How do you measure your customer support staff performance? Many companies fire employees for having "low numbers" but since they can't measure tone, they end up driving their reps to optimize for other factors.
When I used to work support in global escalations for a big multinational, my manager, nor his, ever knew what to do with me.
I maintained a 100% flawless NPS/satisfaction survey rating the entire time, but my mean call time was also nearly triple that of everyone else.
I helped far fewer people, but the ones that I did help I frequently ended up actually educating, resulting in nearly no repeat calls.
Management could never come up with a purely zendesk based overall performance metric I wasn't near the bottom of. I never much cared because at least weekly a customer that I helped would try to convince me to quit and come work for them as a private consultant, making it incredibly hard for my manager to convince me I should change anything at all about what I was doing.
I left after 3 years and shortly after the whole thing got outsourced to an Alorica call center. So I guess management did figure it out, they'd rather have 4 people who's only qualification is the ability to fog a mirror, giving out near worthless support very quickly, than pay for 1 person like me.
Having been in a similar position usually being on the 'inside' with access to code/tools/etc was more interesting than being some consultant who didn't have sufficient access and was saddled with the job responsibility of actually using the product for it's intended goal in an ordinary business setting. Playing troubleshooter for the real hard problems that nobody expected or thought about and delivering a solution in one in a hundred calls can be more rewarding than just turning the crank on a business system.
Some companies actively solicit feedback after interactions with customer support, about the interaction. Those surveys link back directly to the agent. More generally there's also NPS.
I always give those the maximum number of stars/smiles/whatever and put the interaction in the best possible light no matter what. I always assume problems at the front line start somewhere further back.
This is what irked and continues to irk me about working in a customer support position. When I was going above and beyond for customers, customers would go out of their way to let my boss and others know that I was their hero. However, what did that get me? A shallow, perfunctory reply that "the [redacted] department was lucky to have me" and to keep doing great work! When I'd meet with my boss or get feedback, they'd basically shit on my numbers.
As a consequence, I eventually gave in and decided to improve my numbers to see how "well" i could do. I was able to cut down my times to about a third of a normal agent, but that also resulted in me being more robotic and much less of a human to the customers.
I maintained a 100% flawless NPS/satisfaction survey rating the entire time, but my mean call time was also nearly triple that of everyone else.
I helped far fewer people, but the ones that I did help I frequently ended up actually educating, resulting in nearly no repeat calls.
Management could never come up with a purely zendesk based overall performance metric I wasn't near the bottom of. I never much cared because at least weekly a customer that I helped would try to convince me to quit and come work for them as a private consultant, making it incredibly hard for my manager to convince me I should change anything at all about what I was doing.
I left after 3 years and shortly after the whole thing got outsourced to an Alorica call center. So I guess management did figure it out, they'd rather have 4 people who's only qualification is the ability to fog a mirror, giving out near worthless support very quickly, than pay for 1 person like me.