Many companies wrongly assume customer service data discussions exclusively involve performance metrics. While this is important, your company produces a huge swath of useful information from the customer service desk. You just need to figure out what and how to use it.

Research firm Software Advice sat down with JD Peterson, Product Marketing VP for Zendesk, one of the largest customer support software vendors, serving more than 20,000 companies.

“Years ago customer service was looked at more as cost of doing business and not a revenue generator and not connected to the rest of the business. But more and more people are realizing how valuable that customer asset really is and how can people leverage that information in sales and marketing,” Peterson said.

We're seeing customer service, marketing and sales are increasingly breaking out of their silos to align strategies. Data is a great way to do this. Start with a sales CRM and customer service software integration. This way, customer service agents can see whether or not that person is engaged in an active sales cycle. Likewise, marketing and sales can gauge customer sentiment before they send out a big campaign.

Social media is another fantastic conduit for garnering useful customer service data. Customer service-focused listening software can identify critical complaints sent on Twitter and Facebook and automatically route those tickets to an agent. Also, these platforms can show trends over time. This includes things like repetitions in feature requests that could be shared with product development and marketing.

Performance metrics and ratios are of course still very important. Above all, Petersen said companies should look at customer satisfaction – or how satisfied that person with the resolution they received. Next, he recommended factors that contribute to that score, such as first human response and time to resolution.

Call deflection is also a really important metric for cost control purposes. To measure those successes, he recommended a self-service views to ticket volume ratio.

Do you have tips for capitalizing on customer service data? Comment with your ideas. 

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Thanks to Ashley Furness from Software Advice for sharing this article and video with us! You can learn more about what metrics best-in-class organizations are looking at by downloading the latest Aberdeen report: Customer Feedback Management: Leveraging the Voice of the Customer to Amplify Business Results.