Measuring success with one true metric
An evening with London Support Lab
I was invited to moderate a panel at London Support Lab around the topic of customer success and metrics — and most importantly — the idea of having one true metric.
Is there such a thing as one true metric? I was really excited at the prospect of discussing that with fellow members of the Support/Success community, so I immediately accepted the invite from Lisa Hunt when she proposed it.
My co-panelists for the night were James Walters from Assembly and Gary McGrath from Kayako.
Here are some of my favorite questions our panel tackled:
What metrics does your support team track and which do you focus on as a manager? Why these metrics?
Unsurprisingly, we all focus on growth and performance metrics. Gary brought up a great point around measuring interactions and first-time responses, which help identify any potential issues and optimize that to ensure that Kayako’s customers are getting the right help in the least amount of time.
This includes making sure that responses don’t go over 4–5 interactions in any given ticket. This is a great contrast from the 20+ replies I saw a team having not so long ago! Sometimes it really is just easier to pick up the phone and deal with it.
James expanded on that by bringing up a great point — preempt interactions by making sure that you provide the user with all the information before hand. Use bulletpoints, make it easy to read, link to all the appropriate documentation and make sure that the client has all the information before they have to ask you for it.
How do you share your progress and performance with the team and with the rest of the company?
The overall sentiment was to always provide metrics and stats as a team, not as individuals. Whether using OKRs or specific metrics to track performance, everyone agreed that it’s best practice to share insights with the rest of the company as a team.
This promotes both a sentiment of teamwork as well as positive behaviour by letting everyone know that this is in fact a team effort.
That being said, tracking individual insights is also helpful to understand where and what may be causing a shift in performance. These are always discussed one-to-one to allow the person to learn and improve from the situation.
Which metrics do you track and why are they important to your team?
Coming from three different companies and three different growth stages, I found this question fascinating.
We had all previously agreed that number of exchanges per ticket was important, but both Gary and James jumped in with more specific metrics, such as time to resolution, CSAT, NPS, and number of tickets answered per agent.
I jumped in with a more controversial answer — we don’t measure anything. I mean, we kind of do. I do have tracking running in the background, but those numbers aren’t particularly important because I have no one to compare it to other than myself!
Coming from a Success/Product background, I instead focus on qualitative than quantitative metrics, like What frustrates you about our product?
While it is a bit of a leading question, it can actually give you a better insight into what’s happening with the user’s experience instead of focusing on whether or not someone’s going to recommend your product to a friend. Understanding what and why something is frustrating the user can be more insightful than whether a particular interaction was helpful or not.
Is there one true metric?
And now for the saucy question of the night!
And the answer is… Yes.
No, just kidding, of course there isn’t. But we did quite enjoy watching Lisa’s jaw drop for a second!
Metrics vary from company to company and will matter depending on what they’re impacting — whether performance, growth, or overall customer sentiment.
We did, however, all agree with one thing: FullStory.
While it isn’t a metric per say, it is a reliable source to be able to understand user behaviour and how improve those metrics we are tracking.
Gary explained his team uses FullStory to understand areas users were getting stuck with, allowing them to make important UX improvements.
For James’ team, they will take any quiet period and encourage their support (and dev!) team to sit and watch a few sessions on Full Story to see how customers are interacting with the product, often noticing bugs and potential improvements that would otherwise go unreported.
Overall, we all agreed it is a great way to use it as a way to manage pro-active support and jump the gun before someone turns the gun on you!
A big thank you again to Lisa Hunt, GeckoBoard, Hellofresh and the London Support Community for making this happen! Hope to see you all again for chats and pizza. 🍕
Bonus question: Where’s the best poutine in London?
I don’t know the answer to this, but if anyone knows, drop me a line?
