26: Metrics with Craig Stoss

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Welcome to session twenty-six of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is metrics, so let's hear five leaders talking about that very topic. Today I'd like to welcome back my very good friend Craig Stoss. I have some strong feelings about metrics, as I know almost every support leader does, one way or the other. I'm interested in what your ethos is around metrics, what you ideally would like to do, what you currently do, and uh and why you do it.

Craig Stoss: 0:52

Okay, yeah. I mean, my my first thought that comes to mind when you say that is around um the kind of differences between team metrics, individual metrics, performance metrics, business metrics, things like that. Um I always start with any team of mine with the expectation. And I and I, you know, it's hard if there's no expectation to be able to say someone's a poor performer or a high performer. So for example, that could be something as simple as you need to take 20 new tickets per person per day. That's an expectation. And you can start to measure is someone higher than that, lower than that, uh, you know, and and start to figure that out. And then it's it's things like um the important stuff around time to resolve and time to first contact and and those types of things. So I start always with those types of things just to make sure the team understands what my expectation is, what what I have anticipated the customers' expectations are, and uh how how we're gonna meet that. For the most part, I don't focus on individual metrics in my world. I really do focus if we're gonna provide a consistent customer experience, then I think the metrics should be reflect that we are providing it consistently across the team. The consistency is what's important to a customer. Uh I remember long ago when I was traveling for my job frequently, I would call into my my um airplane points company um and I would call and get the answer, no, you can't do whatever you want to do. And I would hang up and call back, and they would say, Yeah, absolutely, let me do that for you right now. And that's what you need to avoid. Beyond that, the the next thing is is kind of the business metrics. And those are the things like um, you know, are your customers satisfied with the service? Is there is there any trends that you need to be aware of? And I like to focus that on more more than more than just CSAT and and MPS and the kind of traditional models of metrics. I like to focus it on trends. So I try to use um both a combination of automated categorization as well as manual categorization of tickets, severities, um, and things like that, uh, as well as obviously customer comments and feedback. But I try to take all of that into one system and and try to provide trend uh provide trends to the business. So this area of the product has had an uptick in negative responses from our customers. This uh this area of the service has provided a positive response, you know, keep doing what you're doing. Um that's the type of thing that that I really like to focus on in metrics, is it's a little bit meaningless to say my CSAT was 90% this month. Because if it was 80, 95 the month before, or if it was 85 the month before, that probably changes the meaning of that metric. 90 is objectively a great customer satisfaction score, but if it's going up or down, that's what's more important.

Charlotte Ward: 3:37

It's important as well, I think, also though, to not read too much into small jumps. You know, if you're looking at trends, it's like who who cares if it was 89 last month and 90 this month? We care if it was, well, maybe I I would care if it was 90 this month and 75 next month. That's quite different, right? But the little variances I think don't bother me really. It's uh so long as the they're relatively consistent. And of course, we're always looking for improvements in the service, but I wouldn't personally obsess over a single digit or two here and there.

Craig Stoss: 4:12

Yes, I think that's true. Uh you know, I think the key point of what you said is the looking for improvement piece. And so beh the way to do that is to okay, it did drop five points, ten points, whatever the drop might be, but what's the story behind that? You know, and and and that's how you improve. It's the story of why that drop occurred that's more important. Um I I had an interesting situation. I was presenting some metrics on response times um to my my peers, and the average response time was was quite high. And I said, this looks really bad if you kind of just judge it based on that number. But when I looked into it, you know, it was something like 65% of the response times were less than one hour, which is which was much better than our SLA was in this particular instance. And I said, the and if you look at the 35% that didn't meet that, there actually is a clear trend on why we didn't. And I went into it and explained that trend. And it was incredibly well received because it basically showed that even though that number was was skewed quite high by that 35%, we're really of the 65% case and the case that we know we can achieve, you know, we're still meeting all of our SLAs, and we can now uh start to even improve more and more. You know, I think that's the key to all metrics, regardless of of which ones.

Charlotte Ward: 5:28

It's telling the stories and and and therefore asking the right questions of those metrics, right? Being being careful what you ask. And I I think you tweeted quite some while ago about uh every support leader gets to that point where they have a spreadsheet that is you recall.

Craig Stoss: 5:45

Yeah, I do remember this one. Do you want to tell us? Yeah, I don't remember the exact wording, but it was basically every every support leader has a spreadsheet with 10 tabs and and 3,000 lines on it, you know, at some point in their career. And I think you called it, I think you called it the source of all truth. The source of all truth. That's right. Yes, exactly. And and it's true. I mean, I have probably three of them on my desktop right now that I I use. None of the tools that I've used in a support context have a really solid reporting engine backend. Yeah, I mean, those spreadsheets, they're they're gonna always exist. Uh, but I I do think uh the other thing that's nice about those spreadsheets is that you can, if someone comes to you and says, Well, can you slice it based on Mondays? I want to know, you know, is Monday a better trend than Wednesday? You know, usually you can do that and build that slice for the individual to be able to satisfy whatever the request is. Um very true.

Charlotte Ward: 6:32

Thank heavens for a pivot table. Exactly right. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash twenty six for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.