What is volume by channel?
Definition: Volume by channel is a customer support metric that measures the number of conversations support has with customers across different channels.
It helps businesses understand the workload on their support channels and identify opportunities to optimize them.
Common customer support channels
- Email is the most popular support channel and tends to have a high volume due to asynchronous communication being convenient for customers. It is mostly used for non-urgent and complex issues.
- Phone support lets customers directly talk with support and has a high volume in most industries. It is used for urgent and complex issues.
- Live chat allows for real-time communication with support and has a high volume because it is used for common questions.
- Social media has multiple platforms allowing convenience in communicating but has lower volume due to it being a channel with slower response rates.
- Self-service includes FAQs, knowledge bases, and informative blogs that allow customers to solve problems without needing support. This means that it doesn’t count volume in tickets but in visits.
- Chatbots utilize automation to provide quick assistance to customers with simple questions.
How to measure support volume by channel?
Businesses can measure them in three ways:
- Tracking support interactions and requests across different channels involves keeping a count of every customer interaction with support for every different channel. This can be done by multi-channel ticket counting software or multiple sing-channel ticketing software. Note that self-service and chatbots don’t receive direct support requests and aren’t counted for.
- Identifying patterns and trends in channel usage by analyzing support requests over time. This helps businesses identify the usage of each channel and increases/decreases in traffic over time.
- Calculating key metrics for different channels like response time, resolution time, first contact resolution rate, satisfaction scores, or average handle time gives businesses insights into the effectiveness and efficiency of each channel.
- Categorizing support interactions over different channels by issue, location, customer persona… helps businesses understand which customer group uses which channel and for what type of interaction.
How can businesses optimize support operations based on volume by channel data?
- By tracking the number of interactions each channel gets, businesses can allocate their staff to the channels that get the most traffic.
- When one or more channels have disproportionately low traffic compared to other channels, support can encourage or redirect customers to use those channels and balance them out.
- By analyzing volume data businesses can identify specific reasons customers are reaching out to support over those specific channels and optimize those channels to solve those specific issues.
- Analyzing past data for different channels helps support predict future channel usage and lets them prepare their resources accordingly.
- By identifying channels with the highest volume and customer impact, businesses can prioritize investing in them, improving their effectiveness and customer experience.
