Customer Service is, of course, predominantly concerned with solving customer issues in a timely fashion, but an organization should also take a look at why customers are having problems in the first place.  Customers’ problems never happen in a vacuum and businesses must look at the bigger picture.

Organizations must ask themselves if there are specific issues costing them business?  Are there problems that are losing individual customers or a matter that has given your organization a negative reputation?  Are there situations that could be avoided altogether if approached in a different way?  Are there issues that appear frequently?  Or is it often the same customers asking for help?  The same type of customers?  Are there certain categories that need attention?  Specific types of problems, issues or customers that appear more than others?

Good Customer Service strategy shouldn’t focus only on attempting to resolve more tickets; it should also concentrate on having fewer tickets to solve.  (And not because your customers become exasperated with poor service that they give up or never bother to contact the service department.)  Tickets shouldn’t be viewed as paperwork to plow through as quickly as possible.  Instead, look at the deeper meaning contained within them.  

Use the data from your Customer Service tickets to analyze the overall Customer Experience strategy.  How are you meeting customer needs?  Do you know what they need?  How do you know?  Are you positive that you are correct?  Are you certain that you are solving their issues or have they just “gone away”?  Beyond checking “resolved” on a ticket, have you really fixed the problem?  Is the problem more than that one single ticket?  That one customer?  That one issue?

Rather than seeing each ticket as an individual item, see it as part of the overall state of your organization.  What is each portion of the whole saying about your business?  What story does it tell regarding the efficiency or quality of your operations?  What is it saying about the success, or not, of your product development to meet customer needs?  What feedback does every ticket give you regarding the effectiveness of all of your policies, procedures, software systems and business practices?

Because every customer comment, both positive and negative, is answering these questions.  It’s information regarding the state of your organization.  It’s all part of your customers’ experience.  It’s also part of your employees’ experience, the value of your product development team, and the value of your current way of doing business. 

Each resolved and unresolved ticket isn’t only a statement regarding one customer and their one problem.  It is part of a much larger story.  Don’t lose the forest for the trees.  The trees will tell you just how well the forest is doing.   If you analyze the health of the trees, the number of trees, the location of the trees, it will tell you a lot about the health of the overall forest.

Customer Service is more than solving customers’ issues, although it is that too.  If you analyze your organization’s Customer Service, it will provide you with important information regarding your business.  The quality of your organization’s Customer Service demonstrates to your customers how much you value them, but also how well your business is doing.  It’s a barometer for your internal and external operations.

Once you begin to examine the tickets for the deeper meaning, you will understand the mistakes your organization is making and where to focus your energy.  You will realize what needs work, improvement or a complete overhaul.  Your customers’ common issues will show you which past decisions were correct and which ones were not.  They will demonstrate to you the aspects of your organization, product development, policies and/or procedures that need adjustment.  Feedback from your customers will show you which tasks are a priority and, often, if you’re willing to listen, your customers will tell you how to go about fixing them.  Sometimes, your customers’ words and experiences will be able to show you the exact steps you need to take, or at the very least, they will help guide you to the answers.  The tickets will show you how diverse your organization’s issues are or how deep they go.  They illustrate what types of things your customers don’t want or appreciate as well as what their priorities and concerns are.

A non-profit organization took the results of a customer survey to prove to themselves that they were doing a great job.  It’s true, the business was highly rated on individual survey forms, but what was also true, was that very few customers filled out the survey.  To claim an organization is meeting customers’ needs based on only a few responses isn’t honest or helpful (to either the business or the customers).  Cherry picking data doesn’t assist an organization to improve, it only helps sooth egos.  But soothing egos doesn’t work to save a struggling organization.  Listening to customers’ concerns does.

If the organization took the time to see the greater meaning in the fact that few of its customers wanted to fill out a survey, it would have noticed the level of unhappiness and the reasons behind retention rates dropping.  The business would have been able to proactively put strategies in place to uncover what their customers wanted from them and how best to go about providing that. 

Every customer interaction needs to be given the importance it deserves, but it also must be looked at as part of the overall business strategy.  It is only by analyzing this information and feedback, that you will have a clear picture of how you are doing and what actions to take.