Customer Success teams are an integral part of any business. A good customer success team will help customers be successful using a product or service, keep customers loyal and turn them into fans. Customer Success teams also gleam important insights from your customers. These insights help pinpoint where your company needs improvement and where to efficiently spend development resources to give customers the next product or service they are seeking. Here are three ways in which BI improves customer success, and in turn, customer satisfaction.

Efficiency

Efficiency is key for Customer Success teams.  The Customer Success teams must be responsive to a customer’s needs and issues. Customers are increasingly expecting a quick and reliable response, and Business Intelligence can increase efficiency of response times by measuring and analyzing metrics such as:

* Response Time (how long before a response is sent to a customer)

* Average Handle Time (how long does it take to resolve issues)

* Customer Support Volume (total number of issues received in a certain period)

Data for these metrics can be collected and analyzed to give insights into various issues of efficiency. Perhaps more resources need to be allocated to the Customer Success team if the volume of tickets has increased beyond the team’s capacity. Does the overall process of receiving issues, assigning, and working tickets waste time and lead to longer overall handle time, unnecessarily increasing the time it takes for a customer to receive a resolution? These metrics could also be giving valuable information on whether more training is needed, if employees are at risk of burn out or are just going through the motions, or perhaps the demands of the job increased above acceptable levels for employees.

Communication

One of the most important interactions between a business and its customers is effective communication. BI can help improve this interaction with the collection and analysis of customer feedback and surveys. With data from customer feedback, two key metrics can be evaluated:

* Customer Satisfaction

* Customer Effort

Customer Satisfaction is often measured via surveys and details how content a customer is and their view of the overall experience with a company. Insights from BI analysis can give a picture of the historical and current customer sentiment of a product, service, or company as well as their sentiment on the interaction with the customer success team. These insights can be used to improve the product or service, develop new products or services that fulfill customer needs, and help evaluate the Customer Success team as a whole and as individual team members.

Customer Effort is the measurement of how much effort a customer puts forth to do business with a company. The goal is to lower the Customer Effort as much as possible so that customers have a seamless interaction with all facets of the company, especially customer success. Data for Customer Effort is typically derived from surveys and BI analysis can give insights into the customer’s perceived effort. These insights can also pinpoint areas in need of review if customers are seeking help on the same issue often, reaching out to customer service many times before getting a response or resolution, or spending too much time waiting for a resolution overall. Keeping Customer Effort low helps to keep customers happy and turn them into loyal customers.

Employee Wellbeing

An important aspect of customer success is the employees and their wellbeing. The following metrics are often overlooked in evaluating the performance of customer success:

* Employee Satisfaction

* Employee Engagement

* Employee Turnover Rate

Employee satisfaction and engagement are especially important to customer success. Measuring these metrics can help pinpoint problems within teams or company processes and give managers the opportunity to remedy situations before they become unmanageable. Employee satisfaction and engagement can help a company implement programs or training that increase employee wellbeing and prevent turnover. In many industries, customer success or service teams often have high turnover . A high rate of turnover can often lead to higher operational costs in terms of recruiting, training, and onboarding. Employee Turnover Rate is a commonly measured metric that simply details the percent of employees that leave the company during a certain period. Measuring employee job satisfaction, team satisfaction and satisfaction with company processes are areas that BI can really help a company predict if employees are becoming unhappy or experiencing burnout. Keeping employees happy is best for the company and the customer.