Is Your Customer Facing Communications Actually Working?
Have you ever wondered if your Customer-Facing Communications is working?
We have!
I have been pondering for months how to find, benchmark, track, and improve Customer-Facing Communications. Here’s what I’ve come up with…
Finding the Customer-Facing Communications KPI:
One day it dawned on me that if the recommended Protocol was being followed, WFRs would be firing, and the ratio of how often each one fired would provide the information we are looking for.
Success: Finding the KPI data has been achieved; check that one off.
Benchmarking the Customer-Facing Communications KPI:
As mentioned, the 2nd best reason to partner with Advanced Global is due to the fact we’ve been working with MSPs around the world for the last 5 years. In turn, this has allowed us to benchmark the average and Best in Class MSP performance.
The #1 reason to partner with us is that we hold our Customers accountable to implement the Service Delivery Operational changes so badly needed.
Here is what we are seeing on average for the short time we have been tracking this metric:
Note the drop-off between # of tickets created and # of tickets Reviewed and Assigned. As we drill into the data, this delta is a noise factor. More than one MSP has taken this noise data point alone to discover the volume of merged tickets or ones closed with 0 (less than X minutes depending on the MSPs noise SOP) time entered.
Merged Tickets:
To resolve the Merged ticket problem, the MSP looked at how the Customer-Facing Communications were being handled and, by improving the Protocol, was able to reduce the noise.
The biggest improvement was re-educating the Techs on three key points of the Protocol:
1) To communicate from within the ticket, or at the very least with the ticket number in the subject line so as not to create a duplicate ticket.
2) To CC Support@, so the email processing was on the thread.
3) Real-Time Time Entry, so the Customer update was delivered in a timely fashion.
Also, educating the Customer to respond to the auto-acknowledgment with inquires and updates so as not to create a duplicate ticket.
Closed with 0 Time Entered:
For the number of tickets completed with no time added, it was discovered that most of these tickets are alerts deemed as being noise. Therefore, sending the list of tickets to the person responsible for RMM scripting was the key to reducing this noise. From experience, 75-80% of the RMM noise tickets can be reduced by improved scripting.
The data and % rates are an average across a very small sample size. However, as time goes on and we have a chance to work with more MSPs, the ratios will become much more accurate. Soon, we will see a pattern of average MSP and Best in Class MSPs.
For now, suffice it to say that using WFR data is the best Customer-Facing Communications Protocol KPI. Even without benchmark data, knowing how your Service Delivery Team is performing when it comes to providing a great Customer Experience and keeping the Customer in the loop as they expect goes a long way to:
1) Reducing churn (worth about $160 per Managed Service Customer per year)
2) Developing Raving Fans (cutting your Sales Cycle from 90 days to 7 days)
3) Finding continuous improvement coaching opportunities