Reporting inspires a mixed bag of emotions for leaders and their teams. It’s hard to strike a balance between the wealth of KPIs reported and the quality of insights these KPIs generate.
For the Customer Experience team, reporting goes beyond historical performance tracking against goals. Rather, these key team members use reporting to nurture the most crucial set of stakeholders for any business - the customers.
Unlike non-customer teams, the CX team reports on qualitative data as well as quantitative data, from widely varying sources from support ticketing platforms to email and calendars. The insights generated from the plethora of data and metadata ultimately leads to a stronger and healthier relationship with the customer.
Read on as our CX team shares how using our very own platform - Pigment - transformed their reporting in three key areas.
Introducing the incredible Pigment for Pigment project!
Here’s a question for you: how do you know when a product is best-in-class?
The answer: it’s when the product transforms the lives of not only its customers, but also its best advocates - the employees. And the Pigment for Pigment project is just that; a successful project for internal usage of the platform for our modeling, forecasting, and reporting needs.
What does this mean for you? We have lots more Pigment for Pigment case studies coming up packed with dozens of examples highlighting how companies can transform their forecasting and reporting with next-gen integrated business planning software. If we can do it, so can you. Stay tuned (and subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates) for:
- Actuals vs forecast
- Sales capacity
- Headcount planning
- Sales funnel reporting
- SaaS metrics reporting
- OPEX planning
With that said, let’s learn how the CX team uses Pigment software to boost productivity and unlock deeper insights.
Monitoring product adoption to create happier customers
Product adoption, sometimes measured as activation, is a set of KPIs that indicate the extent to which users derive value and achieve their goals when using the product. For the product-led company, adoption is one of the key signs of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Each company or product will have a unique set of KPIs to track adoption, but the main goal remains the same:
- Regularly check the pulse of customer health in their interaction with the product
- Identify early warning signs to proactively maintain happy customers
For the Pigment CX team, the product adoption board is a core piece in tracking and achieving team goals.
“When we use multiple data sources, we're unable to track qualitative and even some quantitative goals. Moreover, these pre-built reports are not tailored to our needs. But with Pigment, we can see things like G2 review scores and opportunities in Salesforce, all in the same view.” - Damien Lambert, Customer Success Lead, Pigment
The CX team measures their performance against their OKRs on Pigment and reports to the wider organization on these metrics as well. But that’s not all.
The team drills down to granular levels of data, allowing them to track performance by team members or at the account level.
“You can track the global performance of the team, but you can also view the performance of just one person or a small subset of the team.”
But what exactly does the team measure under product adoption? Read through this extensive list of SaaS product adoption metrics to add to your reporting:
- Daily Active Users: Unique number of users who interact with the product each day
- Monthly Active Users: Unique number of users interacting with the product over a 30-day window
- Time to Value (TTV): The average time taken for users to experience an “aha” moment or derive true value from the product
- ARR: Annual Recurring Revenue is the total amount of recurring revenue, including expansions and up-sells, in a year
- Customer Moments: Significant customer appreciation events including stellar customer reviews, customer reference calls, and positive customer feedback
Accelerated capacity planning with calendar sync, forecasts, and project peering
One of the most common types of analysis used by customer experience teams is capacity planning. Capacity planning is the process of mapping historical bandwidth to predict future capacity needs of the team.
For customer success managers and other members of the CX team, this includes time tracking - a highly complicated and difficult process without the assistance of the right tools. Luckily for Pigment CXers, they’re all set up on the platform:
"We use Pigment everyday, for two purposes: for time tracking and to project our future capacity needs."
Time tracking with Google Calendar synchronization
Time tracking involves identifying how many hours each team member spends with each customer over a period of time. Often, support or implementation hours are built into customer contracts, so minute time tracking is critical to stay true to the contract.
Where this gets complicated is when you handle an increasingly large number of customers, each with separate meetings booked with team members. This is where the Pigment CX team jumps in with one of the most helpful Pigment integrations: the Google Calendar connector.
Integrating Pigment with your Google Calendar means you can automatically track how much time was spent with each customer, any day of the week. You can further slice and dice this by team member or other dimensions.
Imagine a customer calls to ask how exactly your CSM spent six hours with them. Easy, just pull up your time tracking Pigment board and filter by account to share a personalized report of all the time spent with them, sourced directly and automatically from your calendar!
The best part of time tracking on Pigment is the ability to personalize your report based on specific input parameters. Set up your application to identify customer or employee names for more customized reporting than ever before.
Workload forecasts and headcount planning
The Pigment CX team uses time tracking data not only to report on historic time spent, but also to forecast workload and future headcount needs.
By breaking down time spent by each team member on each customer per week, the team gains a way to estimate effort and hours needed for future projects. Each time you sign a new customer or sign a new project, you have an easy way to analyze team bandwidth and craft plans for additional hires.
"This feels much better than creating a static spreadsheet - it's collaborative, easier, and more dynamic to perform capacity planning in Pigment."
In addition to increasing efficiency, long-term planning is streamlined, leading to better utilization of the team’s time and ultimately, customers that are well cared for.
Project peering
Project peering is the process to establish backup CSMs to tend to each customer account. When this process is done manually, it is open to human error. Errors, such as forgetting to assign a backup for a specific account or double booking a CSM, impact the customer.
The Pigment CX team uses their project peering application on Pigment to ensure proper handling of each customer account with the right backups at the right time. As a bonus, they’re now able to provide the same set of project peers dedicated to a specific account, building a stronger bond with each customer.
Reporting on Customer Support KPIs in Pigment
Customer support is one of the key pillars for retaining customers for the long term. Often, companies are able to gather hidden insights from the patterns emerging from the type, frequency, and resolution rate of support tickets.
The Pigment CX team uses a set of boards in Pigment to track all of their support KPIs. The team can be confident about data accuracy, as all their data is sourced directly from Zendesk.
For the support team, it’s important to prioritize the metrics tracked in order to attend to critical, high urgency issues with agility. If you’re wondering what exactly those metrics are, here’s a list of crucial customer success metrics tracked by the best support teams in the industry:
- Total ticket volume: the total number of tickets raised in a given time period. This can include resolved tickets as well, as this metric is tracking tickets created regardless of current status. For more granularity, dissect ticket volume by ticket type and priority.
- First response time: the average time taken to send an initial response to a raised ticket. First response time can vary by industry and ticket channel type. Generally, chat tickets receive faster initial responses than email tickets.
- Average ticket duration: the average amount of time a ticket takes to resolve from when it is raised to when it is successfully closed.
- Remaining unresolved tickets: this is the count of open tickets currently in the ticketing system.
- Ticket volume growth: the percentage growth in total ticket volume over time. A sharp or even a steady increase in this metric can indicate potential problems or even predict churn.
- Ticket topics: a summary of the top ticket topics along with their frequency of appearance.
- Support satisfaction score: the average score showing how customers rate their interactions with customer support.
The Pigment Customer Support team reports regularly on their KPIs within Pigment. Additionally, the CSM team uses these reports to create checkpoints with customers and monitor account health from a support standpoint.
The Pigment CX team moves faster and makes decisions with much more confidence with the onset of the Pigment for Pigment project. But the biggest advantage for Pigmenauts is to walk in the shoes of our customers and develop real empathy for their pain points.
By championing their own product, the Pigment CX team has developed unparalleled empathy for the customers’ points of view and strives to make each day of their customer experience a true pleasure.
