‘Whether you are handling a big brand business or starting from scratch, monitoring your customer service metrics is crucial in 2023.’
These key customer service metrics measure performance and drive revenue from customer satisfaction to resolution time. These metrics are like vital signs for your business, and they can help you improve customer loyalty and, in turn, your bottom line. With so many metrics to choose from, it can be tough to know which ones to focus on. That’s why we’ve put together a free guide to help you understand the most critical metrics and data points.
Keep reading for a sneak peek at why these standard KPI metrics for customer service matter and what tools you can use to measure them. So, without further ado, let’s dive in and get started.
Managing inbound and outbound telephone operations can be tricky, but call center software can make it a lot easier. The software comes with a wide range of features like auto-dialers, interactive voice response systems, smart routing, and CTI, which can help automate operations. Cloud based call center software is particularly useful because it can manage everything from calling to reporting to evaluating agent performance all in one place. It’s like a unified platform that operates over the internet, enabling virtual or remote contact center agents to handle all inbound and outbound communication with customers across various channels like phone, web, email, chat, Facebook, WhatsApp, and other social media platforms. Overall, it helps organizations better communicate with their customers by providing them with a wide range of capabilities, such as communication through different channels, advanced call routing, operator management, and analytics.
Customer service metrics help support teams track if their customers are happy and their agents can do their jobs well. And 73 percent of business leaders report a direct link between their customer service and business performance, according to our 2022 CX Trends Report. This highlights the importance of investing in customer service and striving for excellence in this area. Interestingly, our 2022 CX Trends Report found that a staggering 73 percent of business leaders reported a direct correlation between their customer service quality and business performance. Major Customer Service Metrics
Collect this metric by sending out customer satisfaction surveys that ask customers to rank their recent support experience on a scale of 1 to 5 or to rate it as “good” or “bad.”
To gain more context about CSAT scores, include open-ended survey questions that prompt customers to give more details about their interaction. For example, you can ask, “How did this experience meet your expectations?” to determine what your support team is doing right. You can also state, “Tell us what we can do better,” to identify areas of improvement.
The customer Effort Score evaluates how easy it is to resolve their issues, complete a task, or speak to an agent.
The score is collected via surveys that ask customers to rate the ease of their interaction on a scale of “very easy” to “very difficult.” Send CES surveys shortly after a customer makes a purchase or engages with a support agent so the experience is still fresh in their mind.
Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) measures customer loyalty and satisfaction. Track this metric by asking buyers how likely they are to recommend your business to someone else on a scale of 1 to 10.
Promoters (respondents who answer 9–10) are very satisfied, happy customers and will most likely recommend you to others.
Passives (respondents who answer 7–8) are satisfied but not likely to recommend your products or services.
Detractors (respondents who answer 6 and below) are dissatisfied and will not encourage others to patronize your business.
Other metrics to watch that reflect your customers’ experience includes social media mentions. Track both positive and negative social media mentions to help you understand what’s been said about you publicly. This includes Twitter, Facebook, your Instagram account, and product review sites. You can easily collect and analyze customer feedback using social media monitoring tools. Use this feedback to determine the following:
How many comments appear to be written in moments of frustration, perhaps after a poor customer experience in the person or online?
How many are technical or account-specific questions?
How many comments provide feedback, positive or negative?
How many questions can be answered using links to existing help content?
How many brand mentions require or would benefit from, a response?
What time of day are your customers most active on social media?
Another excellent way to collect customer feedback (especially if you’re a subscription-based business) is to prompt your customers to tell you why they’re canceling their accounts. From this data, you can create a report of your churn activity. This can be done within the user interface during the cancellation process or as a follow-up email request after they’ve canceled. If you embed this survey into the user interface, your response rate will be much higher.
Customer Success teams want customers to be successful, to stay, and renew their subscriptions. So, they really want to understand why a customer clicks on the
dreaded “cancel subscription” button. By surveying customers as they are in the process of canceling their accounts (or right after they’ve canceled them), you can collect that vital feedback.
The first reply or response time, captures how long an agent takes to respond to a support request or ticket. Long wait times might indicate that agents are struggling to keep up with a high volume of tickets or that slow, inefficient support processes are in place.
If you provide a customer service-level agreement (SLA), check whether the agreement has a specific first-response time frame. If so, consistently track FRT to meet your SLA requirements.
This customer service metric shows how many attempts it takes to solve a customer’s problem.
Many reopen might mean customers have complex support requests, which could point to an issue with your product or service. A high reopen rate could also suggest that agents close tickets before customer issues are resolved. In this situation, customers will likely be unsatisfied with the support they receive and have more questions about their problems.
Resolution time refers to the amount of time it takes for a support agent to solve a problem. Your resolution time really matters—73 percent of customers say fast resolutions are the most critical aspect of a good customer service experience.
When monitoring this critical metric, look for trends across different customer issue types and individual agents. You may find that specific problems are more complicated and require additional resolution time. Or, you might see that specific support agents are slower than others and need further training.
This metric measures the number of updates an agent makes to a ticket.
Many touches indicate that support agents face complex issues that take much time and effort to resolve. It might also point to a problem in your product or gaps in your knowledge base.
Many customer service teams set a daily ticket-solved target for their agents (15, for example). Based on this number, they track how well their agents and teams are performing using the percentage of the target achieved. Here’s an example of how two different teams are hitting their daily ticket-solved target. It’s helpful to look at this by team and by individual agent. Of course, some days, an agent will be under (or over) the target of 15 tickets solved per day. Tracking the daily average over time is most important (in this example, 30 days) for spotting trends in agent performance and resourcing needs. This metric is calculated by dividing the total number of tickets solved in the last 30 days by an average of 18 working days a month.
We hope this informational blog has delivered all the required information that might help you in many aspects. Stay tuned for more exciting updates and articles.
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