most relevant data and visualize it in a way that makes sense to you and your team.

Data Sources

Wins from Our Customers

At a glance, everyone in our organization can instantly see how we’re doing.
– Mike Johnson, President and CEO

We have gone from spending a lot of time creating charts to a dashboard that is easy to create, update and share.
– Lakisha Miller-Barclay, CEO

Geckoboard has eliminated the frustration of waiting for reports in order to make smart business decisions.
– John Andrews, Founder

We want to be as data driven as we can and dashboards allow us to share the right data with each team.
– Emiel van Lenthe, Chief of Marketing and Operations

Clearer data. Better Customer Support.

At Geckoboard, we’re on a mission to make it easy for Support teams to keep an eye on their most important metrics.

Our dashboards enable customer service teams to build beautiful dashboards within minutes so that they can have a realtime view of what’s going on in Support at any given moment.