Time to Change How We Measure Customer Support

26 Feb 2025

Blog cover image with the title "Time to Change: How We Measure Customer Support" by Emre Tekoglu. Features a circular photo of Emre speaking and the Spiky logo.

Raise your hand if you used CSAT to measure your team's success in customer support.
What about case closure or even case productivity?
I have a confession. I used those metrics.
Guilty as charged.
But there has to be a better way to create team-spirited metrics that are customer-focused!!!

The Paradox of Plenty

As support leaders, we have answers at our fingertips, but the questions remain unanswered. It's high time we delve deeper, challenge norms, and harness the full power of the data. Beyond traditional metrics lie insights waiting to transform customer experiences, drive business growth, and unlock untapped potential. Let's shift our focus, challenge ourselves, and reimagine what's possible.

Rethinking Case Closure

Let's analyze case closure in customer support and confront a pressing query: Does measuring customer case closure truly encapsulate case resolution, or are we inadvertently prioritizing metrics over genuine customer satisfaction?

Rethinking Customer Support Metrics in SaaS Businesses

As leaders in the SaaS industry, we often celebrate teams that hit quantitative targets, but are we overlooking a critical aspect of our business – the customer support teams?

Customer support is the defense in our SaaS business, ensuring customers stay satisfied, renew subscriptions, and advocate for our brand. Yet when we measure, we do not measure customer support teams as value adds but rather as cost centers because that is easy.

That is the status quo. We often measure things we should not measure, things that do not matter, but we measure because it is easy. Instead, we should measure customers' behavior after customer support interactions.

We should measure if customers become better users.

We should measure if customers can achieve more with the product.

If you can measure your customer support correctly, you can become a value center vs a cost center.

Next steps?

This is a great use case for AI. Imagine you have your scoring rubric—you might measure the quality of your case resolution, the quality of preventing the next case, the customer's effort score, or all of it.

With AI, you can measure 100% of your cases without bias and relying on the CSAT score. Now, that is a great use case for CX leaders.

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