3 customer service reports every small business should be using

Enterprise-level contact centers track metrics that gauge the performance of their agents, the efficiency of their operations, sentiment, and predictive modelling. Great contact center applications like Talkdesk have dozens of customizable reports, dashboards and other analytical tools to help these businesses do this.
For a small business owner, that has traditionally been much more difficult to accomplish. We have limited resources and—usually—much less volume. Most of us have smaller customer service teams that oftentimes must wear many hats.
Even so, no one wants unhappy customers. Just one unhappy customer can have a significant impact on the profitability of a smaller company. This is why it’s really important to stay on top of the issues your customers may be having with your products and services.
To address this challenge, Talkdesk has recently introduced Talkdesk Express, a customer service platform designed specifically for small business owners, but with the capabilities that are commonplace in the best enterprise-level contact centers. This includes reporting to help small businesses make strategic decisions and make our customer service the best it can be. It’s easy to set up and try Talkdesk Express for free. Once it’s up and running, the platform can provide critical information to ensure that problems are being identified and resolved.

But how do you first identify these problems? While deep analytics may be preferred by larger customer service operations, in my opinion, as a small business owner and consultant, there are three main reports small businesses need to use to monitor how their customers are feeling.

Open or pending interactions.

This report would include all calls or issues that have been received during a specific period of time that are still pending resolution or are open. Ideally, this includes detailed information about each one: customer, time of call, duration of call, type of call (based on the product or service you provide), who received it, status of the call, the last interaction, and next planned interaction. It could be aged by the number of days the call has been opened.

Why is this important? You want to know which customers are having problems, what kinds of problems they’re having, and what’s being done to solve them. You want to know if there are any issues that are taking longer than usual to resolve. I have some clients – small business owners – who get this report every day.

Closed interactions.

This report includes much of the same information from the previous calls or interactions report—unresolved, but also includes a field for when the interaction was resolved, who resolved it, and the final resolution (including dispositions). You can run this weekly to review the interactions that were handled, but I also recommend doing a monthly recap. It should be sorted by type of call by topic so that you can identify whether there were numerous calls about a similar issue. You should also sort this by customer because sometimes problems aren’t always about your product or service, but the people you’re dealing with.

Why is this important? You want to understand the types of problems your customers are encountering. If a common customer pain point is product assembly, this allows you to assess if improvements can be made to the assembly instructions, for instance. If there are any customers who are incurring more service time than others through no fault of your business, those customers can be handled separately or priced differently in the future.

Agents report.

This report compares the performance of your customer service agents in terms of calls, speed to answer, call duration, availability, and time to resolution. Even if you have a small team of agents, it’s important to measure how each agent is doing so you can identify any productivity issues and they can better understand how they can best serve your customers. Performance reviews can be based on these metrics, and when those reviews occur, there should be no surprises.

A few other thoughts:

• Spend the time getting these reports set up and designed to your liking. Set up automatic delivery so you get these three reports in your inbox at least once a week. Also, make sure they’re readily available for mobile access in case you want to take a quick, real-time look.

• Have goals. Address quality issues and aim to reduce these calls per month. Try to decrease the amount of time it takes to resolve an issue. See if an agent can handle more calls in the same period of time. Make these goals public so agents can gauge how they’re doing compared to their peers.

• More importantly: follow up. Your interactions report—closed may also want to include a field and description for follow-up. Check in with or survey your customers a week or so later to make sure they were satisfied with the experience and are not having any additional concerns. Talkdesk Express can be set up with workflows to perform some of these functions automatically.

Human beings tend to avoid problems. We don’t want headaches. We gravitate towards the good and away from the bad. But the best people I know who run small businesses have the opposite approach. They want to know the problems, and they want to know how they’re being addressed.

This is not only because they want to keep their customers happy. It’s also because they know that where there are problems, there are also opportunities. When customers need help with a product or service, businesses can learn if they are using it correctly, if there is more they can be doing to get the most reward from it, or if they could benefit from additional products and services that may complement what they bought and improve their experience.

Most customers don’t tell you if they’re happy or not. Many of them are invisible. But when an issue arises, they become visible. Being aware of these issues and then,of course, quickly and satisfactorily addressing them, can create ways to build relationships and increase revenues. People running businesses know that their best source of new revenues comes from their existing customer base. They understand that customer issues can help drive those revenues.

So, take it from me: set up a contact or customer service application like Talkdesk Express. Get your people trained to capture every issue they encounter from your customers. Get the three reports I recommend above. Know who’s having problems. Don’t run away from these problems. Run towards them. Your business will benefit.