Lead Your Support Team to Success

At IT Glue™, we have a stellar Partner Success team, addressing the continuous support, service and consultation requirements of our partners. We love to see our partners succeed and will often try to go above and beyond to help them. From onboarding, all the way to providing continuous consultation and support, our Partner Success team takes care of all service requests, freeing minds in the process. Here are our tips for developing the right metrics for your support team!

Research industry trends

In order to provide world-class onboarding, support and consultation, you need to learn from what are the not-so-best-practices and trends in the industry.

Research suggests some interesting statistics:

• 45% of US consumers will abandon an online transaction if their questions or concerns are not addressed quickly. (Forrester)
• 33% of consumers would recommend a brand that provides a quick but ineffective response, that’s double those that would recommend one that offers slow but effective. (Nielsen-McKinsey)
• 89% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service. (RightNow Customer Experience Impact Report)
• A customer is 4 times more likely to buy from a competitor if the problem is service-related vs. price- or product-related. (Bain & Co.)
• 55% of consumers would pay more for a better customer experience. (Defaqto Research)
• 42% of service agents are unable to efficiently resolve customer issues due to disconnected systems, archaic user interfaces, and multiple applications. (Forrester)

Based on these trends, here at IT Glue we focus on some key metrics that help us become a mature, lean, continuously learning, and adjusting department – Partner Success as the ultimate goal.

1. First response time

We strive to respond to every request from partners within 8 business hours, but we often follow up much sooner, with around 40% of all requests answered in less than 1 hour. Since this is the first point of contact, ensuring that the user gets a timely reply is vital. This involves acknowledging the issue or request at hand and providing a first-time resolution as often as possible. If not, timely follow-ups will eventually resolve the request.

2. Follow-up response time – keep the partners in the loop

We also strive to follow up on tickets every 8 hours once a partner gets back with additional info. We want to let our partners know that they have been heard and that we are doing what it takes to address the request. Quick and efficient responses are key to that process.

3. Partner surveys – gather feedback and analyze

After every resolved ticket, we send out a survey to our partners to rate their experience as GOOD or BAD with the option to leave a comment. We collect all feedback and analyze the tickets. This method isn’t designed to dwell on the negative. Rather, it’s a way to examine each and every pain point at a granular level.

The feedback points us to tickets that may need a little more attention. Often, the feedback left by users in a rating is enough to help us address the specific problems of the ticket in question. The agent gets back to the ticket requester, ensuring that any unattended concern or misunderstanding is completely taken care of and fully addressed. Any product-related feedback is duly passed on to the Product team. Thankfully, the feedback for us is overwhelmingly good, with over 97% responding in the positive, leaving us with only a handful to address individually.

Your metrics will help you succeed

These are just some of the metrics that we track in the Partner Success department. There is definitely no single metric that can tell you everything you need to know. Based on your needs, you may have to track several other statistics that will help you get a better picture of your support and service department and how effectively they are dealing with your clients. No matter which metrics you decide to measure and track, we feel that these three are some of the most important ones to lead our team to success!