From C-suite to agent: aligning on metrics that matter

This article was originally published in Top-Tier Support, Front’s Head of Support Kenji Hayward’s LinkedIn newsletter for customer service leaders. For more frontline advice and actionable insights, subscribe today to get them delivered to your inbox every other week.

It’s important to champion the right KPIs, no matter who you report to. This includes every stakeholder, so when Dan O’Connell joined as Front’s new CEO earlier this year, I knew I had to understand his expectations.

I asked him what he looks at first when I send my weekly updates on support performance. These made the list:

1. CSAT of course

2. Support volume: Is the product working like it’s supposed to so our customers don’t need to write in?

3. Team efficiency and AI impact: Is our deflection the best it can be? Can we do things faster without sacrificing the customer experience? Are we leveraging AI enough to accelerate resolutions, whether self-served or agent-led?

As Dan puts it, "In a saturated market, your customer experience is what sets you apart. Every touchpoint — from support to sales — is a chance to prove why customers choose you. Solid support is what separates good products from great ones."

Meanwhile, my direct manager, Chief of Engineering, Product, and Design Officer Mo Attar, favors the Jira bug report in my reporting — specifically how many issues support creates in comparison to how many issues engineering resolves. If the gap is widening, then we dig into why.

Once I’ve got exec-level goals locked, it’s time to translate them to my team into objectives and key results (OKRs). It’s an exercise of taking the higher level, more business outcome-driven goals from leadership and distilling them into more detailed tactics owned by the agents.

Cascading goals to my team

Whenever I’m setting OKRs with my team, whether it’s for our quarterly planning or a shift in priorities due to new leadership, I use a similar framework as when we decided to make our support metrics public:

• Provide a clear path forward so everyone understands how their work ladders up to each OKR

• Build trust by celebrating small wins early to gain momentum

• Communicate early and often (inviting new stakeholders to team meetings is more effective than an email)

• Reinforce the “why” and give the team ownership

My team is remote, so they appreciate weekly highlights showing their progress toward our OKRs. Everything is summarized in easy-to-read charts that are color coded so the data can be understood at a glance. I use a leaderboard showcasing the top two agents who were crushing it that week across three categories:

🔨Queue Crushers - Top number of messages sent (segmented by support tiers)

🚘Speed Racers - Fastest average response time

🏕️Happy Campers - Most 5-star CSAT scores (segmented by support tiers)

This is where understanding your team’s strengths can help you build a more balanced team. Find out which support personas make up your team with our support archetype quiz! 

While queue work is important, I also like giving public kudos to teammates who went above and beyond — whether that’s covering when a teammate is OOO or troubleshooting a broken step in our workflow. So I name a GOAT (greatest of all time) of the week that helps strike a balance. I also try to make the data fun by sprinkling in shout-outs, celebrating birthdays and work anniversaries, sharing a support meme, and including emojis and GIFs.

At the end of the day, effective reporting is all about knowing your audience. Who is going to read the report? What do they care about? What do you want them to understand from the overview? Ask the audience directly what they want to see or if they think something is missing. Even if your audience might not know what you should be reporting on (and that’s a larger challenge), as long as you’re open to learning, adapting, and iterating, you’ll get to a useful and actionable report.

More tools for your support team

• Neal Travis also talks about The Value of Support with CEO and Co-founder of AIHR Academy, Nando Steenhuis, in a recent Growth Support podcast episode.

• How do you unlock voice of customer (VoC) that’s trapped in your tickets? Front CEO Dan O’Connell and our new Head of AI Kevin Yang (from newly acquired Idiomatic) had a fireside chat on AI-powered customer insights. Watch on-demand.