I work closely with our support team at Swimfish. This group does a great job handling questions on SharePoint, on CRM systems, on mobile devices, and every once in a while I’m sure they work on finding cures for major diseases. They’re that good.
As the head of engineering I’m always interested in learning more about how our customers feel about our products, what problems are they encountering, where are they finding success. In the past I’ve asked for varying degreees of reports from support teams, joined them for their meetings, etc…
This time around I want to see if there is a better solution for finding answers to the questions I want answered and I would love to gather as much feedback as possible. Here are the metrics I’m going to be gathering, what else would you add to the list?
- # of support calls per licensed user per product per week. My intent is to gauge where the most issues are coming from. We might have two products each with 10 support issues per week. However, if one of those products is deployed to 100,000 users and the other is deployed to 1000 users, I want to be able to take a closer look at the “buggier” product.
- What are top five support calls per product per week? These are the items that have to be on the hit list to get resolved sooner than later.
- What customers never call in? Is it because they’re using the product and it is solving all of their problems or are they so frustrated with the product that they’ve given up?
What am I missing? What would you change?
John
March 30, 2009 at 2:56 pm
John – It’s great to look at these kinds of metrics. Along with reaching out to clients directly, it’s the best way to keep your finger on the pulse of customers, their frustrations, and successes.
One metric that may also be useful is, what customers have stopped calling in for support. In other words, if Bill Smith was a regular caller 6 months ago, but hasn’t called in 3-4 months, why? Does he still work for the customer-company? Has he moved on to another position? Did the customer change focus or abandon the product?