Happy to Help | A Customer Support Podcast
If you work in customer support, if you lead a support team, or if you are looking to better the customer experience for your company, then this podcast is for you!
Happy to Help is a podcast about all things customer support brought to you by the people at Buzzsprout. Join us, on the second Tuesday of every month as Buzzsprout's Head of Podcaster Success, Priscilla Brooke dives into the world of customer support to make remarkable support the standard, not the exception!
Happy to Help | A Customer Support Podcast
What You Should Actually Measure in Support with Meghan Gallagher
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Metrics shape the way support teams work, but not every metric tells the full story.
In this episode, we’re joined by Meghan Gallagher, Support Operations Consultant and Founder of MG Consulting, to talk about how support teams can measure what actually matters. We discuss why common metrics like CSAT, first response time, and average handle time can be misleading when they’re used on their own, how speed-focused goals can create bad habits, and why support leaders should use data as a starting point for better conversations.
We also dig into better ways to measure support’s impact, including recontact rate, replies to resolve, customer sentiment, retention, product feedback, and team bandwidth.
Plus, Meghan shares practical advice for telling a clearer story to leadership, motivating your team without burning them out, and revisiting your metrics as your support team grows and changes.
We want to hear from you! Share your support stories and questions with us at happytohelp@buzzsprout.com!
To learn more about Buzzsprout visit Buzzsprout.com.
Thanks for listening!
Welcome And Why Metrics Matter
PriscillaWelcome to Happy to Help, a podcast about customer support from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Priscilla Brooke. Today we're taking a closer look at how we measure customer support. We'll unpack the metrics most teams currently rely on, what we should be measuring, and how to use that data to tell a clear story about your team's impact. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. All right, so today we're talking all about metrics. I feel like there's a lot of discussion right now about what we're measuring, what we should be measuring, whether the things we're currently measuring are actually helping us or if they're hindering our teams, because at the end of the day, what you're measuring is impacting the support you're doing, and it's impacting how your team feels about the work they do. And so it's just a really important thing to get right. And it is something that all support teams are doing in some way, whether we're educated on it or not.
JordanAnd in this day and age, there's so many statistics on like every software that you use day to day.
PriscillaAnd so it's hard to sort through it. So this is gonna be really great. Yeah. So I'm excited because we have someone on the show today who is coming to us with this balance of passion for metrics and also expertise in metrics. And so I'm really excited to talk through what metrics we should and shouldn't be measuring. So joining us today is Meghan Gallagher. Meghan is a support operations consultant with over 10 years of experience in customer support and five years in support ops. She helps B2B SaaS teams turn unreliable support systems into something that leadership actually trusts, which is a big accomplishment. Yeah. She has spent years building support operations from scratch, and her work has helped teams significantly improve response times, deflection rates, and communicate customer feedback in a way that actually benefits the product and leads to product updates and development. She's based in Valencia, Spain, and she is currently building her consultancy, MG Consulting, and she brings this unique perspective because she has history in finance and history in customer support and has a love for numbers. So thanks for being here, Meghan. I'm really excited to talk about metrics.
MeghanOh my God. It's my pleasure. It's something that I've always wanted to nerd out about, and I'm happy to spread the wealth because I want people to learn more.
PriscillaYeah, I'm really excited. I feel like metrics is one of those places where I'm gonna really learn a lot from this conversation. So I'm really pumped. Yes.
A Quick Story About Preferences
PriscillaSo before we get into a conversation about metrics, we always like to kick our episodes off by sharing a story of someone who's made our day recently. So do you have someone who's made your day recently, Meghan?
MeghanI do. My two-year-old daughter. Her name's Alessia. We're currently visiting in lines in Argentina right now. And she's just she's a great traveler. She's very adaptable, like even when she's not in her own home. And yesterday I was making some food and she's starting to develop her own taste into things. Like I was preparing some empanadas. I didn't have the empanada ready, but I gave her the filling. She didn't want the filling, she wanted the real deal. And so for but the fact that she ate the empanada, I was just like, oh, thank God. Like that, I know it's something so small, but like at the same time, like it brings me so much joy. Her defining her own personal preferences.
PriscillaShe's becoming a person. That's great.
MeghanYes.
PriscillaIt's so fun. Yeah. I do think there's like a cool parallel to like new customer support agents that are coming on a team. You're watching her see what she likes and what she doesn't like. And in the same way, support leaders can watch their new support hires find that, you know, this is the way I'm going to handle this work.
MeghanAbsolutely. I honestly compare being like a leader, a support manager to being a parent all of the time. It's about listening and it's not necessarily about solving problems. It's about creating an environment where people can actually thrive. And that translates a lot to leadership as
Megan’s Path From Finance To Support
Meghanwell.
PriscillaYeah, it definitely does. So before we get into the metrics of everything, I want to learn a little bit more about you. Can you share with us a little bit more about your experience in support and in finance and how you kind of ended up in this, you know, metrics-focused place?
MeghanYeah. So I think all of us in the support world has been in a customer-facing role since forever. It started at a dry cleaner, is when I was 16. Um, I had no desire of like picturing where I am today. And so obviously, like when I was at the cleaners, you know, I'm I'm in high school and I was like, you know, I'm really good at math. And I like people too. Like finance set felt like the perfect like segue into that. So I studied finance. I I even had like a few internships under my belt. Well, after college, I was like, life's too short. I have my whole life to work. I'm gonna take a gap year before actually starting work and travel. And so that's exactly what I did. Now, with shocker when I came back, even though I had like volunteer experience on my trip and everything, not a single finance like company wanted to hire me. So I um found a role at a call center that was actually a travel agency.
PriscillaOkay.
MeghanI was in my 20s, so I got married, I moved to Argentina. Uh remote work wasn't really a thing, but of course, being here, I was like, okay, I'm still gonna lean into this customer support thing because it's something that I'm really good at, and I know that there might be more opportunities for me in a remote capacity. And so that's when I have my first real like customer support job. I was a sole, it was just me on the support team. I was the sole leader, the sole person handling tickets, and was for an actual Amazon seller who was selling tea and stuff like that. One of the things that I was being measured on was actually the average product review for like the rating. What interesting. That was one of my KPIs. But you weren't in the product development. No, I wasn't. I wasn't. That the thing is, is that I inherited a bunch of really crappy products as well. So like it's not like these were new products. They had, you know, anything below a four is sauce on Amazon. Like, and so I was dealt some like products that had 3.4 average review, and basically it was my job to either have people update their negative reviews or delete them.
PriscillaSo it was like support and it was like reputation management at the same time.
MeghanYes, weird, very and and it was a very small segment of like my actual the actual work that I was doing. Like I built the foundation for the support team. It didn't grow eventually, but I built the foundation. I got us on a help desk. We weren't even on a help desk before. I was doing all these other accomplishments, and I always felt like my metrics that I had to painstakingly enter into a Google Sheet every Friday. I'm like, this is not reflecting what I'm doing here. Like, this is not an accurate representation of how I'm performing. And most of the time, these negative reviews were about faulty like products. Yeah. And even though, like, I was a huge believer in like bridging that gap between support and product because I knew that you know, this type of information wasn't surface, but it wasn't an accurate representation on how I was doing as a performer. Right. And so that's what kind of instigated my curiosity to be like, there are better numbers out there that this isn't it.
PriscillaYeah. So at what point did you kind of leave that role and move into a consulting perspective where now you're helping other companies learn what to measure based on like obviously that was an early job, but that experience of clearly not measuring the right things.
MeghanAfter leaving this job, I started my first job in tech in 2019 for Whereby, which was formerly known as a peer-in. We love Whereby, we use it all the time. It's such a great interface. It is. And so I was hired as the third support hire in 2019. I went in as a junior, my boss. She obviously wanted people to grow either within support or beyond their role, um, not be a ticket cruncher. And so she knew that she saw that potential in me and really helped me um, you know, learn. Like I've attended so many webinars and, you know, and and just trying to give myself as much information as possible. And I think in that type of environment, when it came around to actually looking at our metrics, like I was part of those conversations about like, how do we do this? What is this? That was very basic because I think even in 2020, the conversation about metrics is has changed a lot. It has. Yeah. It's changed so much. I started measuring CSAT because everybody else was doing it. Like I still was still measuring first response time because it what it was just the standard, you know, and there wasn't so much of a big library or anything else that you were looking at.
PriscillaRight.
MeghanAnd so I started there, and then now that I'm like working, you know, with other teams, I'm like, okay, there are so many different ways that you can tell a story and what is it that you're trying to prove. Um, and you know, I I just have a hunger for learning and I just love reading stuff on LinkedIn.
PriscillaThere's so much stuff on LinkedIn about metrics, and so I'm similar to you in that I also started as like the first support person on a team, and I had no idea what to measure. And I was like, well, response time, people always say that they like things when they're fast. So I'm gonna assume response time is really important. And then, you know, you always feel good when you're getting positive reviews. And so that's another way to naturally, you know, you're gonna go, okay, well, then it must be good because everyone's saying it's great. And so, you know, those were really what I measured a lot. And I think it's been cool in the last five years to see so many conversations about metrics pop up on different, you know, different uh communities and on LinkedIn and things like that. And so I'm excited because I want to talk a little bit more, you know, throughout this episode about what people are measuring currently, like what those popular things are, but in your opinion, what we should be measuring. And then, like you said, how to take those metrics and present the story to leadership in a way that, you know, shows your value as a team in an accurate way.
The Popular Metrics Teams Default To
PriscillaSo when you think about customer support and support metrics, what do you think most teams are getting right right now? And then what do you think they're just you know, they're missing the mark on?
MeghanYeah, I think in terms of right, like like we've been talking about, there is a curiosity to learn more about metrics and what's appropriate for their team. And I've made a post and a lot of people reached out to me personally on LinkedIn, and they're like, hey, I, you know, I always like asking questions. I'm like, what drew you to connect? And people are like, I think what we're measuring is not accurately depicting how we're doing in support and how we can be making an impact. So I think like that personally is such a great thing to see that people have the motivation to learn more and go beyond the status quo. And so that people can self-serve that information however they please. And so I think that's one thing that people are doing correctly. Yeah.
PriscillaYeah.
MeghanNow we're talking about like following the herd and doing the status quo. And I think a lot of these metrics that, you know, um that are being currently measured are built into our help desks. And so that's why I think a lot of people are only using that, those metrics that are surfaced from help desks, which can be quite limiting to actually depicting how things are going, um, and not and not going beyond that. And so, and a lot of those metrics are cost-based metrics when when we think about speed, when we think about number of touches per ticket, like they can still be used. I'm not saying it's not on my like no-no list. Um, but I think like a lot of people don't realize that these cost-based metrics ultimately do support the theory that support is a cost center. Like your metrics are really doing that. So, yeah, those are like few things that I've been noticing about metrics lately.
PriscillaYeah, there's been a lot of conversations about metrics over the last couple of years. A lot of people talking about CSAT and response time. In addition to those, when it comes to measuring support, what are the most popular metrics you're seeing?
MeghanAverage handle time is probably a very popular metric. Average handle time is when somebody opens a ticket, it's the amount of time that it takes for them to open it and send that final response. So, like I said, a lot of metrics that we're gonna be talking about today, the only one that I say don't use is CSAT, but um, the Conserver Satisfaction score. But all these other ones, they can be used but with caution. And we'll kind of dive into that because I'm not saying that you shouldn't be tracking that, but you shouldn't be taking it as face value. So average handle time is definitely one of those that's up there and also contact resolution. So it's the percent of tickets that are resolved after one response. I don't necessarily think that this is accurate. It's hard to dictate if it's actually resolved or not.
PriscillaYeah, I mean, that's a really good point because you look at that and you go, oh, 50% of our emails are resolved with one response. But who's to say that response isn't going to someone who read it and goes, I have no idea what they're talking about. I'm just giving up on this. Like that's not a resolution. That's a bad experience. Yeah. And they are so apathetic toward your product that they're not even going to respond and try to get to a right answer. Yes. And I'm not saying that that's all the time, but it's definitely a percentage of your responses. And so I think that's a really good thing to point out that it's not that these metrics are bad to track. It's just that they don't tell a complete story of what's going on. And you can't say, well, we have a 50%, you know, one response resolution and that be the entire story because that's not the story.
MeghanNo, it's not. And that's when ticket taxonomy is massive. Because let's say your first response rate is down. Yeah. Okay. That triggers us to investigate. And then we can kind of see like, how does this connect with ticket tags? Like, is there a particular part of the product that is having first response times that are really high? Is that like documentation knowledge gap or just bad product design? And so that's where like you can use these types of metrics to combine it with tickets, other metrics. You should never just take one metric for face value, especially like the first contact
Why CSAT Falls Short Today
Meghanrate.
PriscillaYeah. Let's talk about CSAT for a minute. I don't want to spend a ton of time on CSAT because I think we all agree that CSAT is not the right way to measure support. And for those of you listening who might not know what CSAT is, Jordan, I don't know if you know CSAT. I'm raising my hand here. It's customer satisfaction. Great. Okay. Can you share a little bit about why CSAT is not? Because I think it's probably the most, maybe right there with response time, the most uh like shiny thing to measure and the easiest thing to measure. Yes. Okay. So why should we not measure it?
MeghanCSAT was this was a metric that was created in the 1980s. And customer satisfaction is typically measured, like the score is measured with a survey. Yes. Okay. So like people have to opt in to give a response on how the satisfaction was, if they were satisfied or not. So it is not something that's automatically calculated. It is something that people have to opt in to give a score, which um that honestly segues into one of the many reasons why we shouldn't use CSAT is because most of the time I see this constantly that people are struggling to get survey responses.
JordanYeah.
MeghanAnd also, like, let's say a specialist is following their, you know, standard operating procedure as expected, and the customer doesn't like that. Or if the customer is actually saying, like, oh, I really wish you would implement this feature request, it's like, uh, that's not really accurately describing how I handled the ticket. Yeah. And so, like I said, this metric was created in the 80s, and it was customer service back then. It was not customer support. And so when you think about customer service back in the 80s, it was always the customer's always right. You know, it was very much like making sure that we're measuring that in this landscape of how much support has changed. Like I think this metric is just literally outdated. Yeah. And now that we have kind of like sentiment analysis where we could automatically pull that from the ticket itself without somebody having to opt in. This is sentiment, is for the people that don't know, a lot of people use like AI to kind of scrape ticket content and be able to judge if somebody is angry or upset or frustrated. And I always like tracking like the final sentiment to see if people are happy or even the change between that. So that gives us a much more accurate picture of how customers are actually feeling and if they're satisfied with the support. Yeah.
PriscillaI understand why a lot of support teams do focus on that because it is easy to see because people are putting it on a platter for you, very easy to access, even if it is just 8% of your customers that are reaching out to support, but at least you're getting actual words from customers. And it does make you feel good. As a person on a support team, when you read a positive review, it makes you feel like the work you're doing is really good. The flip side of that is a bad review, especially a bad review on a good email, can make you feel really terrible. And it's something that early on, as our team was growing over here, I told people on my team, like, do not look at CSAT because it is encouraging until it's really not encouraging. Yes. And then it can sit with you a lot longer than it should. It's like podcast reviews. Yeah, it's like Instagram comments. It's like anything, you know, like they're great until they're not. Yeah. And I remember probably three or four weeks into working support at all. And we have like a great, an okay, and a bad rating kind of system. And I got an okay rating and I happened to see it. You know, I was new in this job. I was about to go to bed. It was late at night. I happened to pull my phone up and see an email pop up that said that so-and-so gave me an okay rating. And I was like, oh no, this is terrible. This couldn't be any worse. And I was just so stressed out about it. Yeah. And it's so funny because I look back on it now and I like, first of all, why are you looking at your email right before you go into bed? Like, that's not healthy. Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. But also, like to let that kind of a negative thing impact you, it's not healthy. So I think that there's so many reasons why CSAT shouldn't be put at the top of the pedestal or really anywhere when you're trying to measure support. It can be really beneficial to encourage your team. Like, we'll pull out really good reviews that are about really good cases and use that as a motivation and as an encouragement. I love that. But other than that, it's really not a good way to measure your work.
MeghanNo. Susanna De Sosa just posted something about how she changed the question in because you know, you can change the question. It like help scout. I know you can change the question for CSAT. And she changed the question to something about like how did Loom's support set you up for future success? Like, did you take away more information? And do you feel like you can succeed with this? And even just changing the narrative of that question, even though it's still like a CSAT, you know, measured, you still select yes, okay, or no? Yeah, it can still change a lot. Just that small little tweak.
PriscillaAnd it might encourage people to actually fill it out. Yeah. If it's a more unique question than if it's just the standard run-of-the-mill, how was the service today? Question. Yeah. Yeah, I agree.
How Speed Metrics Create Bad Habits
PriscillaHave you seen or had experiences where focusing on the wrong metrics have encouraged bad behavior in your teams?
Meghan1000% of like the first response rate. And it's how quickly a ticket is created and how quickly you can send that first response. There's different frameworks that you can look at this speed or bandwidth. Like I like using the bandwidth one if you're trying to measure like how your team's bandwidth is, but most people default to speed. Yeah, they're not thinking about that. I was on a team where they would actually report the first response time every single week in sync without any like context as to why it was red or green. You know, it's not a good feeling.
PriscillaNo.
MeghanWhen it is in the reds. And so what I noticed is that a lot. People were sending like kind of like non-answers, just confirming that hey, I'm checking with this internally, I'll get back to you. Now, what's happening is that every industry is different. Like some people do value speedy responses, but in the cases that I've seen, customers value thorough and mindful responses to reduce that back and forth because it, you know, I we've all been there. I personally don't like interacting with support over a majillion emails. Like no, and you know, and even like reducing that one like non-answer, like I already know that you got my email because I probably got a confirmation email saying that my ticket's been created. I don't need a non-answer. And and it's just adding to the bloat. And it clutters up your inbox. And yeah, I've seen negative sentiment. So that is where like first response time, it's more about speed, it's less about quality.
PriscillaYeah, I will say when I was early on, I think we just had two people on the team at that point doing support here at Bus Brow. I remember, I mean, our response time was fantastic. And I was so proud of it. It was like under 20 minutes. There were two of us. We were killing it. We also were not taking lunches and it was self-imposed. It's funny. I mean, I it was me going, I need to get this down, not leadership saying you need to get this down. But it was like, oh, can I make it even lower next month? You know, can I make it even lower? And I remember at some point one of my leaders coming to me and saying, Hey, I think we should probably stop publishing or sharing our response time for the whole company as like this thing we're so proud of, because we are proud of it. Like it's great that that's that fast.
MeghanYeah.
PriscillaBut it makes me feel like we're just trying to get faster and faster and faster. And that's not a good thing. And it was a like an eye-opening moment for me because I thought, oh yeah, you're right. I mean, there were moments in a conversation where we would send something much faster than we probably should have, or we wouldn't take the time to understand the full background of the, you know, customer's account, things like that. Yeah. And so we pretty quickly took that out of our like main thing. And it changed a lot about where we put our focus and where we put our value as a team, that now it is a lot more focused on a thorough response. And the funny thing is, even when like our response time is higher now than it was back then, but it's not crazy high. It hasn't been affected so much by adding in this like more intentional quality focus on that. So I think it's, I think it's just interesting if you're listening to this and you're like, well, you know, response time is the most important thing. You are probably not going to lose so much by adding, you know, a little time on your response time, but you're going to gain a ton and your customers are going to feel way more taken care of if they're getting a good quality response, even if they're waiting, you know, a couple hours longer to get it. Yeah.
MeghanI mean, we're not brain surgeons. Right. Right. Burnout is real. And I think it's not something that we should be busting our heads about. And honestly, if we have higher response times, then maybe it's time to look at headcount. Yes. Or the tools we're using. Yes. Yes, exactly. Or like knowledge gaps. Like, you know, is there a feature that it's just so convoluted and internally we don't know about it? That's what's leading to this. So that's why like it does point to other things. But I do think that taking it off the main like KPI or the main report, it does allow you to kind of like, okay, this is not necessarily how I'm being measured on, but it is still being measured in the background. Yeah. So that's that's an excellent story. I love that. Yeah.
PriscillaWell, and I like the way that you set it up in the beginning, saying the bandwidth idea of it, because you're right. You can see that response time go up and you can think, okay, I've either got a bunch of lazy people on the team who are not responding to emails quickly and they're going and doing stuff in the middle of the day. Or you could say, what's probably actually happening is that we don't have enough people to service the inbox that we have and the traffic that we have, or we don't have the tools in place, or we don't have a good mission control set up to give us a good idea of a customer's account in order to get an answer in a quick way. We have to spend a ton of time digging, or like you said, we don't understand this facet of the product and no one's ever taught it to us. And so every time we get a question about that, we're all fumbling over ourselves trying to find an answer. And it's taking a lot longer to do that.
MeghanYes, exactly. I'm working on a team right now where they went through a massive restructuring and naturally our response times is gonna go up. Yeah, it's gonna happen. But I said, okay, if we want to tell a story on how we can maybe reduce the response times to automating some of these really manual or overly designed systems or really like trying to even build tools for ourselves to self-surface information. Like, let's do that and let's track it from a bandwidth perspective because that is a very interesting story for sure.
PriscillaAnd I think bandwidth, looking at it from that perspective, takes a little bit of like the personal weight or guilt off of it. Like if the response time, when you call it response time, there's a personal aspect to it that you're like, I'm not responding fast enough. That is the problem. And this time is going up. And so I am relating that back to myself and the fact that I am not responding fast enough. But if you talk about it for the bandwidth perspective, it takes off that personal guilt, which I think for a lot of us who work in customer support, that like people pleasing, taking on a lot of that, you know, weight and shame and stuff. I think that's pretty normal for these types of people. Very and can be really beneficial.
MeghanWhen I was at Whereby, you know, I was there during the height of the pandemic. Our ticket volume increased by 300%. Of course. Yeah. That one weekend in March.
PriscillaOh my gosh. We were in the same boat because we were in podcasting. So the April 2020 rise was unbelievable.
MeghanReal. Yes. And our backlog of tickets was probably 2,000. Um, like insane. Oh my gosh. Yeah, insane. And so I'm a ticket cruncher. Yeah, it's it's in my natural spirit. Yes. I want to see that number go down. It's stressful. And my boss, you know, had to tell me, slow down. These people are probably gonna wait weeks to hear back from us. Let's make sure that we're taking our and we didn't delete a single email.
PriscillaI think that's a really good thing for your boss to have said that if someone's gonna wait a couple weeks for you to respond, you better make sure that response is really good. Yeah. And I think for people listening who are in those kind of situations where they don't have enough bandwidth for the traffic they're seeing in support and they're like, none of my metrics are gonna be good because I'm, you know, so underwater and I can't get leadership to get us either the right tools or more people or whatever it is. That reminder of, hey, if people are gonna wait two weeks and that's something you can't control, yeah. Then what you can control is that your response can be really good. Like that you can have control over. So I think that could be really encouraging for someone who's in that place right now, going, How do I handle this if I don't have control over what we're measuring or, you know, make sure that what you can control, you're controlling, which is the response. Take your time. Yeah. So I think it's important, obviously, to know what to track. But one thing you've talked about and mentioned a couple of times so far is using data to tell a story and to communicate to
Telling Leadership A Better Data Story
Priscillayour leaders. And so I want to kind of move into that a little bit.
JordanYeah.
PriscillaWhat are the biggest challenges for support leaders in showing that value beyond the queue? You know, how do you use metrics to play a role in that?
MeghanWhen we talk about data and storytelling, the first thing we have to do is know who we're telling the story to. And we should probably talk to them. Yeah. We should probably ask them, what do you want to see? Because I think a lot of people just assume that leadership wants certain aspects of it, but at the same time, like we need to ask them, what is it that you're missing? And what kind of information do you want to see? And there's no like rubric or inner bank of interview questions. You just have to start that conversation.
JordanThat reminds me of what Priscilla was talking about earlier. She was reporting on her response time every time. And then the leaders were like, Yeah, we don't really interested in that so much. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
MeghanLike typically one of the biggest challenges right now is you know, support as a cost center type views, do, like I said, directly come from metrics. And sometimes leadership does want to see those metrics. But the thing is, is that it does change the narrative a lot on how the rest of the company views the support. And so there are better metrics to measure impact. And I think that if you collaborate with leadership and really talk them through and explain why you want to use these metrics. So some of my favorite metrics are measuring impact. Our person in particular are the recontact rate. So the recontact rate measures how often customers reach out again after their issue was considered resolved. There are kind of two sides of that story. You know, maybe there's room for improvement, for support to better learn a topic, or maybe learn why wasn't it resolved truly the first time? Or like I said, product usability. Like, you know, is there something in the product that is constantly generating these types of questions? So that's something that you can see like where can we get started on that? Um, because we don't like do creating duplicate emails essentially and more ticket volume for something that should have been resolved the first time. And then another thing that I mentioned before is obviously customer sentiment. You know, this is typically measured by AI, like because it does measure sentiment feelings based off of the ticket context. Most of our customers love telling us this is frustrating, or I don't appreciate, I don't understand, or you know, things like that. And so I think that like this can give us a lot more context to how the customer is feeling because ultimately we are there to support them and we are there to uplift them. And so it's important that we do measure this type of analysis. It's like a qualitative type of metric as well. Yeah. Even though you can assign number to it, but it's still very helpful. Yeah.
PriscillaYeah. Specifically about sentiment, how would you go about measuring that? I mean, it's not, I use Help Scout, and I don't think there's anything in there in Help Scout. So how would you get that sentiment?
MeghanSo I think like you have to use external like AI, like some people hire, you know, AI people or someone within your team if they're looking to flex their AI muscle and they want to build more bots that are helpful. And like I've seen teams even take it as far as building a dashboard inversal, which is one of those like no-code type of like lovable-esque apps. And so that you can surface that information. I think that with sentiment, you could measure the change. Let's say somebody starts off as frustrated and is actually positive at the end. That tells a great story. Hopefully positive. Yeah. Right. But even if it is negative, like you can still learn from that.
PriscillaYeah. Yeah. And sometimes it's more beneficial to know that someone came in frustrated and their situation was turned around and they left happy than coming in happy and leaving happy. Like it's a harder thing to do. And so it's good to measure that, to know that. I think that's great. And it's one of those things, you know, we talk about AI a lot. And it's one of those uses of AI that can be really super beneficial that is not just taking away jobs. You know what I mean? That the worry that people have. It's like AI can be a really beneficial thing in scraping all that content and giving you information on your customers and on these interactions that you wouldn't have had before without a ton of manual work.
MeghanYes,
Linking Support To Retention And Product
Meghanexactly.
PriscillaAnd so I think that's a really great example. What about retention revenue and product improvement? Like, how do you take stats and data and metrics and use them in a way to influence those things?
MeghanWith retention, you know, when I talk about products, I mean like SaaS, you know, like software as a service product. Most of us have trials, maybe like money back guarantee, like refund periods where you're able to ask for refund with no questions asked. And I think most of the time our customers are reaching out to us in that very opening window. And I think like with retention, if you have that set up, let's say you're at the end of that 30-day or two-week period, you can say X percent of people who got in touch with support renewed for the following month or something or like renewed past that trial period. I think when you have those first 90 days, you know, I think like every single SaaS product or even like service, I'm sure the product team has calculated like what is that adoption window when customers actually activate and become like almost like a fan and you know that they're not going anywhere. I think it's important to ask your product team, like, what is that window that we're hoping people are actually renewing extra X amount of days? And so when you say, like, for the people that canceled, let's say like 90% of them didn't even reach out to support. Yeah, you know, and that can have a direct relationship with being like, hey, X percent of people that reached out to support, they actually renewed. And so that's one side of like, I know it it can be extremely hard, especially diving into revenue. Like revenue, I think that one of our best things is we know maybe a customer is asking for specific features for like a high-ticket type of product. We kind of like pre-qualify them and support and pass them over to sales. How many of those have actually converted? You know, that's a great because I know sales that directly correlates to money. Yeah. But like imagine how many internal escalations, how many handovers have actually resulted in a sale. That's a number you can grab like easily. Another thing is like with refunds, it's a little tricky because most of the time people like they might churn for whatever reason, but their churn reason isn't listed there, or maybe there's multiple things, or they don't identify with it. But it's always a various factors of things. So that's always something super hard. But in the support-driven slot community, for those that are not part of it, should definitely join. Um, I'm in there quite a lot. Somebody posted about this last week where they want to kind of drive the needle on bugs, for example. And like, how can we show that our customers are like leaving us because of bugs? Yeah. And that's where you can kind of like find a bug that was a high impact bug and work backwards. See how many customers have actually reported that bug and how many actually churned, even though it might be churning for a different reason. You can still show that in the report of being like 30% of the people that have reported this bug since have left us. Like that tells us maybe we should fix this one. Like so, kind of like working backwards and stuff. It is very hard though to kind of connect the revenue and the money part with support. That's why it's notorious why we're kind of like put on the bottom as not impact drivers, um, because it is a little bit harder, but not impossible to get those metrics. Yeah. And then with like product improvements, like what I said before, like having a good ticket taxonomy and showing that what if we have negative sentiment about specific product features, or if we notice that a lot of the support ticket volume is coming from a specific feature, hmm, that should raise flags. So, like I said, pairing these other metrics like ticket volume, how many tickets are coming in about this specific feature? Maybe we should revisit it and see what's going on.
PriscillaYeah. Yeah. That just made me think of the times when someone walks up and says, How many questions do we get about this issue? Yes, exactly. And you go, oh man, well, we get a bunch of questions about that issue. Yeah. And then you go and you look it up to see how many you're actually getting. And it's actually not as many as you thought, but it feels like a lot. Yeah. That's another reason why metrics are really important to be very intentional about, because when you're in the inbox working the queue, you can answer four of the same questions in a day and feel like, oh my gosh, a ton of people run into this issue.
MeghanYeah.
PriscillaBut when you look at it in the whole grand scheme of things, it's actually not as big of an issue, or vice versa. You're like, that's not really, I don't see that that much. And then you go look at the actual numbers and you say, oh, actually, it's a lot higher than my perception of it is. And so it's just another reason why being intentional about your metrics and being intentional about how you're measuring things is really good in more ways than just the proving value, because that definitely is, but the accurate understanding of what your customers are saying and how they're interacting with your product.
Metrics That Motivate Instead Of Burnout
PriscillaIt's really important. Yeah. I think metrics can also play a huge role in how we motivate the people on our team. And I think I said it up top that the things that we measure impact the emails that we send or the phone calls that we take. And so, you know, I want to talk a little bit about how we can use the metrics that we are tracking to motivate and encourage our team.
MeghanYeah, I think for starters, I personally think that metric should be revisited every quarter. You know, I I don't think it should be a set one and done kind of situation. And I like involving people early on in the team to be like, here are my proposed metrics this quarter. And like, because I kind of frame it as the like, how can we show that um we're capable of doing X, Y, Z and do these numbers accurately portray that? Because your support department can change every quarter, and what story you're trying to depict or what proof you're trying to show will change. So having people have those conversations early on is super motivating because people can say, like, I don't think this is a good idea, or I think this is a good idea, and then you know, have a conversation about it. Also, when you are introducing a new set of metrics, I think as leaders, we have to be prepared to explain a motivation behind them and also where we currently stand. Because I think for us, it's important to have a benchmark that is realistic and where it's where we're standing right now as the team capacity and things like that. This is our benchmark. And we're trying to go a little bit lower, a little bit higher.
JordanYeah.
MeghanAnd I think having a real conversation in a meet and like a team sync about these types of metrics, like I think is super important early on, you know, just to get an understanding of why we're coming at it and why we're measuring this. For example, we talk about first response time a lot in terms of bandwidth. Like, you know, we're hoping that this will go down because we're in we're empowering you to maybe automate some redundant tasks or improve our documentation. And so try to show what kind of impact we're having beyond that metric because it it relates it to almost like quality of life, like workplace, um, and try to connect it to that. And I think that if you have that conversation rather than being like, these are our metrics, that will help um kind of like plant those seeds early on. Yeah. And then also celebrate wins. Like I I think a lot of people don't do this. It's a big one. It's a big one. And even if there are losses, let's start a conversation just because it's maybe in the red, that's okay. Like, you know, let's have conversations on how we can improve it as a team or like what might be happening. Like, I think open and honest communication is always the best. And yeah.
PriscillaAnd it makes it less scary when you have those conversations regularly, and it's less like, oh my gosh, something's bad. So now we're talking about it. It's more like this is a conversation we have consistently. And if the number goes up or down, you know, we're still having the conversation, we're talking about it. Yeah. So as we wrap things up, I want to give our listeners, you know, some things they can take away into their work day tomorrow if they're, you know, gonna go and start looking into their digging into their metrics. So if you could track just like one or two things, what would you tell people to track?
MeghanAnother one that I didn't have time to mention is replies to resolve. I think that focusing less on the back and forth, it's okay if you follow up just to check in and something's being, you know, it's not gonna skew the average, but I still think that it gives us a better picture than that first percent like contact rate, like if the first reply is resolved. I think the number of replies to resolve like gives us a better story on like, hmm, this ticket had 16 replies, like from the customer agent before the ticket was resolved. We should probably look into that. Yeah.
PriscillaIs there a mindset shift that you would like to see people take when it comes to metrics?
MeghanYeah, I think numbers do not define how you and your team perform. It is the starting point to trigger a conversation. We are in support, we are not defined by numbers. It just is our gut feeling that feels validated by numbers, but you should always look beyond that number and try to understand why that number goes up or go down. And so it shouldn't define us at who how we support our customers.
PriscillaI mean, I think that's the crux of all of it, right? Like we can use metrics, but you know, the numbers are not the definition. Yes. There's a story there and we need to dig deeper and figure out what the story
Where To Find Megan And Closing
Priscillais. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Meghan. This was great. I learned a lot about metrics. I'm really excited to go and take some things back into my team and how we measure and what we share. So I'm really excited about that. If there is anyone listening to this who wants to learn more about you or maybe use you as a consultant for their team, how can they get in touch with you?
MeghanLinkedIn. LinkedIn is the best way to get in touch with me. I also have linked a calendar link where you can book a free strategy session with me and we can kind of just talk about, you know, your sport infrastructure metrics, what it is that you're trying to do, and start the conversation there.
PriscillaYeah. And if you want to book that strategy session, we'll link that in the show notes of this episode. So you can just scroll down on your iPhone and click that link and set up a time because that is gonna be, I mean, that's a great resource that people should definitely use. Please, I love talking.
MeghanSo yeah, please book me.
PriscillaI love it. If you have a question or a topic that you would like us to cover on a future episode, you can shoot us a text using the send us a text link in our episode description. As always, if you like this episode, please review it on Apple Podcasts or share it with someone who works in customer support. That would be a huge benefit to us. Thank you again to Meghan Gallagher for joining us on today's episode. Thank you for listening. Now go and make someone's day.
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