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How to Extract Maximum Value of Your Customer Service Data with Professional Customer Service Reports

Customer service reports blog post by datapine

Customer service and experience count now more than ever before—no compromises, no exceptions. Brands that invest in building faultless experiences and offer exceptional standards of customer service (CS) will set themselves apart from their competitors while earning genuine consumer loyalty.

When it comes to CS, in particular, today’s digital consumer is very much in charge. Due to the hyperconnected, incredibly convenient, and instantaneous nature of the modern consumer world, as well as the number of touchpoints on offer, maintaining excellent levels of service by utilizing carefully selected customer service KPIs is the ultimate key to survival.

That said, if you’re able to answer customer queries quickly and effectively, you stand to increase your brand loyalty tenfold. To optimize your CS offerings, you need access to the right data, and this is where a customer service KPI report comes into play.

This kind of report will empower your organization to understand its clients on a deeper level, consistently meeting their needs. Armed with the right insights and the right visualizations, a service report will make your organization smarter, more efficient, and ultimately, more consumer-facing (which is essential to ongoing growth in the digital age).

In this article, we will explain how data analytics can significantly improve your CS offerings while explaining the vital role reporting plays in propelling your business to new commercial heights. We’ll also look at a mix of inspiring dashboards and template examples based on different types of customer service reports.

Ready? Let's get started.

“There is only one boss. The customer.” – Sam Walton, founder of Walmart

What Is a Service Report?

A customer service report is a tool composed of a mix of customer service metrics that help organizations meet customer expectations and provide better experiences. Thanks to real-time data, businesses can optimize their service levels while increasing profits.

Customer service report example

From average response time to NPS score, a customer service report provides deep and valuable insight into key areas of your consumer-facing efforts. In turn, this will provide you with an astute understanding of the positive areas to build upon and the areas of improvement.

To provide the best possible standards of CS on a consistent basis, understanding how your consumers interact with your company is vital. Having the right online reporting tool will ensure your data stays up-to-date and evolves as your company changes.

In the Age of Information, there are several customer service reports to explore—each with different assets, attributes, and capabilities. It’s possible to use a customer service report for a wealth of different aims, goals, and purposes, some common types include:

Internal agent reports: In many ways, your customer service team is the beating heart of your entire organization. In fact, customer service and experience are two of the most important drivers of success in today’s digital world. An internal customer service report will give you the insights required to assess as well as demonstrate how well your customer service team deals with inquiries across multiple channels. This stringent level of internal insight will give you the data to track individual progress as well as collective output so that you can provide tailored support and training where required. This is an essential report for ongoing productivity and departmental progress.

External stakeholder reports: In addition to internal customer service analytics, you should work with external service reports. Tracking this branch of customer service data is essential for managing healthy relationships with external stakeholders, including partners, sponsors, and investors. By presenting your most valuable service insights in a dynamic visual format, you can make persuasive cases for planning and investment in a way that’s universally understood and accepted. External reports will also give you the tools to benchmark your success or progress against industry standards, which is often an important factor for gaining ongoing support from investors and stakeholders.

Real-time reports: Real-time service reports are designed to maximize your ability to respond to issues and inquiries under pressure. These types of customer support reports track ‘in the moment’  insights as they change, evolve, or emerge. By gaining access to the right daily customer service report, you can nip any rising issues in the bud while making concrete decisions that will ultimately improve your service operations and strategies. Having access to this highly responsive level of information is vital, especially when your service team is responsible for managing an ever-growing demand for consumer support.

Omnichannel service reports: Omnichannel reports are designed to consolidate essential service metrics across a host of consumer channels. Using these types of reports will help you manage your service strategy and output across a wealth of touchpoints including email, phone support, online chat, and social media with complete confidence. Not only will omnichannel reporting help you maximize overall responsiveness and efficiency - it will also give you the tools to uncover patterns or trends to keep improving your strategy.

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What Are the Benefits of Customer Service Reports?

Customer service reports benefits

Now that you know what a customer service report is and the role it plays in improving your consumer-facing processes, let’s look at the key benefits.

In the digital age, consumers are more empowered, more tech-savvy, and more demanding than ever before. If you don’t satisfy a customer’s needs or resolve their issues almost instantly or with a degree of competency that they deem unacceptable, they simply will not stick around. Add to this the fact that clients now trust the opinions of their peers more than the brand itself, and focusing on your CS offerings should be your topmost priority if you want to succeed.

There are seemingly infinite benefits to the pursuit of customer reporting. By gaining access to the right insights, you can:

  • Improve your company’s best response time

The response time is the backbone of any CS department or organization. We have written a bit more on the average response time below in our article, but the main point is to keep it as short as possible. If you track this metric in your weekly or monthly reports, you can significantly improve it by identifying your bottlenecks (maybe the number of available agents during a rush-hour shift is too low, for example).

  • Prevent callbacks about a repeat issue

Let’s face it, consumers don’t like to call back or repetitively point out a single issue. By utilizing comprehensive reports in which you can include the first call resolution metric (FCR) or recorded calls as they're critical, you will have immediate access to data and a better chance to act promptly, without providing low-level service that can cost you in the long run. Setting detailed reports on a single screen will enable you to increase the level of your support department and ensure customers are taken care of at all times.

  • Reward your top-performing agents and boost internal morale

Top-performing agents should be rewarded. If you see beneficial results in your reports, investigate further and see whose work has brought those results. Better yet, implement a team KPI dashboard that will show you immediately how your team is performing and where you need to allocate more resources (educational materials or workshops) so that the whole department has more chances to improve their results. You can also ask your top agents to educate other team members and provide them with tactics that bring success and sustainable development.

  • Track the level and nature of issues overtime to make informed strategic decisions

If you lose track and count of your customer issues when you manually insert information into a spreadsheet, you can cause serious issues in the long run. It’s simple to miss a row or comment made by another colleague, non-intentionally, but definitely harmful. If your reports, for example, have set intelligent alarms that will send you a notification as soon as an anomaly occurs, you can improve the tracking of issues and create an environment that will improve your decision-making processes in the future.

  • Gain a deeper insight into how your company is perceived by your customers

Another benefit is measuring satisfaction. A satisfied customer is worth more than any other indicator you could possibly track or evaluate. It is fairly known that a contented customer will recommend you on average to 3 friends, while the unsatisfied ones have the power to access and write on the Internet about their experiences with your brand. By regularly evaluating how you are perceived by your customers, you have the power to predict and act on potential future obstacles.

  • Evaluate and improve your net promoter score (NPS)

Net promoter score is one of the customer satisfaction metrics that are, simply put, all about referrals. The goal is to obtain as many promoters as you can which will enable you to expand your brand and enhance your loyalty rates. The more loyal consumers you have, the more rewards your company will reap. If you properly take advantage of ensuring your reports also include the net promoter score, you will be able to quickly evaluate how detractors, neutrals, and promoters affect your bottom line. In the above image, you see an example of an interactive way to display your NPS, dividing consumers into promoters, passives, and detractors.

Net promoter score NPS KPI for customer satisfaction
  • Enhance priceless retention and loyalty rates

Closely connected to the net promoter score, the retention and loyalty rate are all focused on gaining your customers’ trust and enabling them to spread positive words about your organization. Retaining a customer is essentially much less expensive than gaining a new one and with the help of a proper report, your CS department can thrive. By looking at your customer retention metrics you can also extract conclusions like which channels your target audience engages in the most and allocate your budget and efforts accordingly.

  • Make your CS department more effective by reducing costs

A customer service report sample can also help improve financial efficiency. Reducing support costs is not about cutting down manpower or investing the lowest amount of dollars into your support department. It’s mainly about optimizing your processes and reaching the highest quality of your services with the lowest costs possible. That would mean that your agents are efficient and trained pretty well, and the agents’ schedules are corresponding with the needs of the department. To have an at a glance overview, creating a customer support report will ensure that you monitor your expenses regularly and efficiently.

It’s clear that there are a host of tangible benefits as stated in our 8 points above, and many of them will have a positive impact on other areas of the business. To get details into each mentioned KPI, you can read more about it below in our examples section of the article.

In short, they offer the power to understand your company to make informed decisions based on accurate insights rather than making estimations and taking actions that offer little value to the organization or its customers.

Companies that grow their retention rates by as little as 5% often see profit increases ranging from 25% to 95%. Like this, you’ll not only be able to boost your retention rates significantly but you’ll also be able to boost your brand’s reputation, thereby resulting in commercial growth and increased profits.

We live in a world rife with invaluable digital insights. If you fail to use this information to your advantage, you are missing out on vital opportunities that can improve the efficiency, output, and cohesion of your organization’s CS department, which could prove disastrous in the long run.

  • Understand your customers’ preferred channels of communication

As we migrate towards an increasingly hyper-connected age dominated by digitally native consumers (mainly millennials and gen zers), consumers can access a wealth of information at the swipe of a screen or the click of a button. As such, today’s consumers like to interact with brands across an increasingly broad range of channels or touchpoints.

From Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat to TikTok, YouTube, mobile apps, online chat, email, and beyond, there are so many ways you can connect with your customers in the modern age. And while there is almost an endless scope for connecting with them you will find that almost everyone who interacts with your organization has a preferred channel.

By working with the right customer service analysis metrics, you can discover, at a glance, which channels your clients prefer for particular issues or communicative reasons. By uncovering this information with ease, you can branch out to your consumers using the right method, solving their issues or pain points in a way that’s personable and meets their needs. This will boost your satisfaction rates, improve your brand reputation, and grow the company.

  • Plan staffing schedules and spot the need for training

Providing your agents with the right training is essential to the ongoing growth and development of your CS department. Without adequate training and mentorship, your agents will not only thrive in their roles, but they will become more efficient, responsive, adaptable, and innovative.

With the right customer report, you can pinpoint where your agents are struggling to resolve your consumers’ issues or answer the right questions. Using this specific information to your advantage, you can provide tailored training to get straight to the root of the issue and ensure your team can tackle everything that comes their way with confidence.

Using this type of service report, you can also gain an informed understanding of how many agents you need working at one time, overseeing the entire operation with clarity to jump in and offer support or training when it’s needed. These business dashboards will also help you understand the days and times your customers are contacting you the most. Having this info is valuable as it will allow you to plan shifts and make sure you have the number of agents needed to cover the volume of tickets at any given time, boosting your service levels in the process.

Client support can prove to be a challenging role, and by offering your agents practical mentorship, it’s more than likely that you will also boost morale, motivate your team to keep improving and boost productivity across the board.

  • Identify areas for product improvement

This is a commonly overlooked facet of CS success, but it's incredibly important: the quality or value of your products will have a direct impact on the success of your service strategy. 

By using a service report to monitor specific queries or issues, you will swiftly paint a picture concerning any products that are failing to meet your consumers’ needs or expectations.

If you’re a fitness tech supplier, for instance, and you notice a spike in complaints centered on the interface quality of your latest outdoor pursuits watch, you can quickly notify your product team about the specific issues resulting in complaints.

By providing this level of consumer intelligence, a report on customer service essentially becomes a vessel for overall organizational improvement. It’s true that your CS department is your main point of consumer communication or resolution. But it’s vital to understand that it’s also a vessel for invaluable frontline information.

Armed with dynamic information, your CS department will become a valuable hub for organizational intelligence, helping you improve your communications, marketing messaging, and the products you develop, sell, and promote.

Your Chance: Want to test a customer service reporting software?
Explore our 14 day free trial & benefit from customer service reports!

Customer Service Reports Examples & Templates

We’ve looked at the what and why of customer reports, and now we’re going to explore the primary customer service dashboards associated with an organization’s various CS-based activities.

1. Customer Service Team Dashboard

In this day and age, to provide an exceptional standard of service, you must exceed customer expectations.

This customer service report template focuses on the team metrics and KPIs

**click to enlarge**

This first customer service report sample hones your team’s overall performance on a daily and monthly basis by focusing on response time and individual agent performance all in one centralized space. Your team’s performance is vital to the success of your entire operation and this BI dashboard will help you make valuable contributions toward driving your organization forward.

Main KPIs:

  • Average response time: To enhance your customer satisfaction level and productivity rates, keeping your average response time to a minimum is a must. This particular KPI measures the time right from the moment a customer makes a call to the moment an agent responds. This along with other related service desk KPIs offer an excellent insight into your overall CS performance levels.
  • First call resolution: The First call resolution rate gives a clear indication of how successful your team is at solving an issue upon the first contact. An improvement in this area might increase your call handle rate, but it will have a minor impact if your first call resolution level has improved.
  • Top agents: Staff satisfaction and morale are perhaps one of the most vital drivers of positive customer support performance. By tracking this metric over several months, you’ll be able to identify which of your agents can benefit from additional support and training and which agents you should reward and recognize.
  • The number of issues: By understanding the volume of incoming calls and queries coming as well as the nature of each inquiry, you’ll be able to make informed staffing decisions to cope with demand at particular times while improving your strategy to meet the needs of your customers.

2. Customer Satisfaction Dashboard

Customer satisfaction remains a number one priority for today’s businesses as it translates to an increase in brand loyalty and in many cases, an increased spend per customer.

The Customer Satisfaction dashboard displays the Customer Effort Score, the Net Promoter Score, that both impact the customer satisfaction

**click to enlarge**

Focused on all primary aspects of customer satisfaction, experience, perception, and retention, this particular example will help you keep your consumer happy, engaged, and loyal to your business.

Main KPIs:

  • Net promoter score (NPS): Your NPS is critical to your entire operation because it shows the perception of your support levels by the public. Essentially, it determines how likely someone is to refer you to their peers. On a scale of 1 – 10, and based on their scores, customers are either considered promoters (9-10), passives (7-8), or detractors (0-6). By improving your NPS score, you’ll ultimately see an increase in growth and loyalty.
  • Customer effort score: This is a particularly critical KPI as it gives you a glimpse into the standard of your overall customer experience offerings. By understanding the elements of your customer experience that are letting your company down, you’ll be able to make vital improvements and in turn, grow the company.
  • Customer retention: As mentioned, customer retention is essential to the success of your organization. By setting a retention rate target and working towards it, you’ll improve your brand image and expand your customer base over time.

3. Customer Support KPI Dashboard

Regardless of your CS role or level of seniority, there’s always room for improvement.

Call center data analytics presented with the revenue value, costs per support, average time to solve an issue wand overall satisfaction

 

**click to enlarge**

That last customer service report template is heavily populated with information and tracks a host of indicators that are common to a helpdesk dashboard in addition to customer satisfaction or even a customer service dashboard. With a wealth of invaluable insights available on one easy-to-navigate platform, this dashboard offers managers all the support information they need at a glance with the option to drill deeper into individual performance indicators and insights.

Main KPIs:

  • Service level: This particular metric calculates your capacity to complete the standards confirmed in the service level agreement (SLA) you provide to your customers. This KPI is important as it showcases your commitment to delivering on your promises and will help you identify ways in which you can improve your overall standards.
  • Customer support vs revenue: A priceless support metric, this KPI helps you to calculate how much the support costs are in relation to the total revenue. If you can provide incredibly high standards of service for decreased costs, commercial growth and increased revenue are inevitable. This KPI will help you gain the insights you need to achieve this goal.
  • Customer satisfaction: A satisfied customer lies at the beating heart of every successful organization. By getting a tangible gauge of what your customers currently think of you, you’ll be able to make improvements in the areas that matter most.

4. Customer Retention Dashboard

It’s no secret that retaining existing customers is more cost-effective than attracting new ones. And given the fact that loyal customers spend an average of 67% more than new consumers, investing in your retention strategies and activities will prove essential to your success.

This is a service report dashboard example focusing on customer retention

**click to enlarge**

As one of our most valuable service reports, this dynamic customer retention dashboard is designed to sustainably improve your consumer retention rates.

Visually balanced and featuring charts, graphs, and visualizations that offer at-a-glance insights into retention-centric progress and trend-based insights, this report is a go-to resource for companies across industries.

Here, you will find everything you need to benchmark your success in specific customer retention-centric areas while identifying potential strengths and weaknesses—a visual vessel for CS success.

Main KPIs:

  • Customer churn: This sales KPI also plays an essential role in customer retention, as it helps you understand which portion or percentage of your customers have stopped using your business or service over a set timeframe. Here, you can identify peaks or troughs in your customer churn rates, pinpoint potential loyalty issues, and create targeted strategies to reduce them.
  • Net retention rate: Your net retention rate is important as it gives you a deeper insight into new vs. repeat customer churn rates while calculating new product or service cancellations over a set period. By tracking the net retention rate consistently, you will be able to make valuable tweaks or improvements to your service or customer experience journey.
  • Revenue churn: This revenue-focused KPI will help you track, monitor, and measure the percentage of revenue your business has lost from your existing customers. Here, you can trace trends, pinpoint where the revenue loss came from (a product cancellation or service downgrade, for example), and make strategic refinements to reduce your revenue churn rates consistently.
  • MRR growth rate: Your MRR (monthly recurring revenue) is another essential metric. It will tell you how your retention rates are affecting your bottom line over a set period. In turn, you will gain a clear understanding of what might be affecting your MRR and tackle the issue head-on.

“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” –Donald Porter, V.P of British Airways

5. Agent Talk Dashboard

Despite the ever-growing number of channels available to today's customers, many people still like to communicate the 'old-fashioned' way - via the telephone.

Customer service report example: a dashboard focusing on the performance of talk support

**click to enlarge**

The quality of your calls counts - and this talk-centric customer service report will tell you all you need to make your telephone-based communications more impactful and efficient based on four key areas: unsuccessful inbound calls, general efficiency, agent activity, and conversation quality.

This insightful Zendesk dashboard will give you the tools you need to answer more calls and resolve more complaints within a specific time frame without compromising on service quality. By using this customer service report example as your talk-based informational North Star, you will improve the success of your CS offerings exponentially, improving your brand reputation in the process.

Main KPIs:

  • Answer time: This most telling metric will give you an accurate gauge of how long it takes your agents to answer calls. By tracking this KPI consistently, you will gain an understanding of exactly how efficient your call system is and pinpoint any potential weaknesses so you can make targeted improvements.
  • Leg talk time: This particular customer service analysis example is based on how long it takes your agents to provide a resolution during a customer call. Each leg refers to a different stage of the service or sales cycle, providing you with targeted information that will empower you to make improvements or agent support exactly where it’s needed.
  • Unsuccessful inbound calls: Presented as a digestible bar chart, this KPI tracks how many customers calls fail to connect or get picked up within a specific period, as well as the primary reasons why. Gaining access to this level of detailed service information will empower you to understand where your service is failing most and dig deeper into the issue, improving your overall customer experience offerings in the process.
  • Quality rate: The quality rate KPI measures the general quality of your call center. Essentially, the quality rate is the percentage of calls that receive good-quality reviews based on the total number of conversations. Setting a realistic benchmark will give you a continual gauge of your call center’s result, empowering you to respond to any dips in quality quickly, preserving your service offerings as a result.

6. Customer Service Quality Dashboard

When it comes to customer service analysis, monitoring the overall quality of your efforts will ensure you remain responsive, progressive, and efficient across the board. It’s not only important to be responsive in today’s competitive digital landscape – you must also be able to provide consistent resolutions to a variety of requests or issues with clarity and confidence. That’s where this effective customer service report template comes in.

Customer service report example tracking omnichannel metrics

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Featuring a dynamic mix of customer support analysis metrics, our customer service quality dashboard is designed to monitor your ongoing progress across your most engaged service channels, including email, telephone, online chat, and social media. Here, you can track integral trends or patterns in real-time and gauge your abandonment and resolution times and costs.

 Main KPIs:

  • Average resolution time: This customer service analysis report metric quantifies the length of time, in minutes, your service team takes to tie up consumer issues or requests. The reason this metric is so effective is that it takes standard as well as more specialist requests into account, offering an accurate weekly average. If you notice that your resolution times are dwindling, you can drill down into the issue and take targeted measures to streamline your processes for specific service channels.
  • Cost per resolution: Often featured within a customer service weekly report template, this service metric will tell you how much it actually costs to solve your consumers’ requests or issues. It’s possible to break this information down across specific channels and pinpoint the driving factors behind cost fluctuations. The aim here is to have lower costs and higher satisfaction rates by getting to the root of the problem swiftly. Rising costs could be related to platform licensing fees, inefficient team structures, or poor internal communication. You can uncover the issue and solve it.
  • Total & solved tickets by channel: This telling visualization will give you a balanced insight into your overall ticket status. Segmented into different service channels, it’s possible to keep your customer service reporting structure efficient while getting to grips with your service capacity and limitations. If you identify any dips or irregularities in your ticket handling success, you will be able to find out the reason why and get your weekly service strategy back on track.
  • Abandon rate: This essential service quality metric will give you an ongoing appraisal of how many people give up on a service interaction without having their issue solved. If you notice a spike in these numbers, immediate action is required. Using this visualization, you can understand whether issues like service backlogs, clunky resolution processes, or poorly trained agents are driving your numbers up. Armed with the right knowledge, you can get your service levels back on track quickly.
Your Chance: Want to test a customer service reporting software?
Explore our 14 day free trial & benefit from customer service reports!

13 Top Tips for Customer Service Data Analysis

While CS insights are priceless to any modern organization regardless of its industry or sector, due to the colossal volume of information available on a daily basis, creating and managing it effectively can prove to be challenging.

Here, we’re going to share 13 essential tips for effective customer service data analysis.

Top 13 tips for your customer service data analysis process

1. Create a detailed report plan

To generate the best possible service report, you have to create a solid customer-facing plan. You need to understand the scope of the data that you are going to report on and the roles of the stakeholders involved (from front-line reps to service development executives, communications specialists, and beyond). Creating a draft to ensure you have all the steps covered beforehand will save you a lot of time later on. With the help of a BI reporting tool, you can look at the bigger picture and identify what kind of report you are going to generate (more on that below), who are you going to address, and what is your end goal. Preparation and planning are key factors in creating a stable and gainful report practice, and you should not skip this step.

2. Structure your reports based on the end-user

Depending on whether you selected KPIs for your support team, departmental or C-level manager, structuring your data is of utmost importance. Who will use the customer report is the baseline of your report creation. This is also closely connected to selecting the right metrics (more on this below) as the team leader won’t collect and analyze the same metrics as the support agent, but focus on the team’s performance, for example, to be able to provide necessary training and ensure stable processes. Using a comprehensive online dashboard, you can monitor performance indicators related to your top agents, the number of issues, or the first call resolution time automatically, streamlining your customer service data analysis efforts in the process.

3. Use a mix of real-time and historical data

When you’re working with a customer support report template, it’s also important not to pigeonhole your analytical efforts. What we mean here is that you shouldn’t only work with one set of insights (only real-time metrics, for example). To get a well-rounded view of your service progress, capabilities, and strategy, it’s vital to explore both real-time metrics and historical insights. Taking this balanced approach will ensure you can respond to emerging issues swiftly while uncovering past patterns or trends that will help you formulate efficient service strategies across all key communication channels.

4. Choose your KPIs

Each business is different and insights that might prove particularly useful to one organization might not be the same for another. However, selecting the right KPIs for your business in a collaborative capacity is essential to the reports’ success. The average response time, for instance, will tell you how long it takes for an agent to respond to a customer call. If you respond swiftly and diligently, your brand image will remain positive, and the customer will certainly not complain. On the other hand, if you put them on hold for a longer period of time (more than a minute), the probability that they will hang up significantly increases but also the potential to harm your reputation.

Once you’ve identified the information that will help you enhance your CS offerings the most, you will be able to set up a visual data dashboard customized to your needs, goals, and objectives. To ensure that you get optimum value from certain metrics, you should set measurement time parameters that will give you a comprehensive snapshot of averages and trends. It will also give you the most accurate view of your CS data. That brings us to our next point. If you want a complete guide on how to choose the right indicators for your business, take a look at our KPIs vs metrics post!

5. Monitor and analyze your data regularly

To ensure your CS analysis report provides invaluable quality and the best possible insights, you need to regularly monitor and analyze your findings. To create a sustainable customer KPI report, utilizing modern software and online data analysis tools such as datapine will make sure your data is up to date and valid in any given situation.

By monitoring your information in real-time and graphically representing data through a series of charts you can easily manipulate and drill down into bits and pieces that would, otherwise, remain hidden. The analytical part is one of the most important steps you need to perform in order to successfully build and maintain a profitable strategy.

Through logical analysis, you will be able to meet your customers’ needs at every stage of their journey and provide a seamless service across every channel or touchpoint.

Customer reporting isn’t just collecting numerous data, but analyzing the numbers and answering important questions.  If you do that, you will take your customer service offerings to the next level.

6. Use a balanced mix of service KPIs

Once you’ve established your goals, selected your most valuable KPIs, and put everything together with the help of a dashboard generator, your customer service analysis success will boil down to drilling down into the right information at the right times.

Armed with a dashboard that consolidates all of the most important data from your CS department, you will be able to regularly monitor a wealth of insights. However, if you want to extract maximum value from your data, it’s vital to work with a balanced mix of metrics. This will give you a clear indication of how valuable your existing analytical reports are in a practical context.

When we say you should use a mix of KPIs, we mean tracking:

  • Historical data
  • Real-time data
  • Predictive data

For balanced and progressive analytics success, it’s essential that your metrics and visualizations work together to display insights that paint a picture of past trends of performance (for comparison), real-time activity (to adapt and respond to challenges as they happen), and potential future patterns (to create strategies that nip possible issues in the bud or capitalize on potential opportunities).

7. Tell a story with your data

As humans, we digest information far more effectively when it’s presented in the form of a story or narrative.

When interacting with your customer service report data, it’s important that you arrange your visualizations, KPIs, and metrics in a way that is logical and tells a story.

Doing so will provide accessible insights into how you are performing in key areas of your customer operations while giving everyone in the department the tools to use that data to improve their individual progress while communicating more effectively.

Our definitive guide to data storytelling will tell you all you need to know to get started.

8. Create customer profiles & personas

As mentioned, even when you’ve collected your customer service data, developed your reports, and started using them, you must regularly assess and refine your analytics efforts.

To put your data into a real-world context and ensure your metrics remain relevant, creating (and updating) customer profiles or personas is a valuable activity.

A customer profile or persona is a representation of your ideal target customers and consists of a description of their needs, wants, and pain points while outlining essential demographic information, including:

  • Name (to humanize your customer profiles)
  • Sex
  • Age
  • Occupation
  • Income
  • Interests
  • Family situation
  • Preferred communication method
  • Level of digital literacy

By creating a set of customer profiles or personas, you will better understand your data and ensure the metrics you’re tracking are still directly relevant to your strategy. Customer profiles will also help you humanize your data and make more effective analytical decisions as a result.

9. Segment your customers

Concerning your business’s more customer-facing activities, by segmenting your consumers into distinct groups, you will be able to understand their needs, preferences, or issues on a deeper level, improving the quality of your communications as a result. You can use your customer personas or profiles to do this.

For example, by working with your customer support and satisfaction KPIs, you can segment your customers based on whether they are new or repeat customers, their service or product preferences, or the nature of their issues.

Doing this will empower you to dig deeper into your most relevant data and create initiatives that will ultimately improve the way you tackle service issues as well as the standard of experience you offer your customers.

If you want to dig deeper into customer segmentation with professional analytical methods take a look at our complete guide to data analysis.

10. Map out our customer journey

In the age of information, customer service is consistent with countless activities and functions, many of which cross over with marketing and sales.

The point here is: digitally-driven companies are becoming increasingly cohesive and, as such, departments collaborate on activities and initiatives more than ever.

That said, one of the most effective ways of improving your service department across the board is using your various dashboards to develop a customer journey map.

A customer journey map provides an outline of how a customer might interact with your brand from start to finish. By developing a map using your customer data, you will be able to understand which channels or touchpoints need attention and where possible bottlenecks or issues might arise.

You should examine your KPIs across every key function (from support performance to retention) to create your customer journey and highlight where you need to focus your efforts. When you share this data with your sales and marketing decision-makers, you can all work together to develop a journey that is rich, rewarding, and seamless from start to finish using informative, reliable insights as your guide.

11. Perform sentiment analysis

The best customer service reports templates will give you the ability to drill down into sentiment analytics. This savvy approach to service strategy is a branch of natural language processing (NLP), and it will help you gain a greater understanding of your audience. Using a sentiment-based approach will empower you to understand whether a consumer interaction is positive, negative, or neutral. 

Sentiment analytics is based on text-centric interactions including feedback, testimonials, reviews, forum interactions, and social media comments or conversations. Mining for these insights will uncover a wealth of intelligence that you can use to your service-boosting advantage.

Gaining this level of intelligence will help you improve your service content and communications while getting a firm grip on how your brand is perceived by your target audience. In turn, you will be able to take consistent measures to keep your satisfaction rates high.

NLP will present your business with a huge competitive advantage, learn more about it in our BI trends blog post for 2023!

12. Automate your report generation

Not only will automating the generation of your reports save you time and boost your efficiency; it will also help you streamline the core aspects of your customer service strategy. Automating your service reports will give you the space to focus on rolling out targeted strategic initiatives like service training workshops, curating personable and engaging helpdesk content, and updating your resolution processes while keeping up to date with essential trends, patterns, or information. As a result, you will create a service analytics ecosystem that will see your department thrive in the long term.

13. Share your report and derive actionable insights

Submitting your results via scheduled, automated emails or sharing an interactive dashboard will cut the time needed to generate, consolidate, and export numerous data points you might have. Sharing information is another important aspect of creating and managing customer support reports. To be able to fully focus on what is crucial in your reporting process,  you can benefit from automated reporting that way you won’t need to spend numerous hours on exporting spreadsheets or preparing presentations, but your data will be immediately accessible while you can focus on what matters the most: actionable insights.

These were some basic tips on how to create a successful customer service analysis report and improve your bottom line.

Customer Service Performance Mistakes To Avoid

At this point, you know what elements make a solid customer service reporting structure. Now, it’s time to look at which mistakes you should avoid at all costs.

1. Not measuring performance with KPIs

Without a doubt, customer service is one of the most performance-driven departments of any modern business.

When you’re looking to develop your efforts, measuring performance matters. There’s more to CS development than a happy or unhappy customer alone. There are several factors that can influence the success of your communications across channels. And without using visual KPIs to benchmark and quantify your performance in these key areas, it’s unlikely that you will ever meet your customers’ needs fully.

Choosing KPIs targets based on your specific customer service goals will ensure you have the information you need to nip any potential service issues in the bud while enhancing your communications across channels. Without this information, all you will ever do is shoot in the dark and provide an average service, falling behind your competitors in the process.

If you’re looking to improve your overall call efficiency, you will use the talked metrics we covered earlier, for example. And, if one of your core aims is to improve the quality of your products, you should focus on KPIs that show specific customer complaints over a certain timeframe.

2. Not measuring every channel

If you only hone in on customer support reports metrics based on phone or online chat or email, for instance, you will never achieve a cohesive, well-rounded, and fully-operation customer service strategy.

Many businesses fail to explore every strand of relevant data across all communication channels, meaning that their overall service quality or NPS scores suffer. To meet your customer’s needs across the board, it’s vital that you explore metrics across any potential customer service channel that your consumers use to engage with you.

Today, customers branch out to businesses via social media, mobile apps, YouTube comments, email, third-party feedback platforms, online chat, telephone, and more. So, track data across every channel to ensure your efforts continue to evolve with your customer base. Fail to do so, and you will fall behind your competitors.

3. Not getting buy-in across the business

Setting accurate service benchmarks is vital to ensure you’re consistently performing at optimum levels. But without buy-in from the top or other seniors across departments (sales and marketing are strongly linked to CS), your customer service reporting goals will become seriously stunted.

To avoid getting your data-driven efforts quashed by the C-suite, you must build a case for your customer service performance reporting tools and strategies by building a compelling case on your existing service issues, explaining how working with cutting-edge report templates will help solve them.

Work to get buy-in early on, and you will reap the maximum rewards of customer service performance reporting.

4. Not involving everyone in the department

A customer service report format is only ever as effective as the people using it. To maximize the success of your analytical efforts, you must empower everyone within the department, as well as any relevant sub-departments, with the right level of access, training, and knowledge to squeeze every last drop of value from your reports.

Not providing adequate training, workshops, and department updates will cause confusion, dilute your efforts, and offer a poor return on investment (ROI) for your efforts.

5. Not testing, tracking, and evolving your strategy

To ensure your reports are 100% consistent, relevant, and valuable, you must periodically check in with certain aspects of your service reports to ensure the insights being served up are really benefiting your business. Without frequently testing and tracking your reports, you could start to suffer from inaccurate information that will lead you down a brand reputation-crushing rabbit hole. Regularly test your reports, and you’ll keep those satisfaction levels at a consistent peak.

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Key Takeaways Customer Service Reporting

In today’s hyper-connected digital world, customer service counts. In fact, this year and beyond, customer experience (CX) and service are set to become the number one brand differentiator, surpassing both price and product in terms of business value.

Meeting your customers’ needs and pain points head-on is no longer a luxury, it’s essential — and a customer service report will help you get there.

By using the unrivaled power of these reports to your advantage, you will become more productive, strategic, insightful, and approachable. 

The result? A reputation for customer service innovation that will not only help you stand out in your niche but accelerate the growth of your business.

With the help of cutting-edge dashboard software, you can develop dashboards that will let you dive deep into analysis and track essential day-to-day activities as well as performance metrics that will set you apart from the pack, one initiative at a time.

We have explored essential types of service reports, outlined the benefits, and shared tips on maximizing the value of your business’s most essential insights. Now, it's your turn!

To unleash the business-boosting power of customer service reports, try our 14-day free trial today.