Historically speaking, customer support hasn’t been viewed as a revenue driver. Now, support teams are flipping the story with positive customer feedback and influenced revenue evidence. And yet, 50% of customer experience leaders don’t report on their team’s contribution to business success. Worse than just a missed opportunity, this reinforces the outdated perception of customer service and support as a cost center, rather than a value driver.
Whether it’s your quarterly business review or an ad hoc request from leadership, summing up your team’s performance is challenging — especially with limited time and attention spans. Effective reporting requires a curated selection of metrics tailored to a compelling narrative and complemented with customer retention stories.
Free template: Download our reporting template to showcase support’s value for a variety of audiences.
How you decide to report on customer support depends on two things:
Audience: Who will be listening? Who should be?
Purpose: What is your end goal?
Let’s break down the considerations for each.
Know your audience
Before you begin gathering metrics, there are some key questions to ask about your audience:
Who needs to understand your team’s impact?
What metrics would they expect to see?
What do they care about? In other words, what kind of outcomes do they want to see from support?
If you need something from leadership, whether that’s new headcount, tooling, or reallocation of time investment, it’s essential that you identify your key stakeholders. Maybe that means inviting your CFO if you require more budget or Head of IT if you need to update your tech stack.
You’ll notice the narrative will change for each group due to varying expectations:
Board members might be interested in long-term business impact, preferring metrics like customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer retention rate (CRR).
C-suite might prefer a high-level performance overview, impact to bottom line, or valuable customer insights that could guide business decisions. Some metrics they might care about include customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net revenue retention (NRR).
Operational managers might be more focused on team productivity, operational efficiency, and reducing support costs. They might hone in on metrics like service-level agreement (SLA) compliance, first response time (FRT), and average handle time (AHT).
Cross-functional partners like product or sales might want to dig deeper into the customer experience to understand product pain points and where improvements can be made. A metric they might jump to would be net promoter score (NPS) or trends within support ticket volume.
Your immediate support team should not only keep a close eye on operational metrics like average reply time and resolution time and how they compare to industry benchmarks, but also understand their broader impact on the business. This way, they see how improving those aspects of the customer experience leads to returning customers.
Tailor your narrative with differentiated metrics that underpin each audience’s desired outcomes. Learning to champion the right KPIs under various leaders requires alignment from each party, so it’s important to understand what success looks like for everyone. Once you know the objectives and key results (OKRs) at the company level, you can ensure support’s goals ladder up to the company goals and map support’s impact to them.
Sometimes you need to shift the conversation from efficiency metrics to more holistic, outcome-based measures — put the value support brings to the customer experience first. In the past, I’ve challenged leadership to consider support’s impact on customer lifetime value. It’s not always a direct link to an upsell to prove the ROI of support.
Define your purpose
Every impactful report begins with a critical question: What do you want your audience to feel, understand, and do after they walk away?
Without a clear destination, your reporting becomes a meandering journey of data points — interesting, perhaps, but ultimately ineffective. Your report isn’t just a collection of metrics; it’s a strategic narrative designed to drive action. Think of your report as a well-designed roadmap. You need to know:
What decision or shift are you hoping to inspire?
What specific actions do you want your audience to take?
Instead of just describing what happened, illuminate why the metrics matter and what comes next. Each metric you choose to include should align with broader company goals, demonstrate your team’s business impact, and show qualitative and quantitative context. A truly credible report includes both wins and challenges, lessons learned, and other strategic recommendations for addressing shortcomings or gaps.
Keep this guiding principle front and center: what gets measured gets managed. Only you and your team know which metrics push the right story forward.
For example, stating that your CSAT score is 85% only scratches the surface of what that metric means for the business. If you pair your CSAT score with your industry standard and your internal benchmark, your audience will have much better context.
Pro tip: Add customer anecdotes and quotes to illustrate your team’s critical relationship with customers. An example story could be how support kept a large account to continue their business because they were pleased with the level of detailed support they received on a recent issue. When customers compliment teammates by individual names, that’s a good thing! Celebrate it and share it with the rest of your org.
Reporting beyond operational metrics
While traditional support metrics like CSAT are important and make up 80% of key performance indicators (KPIs) measured, they only tell part of the story. Sometimes the other part of the story comes directly from the customer and it’s important to relay those insights that could guide business decisions.
Capturing the customer experience requires processing many signals — quantitative and qualitative, structured and unstructured. For example, you can report on the top three issues that made up your ticket volume, but you should also consider your team’s sentiment on how much time they feel like they’re spending on a customer issue.
Feedback on your customer experience can also come in a variety of forms. Structured data is when customer feedback is captured through a survey or in a ticket. However, there’s still rich data found within unstructured formats like social media comments or thoughts shared over a phone call.
Customer support leaders must harness this wealth of data across this diverse array of sources and integrate key intel into their reporting for a more holistic view of support’s impact.
Need help pairing metrics with the right narrative in your reporting? Download the template.
Be an intentional storyteller
Before you start compiling data, spend time understanding who your report is for and what matters to them. Define the purpose of your report to know which metrics to include in your narrative (and avoid “Death by Powerpoint” with our template).
Finally, remember to look beyond traditional metrics and incorporate customer insights for a more holistic view of your team’s contributions. Happy reporting!
Frequently asked questions
What if my stakeholders have conflicting expectations?
Find areas where you can establish common ground. Company goals and OKRs are great reference points when sharing the reasoning behind decisions and focus areas. Sometimes a leader might be fixated on a specific metric or there could be a misunderstanding of the metric entirely. This is where open discussions of what the metrics mean and why they matter are important. Try framing discussions around business impact and customer outcomes rather than just numbers.
How do I navigate presenting challenging results or negative metrics?
Include context to help explain when your results are less than ideal. Always present metrics with:
Historical trends: Maybe it was a bumpy product launch
Industry benchmarks: Helps show where you stand even if you missed your internal benchmark
Contributing factors: Policy updates, product changes, seasonal impacts, etc.
Most importantly, always provide next steps on what you plan to do to remedy the situation or prevent setbacks from happening again.
What are the best practices for the frequency and format of reports?
Depending on how your business operates, timing could vary from weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual reporting. Talk to your stakeholders to understand what they would prefer, while also being pragmatic about having enough time for data to collect for a meaningful analysis.
Same goes for the format. Find out your audience’s preferences. Some prefer to be updated by email while others prefer a presentation. Get creative in figuring out the most effective way to get your message across. Experiment and see what sticks!
worksheet: How customer support drives business value
A reporting template for customer support leaders to present to their C-suite, non-support teammates, and immediate team.
Written by Andrea Lean
Originally Published: 12 December 2024