What are the most effective CSM process metrics for cross-channel consistency?

In my perspective, monitoring response time across different channels is crucial for maintaining cross-channel consistency in CSM. It's a direct measure of your team's efficiency and a reflection of your commitment to customer satisfaction. Setting realistic response time goals for each channel, aligned with customer expectations, is essential. This includes quicker responses for real-time channels like chat or phone, and perhaps slightly longer for email. Regularly reviewing these metrics and adjusting staffing and strategies accordingly ensures consistency. It's not just about being fast; it's about being consistently reliable across all platforms, which significantly enhances customer experience and trust in the brand.

Resonse time is very critical in the business. This is where the brand image of how we interact and engage with customer. No matter what, we should be able to answer a call or message within certain time.

Acknowledgement of any query needs to be automated and immediate, providing peace of mind for the customer that their query has been acknowledged. We can now also go one step further by providing self service solutions within the automated acknowledgement. Generative AI makes self support more effective than its ever been. Forget directions to your knowledge base or FAQ’s - let AI take care of customers by directing them to the most effective solution that they need, and one that can be relative to their location, language, experience or capability.

Resolution time is very important in Customer service. The faster we can close, the better our reputation. If we are not able to close soon, get them off the call and commit to a callback. Be firm and also follow through what timeline you commited regardless of we do or do not have a feedback.

This is the best answer for a perfect situation. However, not all queries are able to conclude during the intial call. I also think that proper training and incentivise this action to the Customer Service by evaluating their scores and records.

CSAT need to be followed up with a SIP which is key to measuring the change in experience from one survey to the other. It is also a documented evidence for specific actions driven from the CSAT ratings and feedback.

CSAT is a tiny part of the CX tool kit, typically reaching less than 5% of your customer base. Putting the Customer First - and all customers, not just those needing help, is how to exceed customer expectations. The best CSAT, will always be, no query, and no CSAT questionnaire required. No response time needed, no resolution required, better than first time resolution - because when we focus on Customer First, we remove issues at the root and prevent them.

One thing I have experienced in my current position is you need the right systems in place with a fully trained Team who you need to make understand why such systems exist and how they are used to derive impactful and constructive decisions. You might be doing a wonderful job with customers and getting really good feedback when you choose to do random phone calls or physical customer visits (you can even have a good recommendation/referral rate). But chances are 99% all that will not reflect on any of your dashboards if you don’t have the right systems or your team doesn’t understand the importance of systems or they don’t know how to use them and lastly if systems are violated.

Listening, learning and working backwards from the customer perspective. Don’t accept repetition of issues , if one customer has a problem, don’t accept another may have the same experience. Prevention if far better than resolution.