Customer service is the key to success or the sustainability of any business. In today’s competitive ecosystem, it’s no longer a good practise to track performance, it’s a must.
Staff Domain understands that the effectiveness of your customer service team directly impacts customer satisfaction, retention, and ultimately, your bottom line. With the growing trend toward leveraging outsourced customer success teams, including offshore customer success managers (CSMs), measuring these metrics has become more dynamic. This article explores the most important metrics for measuring customer service performance in a way that business leaders should pay attention to.
Who is the Customer Success Manager?
A Customer Success Manager (CSM) acts as the bridge between your company and your customers, ensuring that the customer’s needs are met and their relationship with your business remains strong. From handling customer queries to becoming a strategic role that shapes retention, satisfaction and long-term loyalty, this role has evolved.
Whether you employ an internal or an offshore customer success manager, the role remains critical. It often comes down to cost and scalability, but performance measurements need to stay the same. To get started, evaluate how well your CSM is doing. Review their, and their team’s performance, based on the following key metrics to customer success performance.
Critical Metrics to Measure Customer Success Performance
You need to measure the right performance metrics to measure the success of your customer success strategy. With these metrics, you can get actionable insights about how well (or not) your team (in-house or offshore) is driving customer satisfaction and retention.
1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
One of the most direct metrics for seeing how customers are feeling about your service is Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). Surveys sent after a customer interacts with your support team are often how it’s measured. Asking, “How satisfied are you with your recent experience?” is both a simple and effective way to check customer sentiment.
For companies utilizing offshore CSM teams, monitoring CSAT becomes even more crucial. Discontent often arises from miscommunication or cultural differences. For this reason, you need to make sure that your offshore CSM are trained to meet your service expectations. If your customers consistently have high CSAT scores, even when your CSM isn’t in the same country as your customers, that tells you that your CSM is well supported, and they are providing that value regardless of their location.
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
It’s also important to look at your Net Promoter Score (NPS). This metric measures how likely your customers are to tell others about your business. NPS is a clear indication of customer loyalty, the question at its heart — ‘On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?’ — should be answered by every company.
NPS is particularly telling when evaluating the performance of offshore customer success managers. While outsourced customer success solutions can save on overhead costs, ensuring that offshore teams deliver consistent service levels is essential for maintaining a high NPS.
Low NPS scores can indicate that there is a gap between what customers expect and what gets delivered. In most cases, this is because of the differences in training, or lack of alignment between the offshore team and your company’s service ethos. Regularly auditing NPS scores is important to ensure that all remote client success managers are in sync regarding the customer experience.
3. Customer Retention Rate
Acquisition is usually less valuable than retention. Customer retention rate is the percentage of customers your business keeps within a certain period. This metric is a direct indicator of how well your customer success managers are performing, as their primary role revolves around ensuring that customers stay satisfied and loyal.
Retention rates are a critical metric for evaluating the long-term impact of both in-house and offshore customer success managers. An effective remote client success manager should be just as capable of keeping customers loyal as an on-site team member, but consistent training and alignment with company values are key. However, if your offshore team can retain customers as good as an internal team, then your outsourcing model is working fine.
4. First Response Time
Customer service speed does count. First Response Time (FRT) is the time it takes your team to respond to a customer inquiry. With customers expecting near instant solutions, FRT reduction is key to keeping customers happy.
For offshore CSM teams and client success managers remote, time zone differences and communication delays can sometimes hinder fast response times. Unfortunately, these challenges can be overcome with the right processes in place. The more valued your customers are, the faster your team needs to respond.
5. Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score (CES) is a way to measure how easy it is for customers to get their issues resolved. This metric is especially important for tracking the efficiency of your customer success managers, whether in-house or remote. Customers today want speed and simplicity and a high CES can indicate friction in the support process.
For offshore customer success teams, CES becomes a particularly relevant metric. Building language barriers, unclear workflows, or complex escalation processes can cause customers to expend extra effort to solve their problems. If your customer success managers remote are doing their job well, a low CES suggests that they are making the support process as frictionless as possible.
Practical Tips to Improve Customer Service Performance
1. Set clear response time targets
2. Equip teams with real-time data
3. Tailor training for offshore teams
Measuring Success for Long Term Growth
Staff Domain‘s offshore outsourcing solutions connect your business to a highly experienced global talent pool for game-changing results. Effortlessly manage your offshore workforce with our comprehensive compliance, payroll, and HR support, and benefit from fixed, transparent pricing in your local currency. Contact us today or schedule a meeting with our sales team to quickly source the right offshore team for your business
