15 Customer Service KPI Metrics That Propel CX Teams

If your team is off on weekends, make sure they diligently address the ticket backlog first thing on Mondays to provide timely resolution of customer issues. A high CRR not only generates happy customers but also gives a lot of other benefits to businesses. It streamlines support operations, reduces costs for labor, and brings to light brand reputation, making you a brand leader. The main rule of a successful sale is to always think about the customers, not the business. You should genuinely try to help and resolve the issue with your product or service. Think about how the user will benefit from upgrading their subscription or buying additional stuff.

• If you don’t exclusively sell subscription packages, you’ll need to use tools like Dataweave or Y42 to measure upcoming revenue.
• Calculating how much it costs to resolve each ticket is critical to determining staffing and operating costs.
• It goes without saying that the onus of doing that lies with the customer support team.
• For instance, reducing first response time could be mapped to a customer service admin since it involves improving queue management while keeping resolution SLA in check is every agent’s responsibility.

If you don’t have a customer support platform, you can create templated responses in Gmail to answer common questions like, “Where is my order? If you use helpdesk software, you can also likely add pre-written responses agents can use for each channel. Finding out the percentage of customer support costs of your total revenue is one of the most important KPIs for customer service. When you compare the support costs in terms of your revenue it helps you to evaluate how much your service efforts represent compared to your total revenue. With the help of the simple formula, you can carry out customer service evaluation.

This metric can also be measured against daily, weekly, or monthly increments. Your average ticket count measures the average number of customer service or support tickets your team receives. You can measure these on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis … or all of the above. Customer satisfaction measures how your customers feel about the customer service or support they received.

Agent feedback

They give you insights into how customers enjoy your service, how fast they get help, and if your support team is doing the best they can. You need to acknowledge the factors that contribute to prolonged resolution times. Often, lengthy interactions stem from a lack of self-service tools (never tired of highlighting their importance!), insufficient agent training, or poor case management systems. “You may think you’re maintaining a solid first response time and resolution time, but these metrics don’t mean much if your customers still aren’t satisfied enough to stick with your business.

The next step is to identify who is responsible for achieving the goal.

The average handle time (AHT) is an important metric to track if you offer customer service via phone. In today’s online world, most ecommerce companies handle tickets only with chat and email. However, very large ecommerce brands may choose to provide phone call support as well. Most brands keep a close eye on sales numbers, marketing performance, and other parts of the business that generate revenue.

You can be the most customer-driven company in the world, but every business should earn money. And being on the frontline of customer communications, support representatives should have a vested interest in bringing in more money and customers. It’s also important to note that auto-responders don’t have the same effect. Their sole role is to confirm that a message did land in your customer service inbox. The answer from a real human is what counts (so make sure it reads as such).

You have to divide the sum of all times to resolution by the total number of cases resolved. Average resolution time (ART) refers to the total time taken by the team to resolve the support ticket once it is looked upon. You can directly ask your customers to rate their satisfaction across different communication channels such as live chat to collect real-time customer feedback as a form of survey. A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in customer service is a measurable metric used to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of a company’s customer support processes. These indicators are crucial for monitoring and improving various aspects of customer service.

From all-in-one to field-specific, we’ve collected 20 solutions for you to choose from. ” There’s no better way to measure it than by directly asking people whether they liked their experience with your business or not. The other negative example is when a person is being transferred from one customer service department to another. Support specialists need to be tied to money stuff and stay on top of everything that’s going on in your company.

Escalation rate is the percentage of tickets escalated to someone else like a senior manager or another support tier. It’s a valuable KPI for telling you how many support tickets could not be resolved by your first line of support. Although fast response times are preferred, response quality should not be sacrificed for speed. Don’t respond with a generic, cookie-cutter support email—use some personality and personalization. With a basic understanding of KPIs and why you should track them, let’s look at the top 12 KPIs support teams should track across three core categories. A KPI is an indicator that helps you track the performance of a business, project, or department against strategic goals and objectives.

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The average conversion rate refers to the number of visitors who have completed their actions successfully on your website. The higher the conversion rate, the more successful are your campaigns for business growth. Forrester report says 44% of online customers having questions answered by a support agent during the buying journey is one of the most important features of a website. Therefore, “after call work time” is the time a customer agent spends wrapping up a transaction at the end of a customer call. Most managers will want to reduce this time so as to minimize the cost of interaction with a customer.

Customer support KPIs are crucial for assessing overall team performance, holding agents accountable, keeping everyone aligned, and improving your customer service. When I first started to work at Intercom as a Customer Support Representative (CSR), KPIs were completely foreign to me. I had previously worked in the television and film industry, where there was an entirely different metric – either I delivered high quality work on time or I didn’t, and I was out. Now, as one of the managers of a global support team that is quickly scaling, I can completely understand not only the necessity but the benefits of tracking KPIs. For instance, reducing first response time could be mapped to a customer service admin since it involves improving queue management while keeping resolution SLA in check is every agent’s responsibility. While others might be tracking first contact resolution or handle time, if these don’t relate to a team’s support philosophy or goals in a meaningful way, then it’s best not to make them into KPIs.

FCR is calculated by dividing the number of issues resolved by the customer service department on the first contact by the total number of customer contacts with the department. Measuring your customer service performance gives you access to some of the most important leading KPI indicators for your business. These, in turn, will go on to influence things like your sales and your customer retention.

To cultivate an exceptional CRR, you must continuously improve customer experience and follow strategies that put a client at the center of all decisions. While all elements are clear, let me elaborate on the total after-talk work time. It is the time that agents spend on after-call work, such as writing up a report or following up with the customer. The goal is to answer as many questions as possible before people even ask. Use common questions from your support experience, track niche communities, and Quora. Statistically speaking, people who had a negative experience with a company are more likely to leave a review.

Providing them scripts and customer surveys, and putting a clear process in place are also best practices you should consider if you want to increase your first call resolution rate. Implementing a knowledge base gathering all the customers’ issues and how they got addressed is also a good thing to do in the long run. Even if that requires a little bit of time to write, you will be rewarded with plenty of time saved in the future. A customer service KPI dashboard is a live display of all the metrics that a team is measuring. A dashboard mainly helps with monitoring team performance and customer satisfaction metrics, including the total number of tickets resolved, average response time, and CSAT score. Any company offering customer service should monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to stay ahead of the competition.

With an all-encompassing view of the key figures that shape success, businesses can provide customers with exceptional satisfaction at any given time. You don’t want your customers to have to reach out to you multiple times to resolve a single issue. That’s why measuring first contact resolution, or whether or not you resolved an issue in a single chat session, phone call or email response, is a good indicator of how your team is performing. If your customer needs to reach back out or be escalated to another source for support, it does not count as first contact resolution. The customer effort score measures how much effort your customer had to put into resolving their issue.

Similar to the CSAT, the NPS is a common metric for measuring customer satisfaction. Customers will rate on a scale from 1 to 10 how likely they are to recommend your business to a friend. It’s best to measure this regularly, so you can determine your company’s benchmark and look for any drops or spikes in the average rating.

This is due to the fact that businesses usually have processes in place for common customer issues. The graph also includes trend lines for both types of requests so you can easily understand when a value is higher than it is supposed to be and can dig deeper into the reasons. Customer support software Zendesk allows support agents to effortlessly track, prioritize, and solve customer interactions across multiple channels. Its robust features that enable support teams to deliver quality services include SLA views, custom ticket fields, ticket forms, and an admin interface available in more than 40 languages. Besides, Zendesk supports seamless channel integration allowing teams to connect with customers through mobile, web, email, Twitter, or Facebook. By monitoring and tracking these performance indicators, managers can gain insight into the success of their customer service teams and make educated decisions to boost customer experience.

If a new product launch sees a spike in support tickets within a short period of time, this KPI might signal the need for product improvements or better customer education. When the COVID-19 pandemic crept across the world, customer service teams were dealing with a surge in volume, evolving policies and new remote work environments. Many companies stopped measuring customer satisfaction during this time as they were simply trying to get back to customers, which often took days.

You can use them to make strategic decisions that will improve the quality of service and impact revenue positively. However, only if you have quantifiable data on how well your support team is doing can you improve existing processes, make better staffing decisions, and ensure customer happiness. Freshservice comes with a mobile app, which allows IT personnel to get the job done even if they are offsite.

Aircall’s phone solution offers numerous tracking options to measure productivity for you and your team as a whole. Let’s break down a few KPIs we recommend tracking for support teams, sales teams, and customer service teams. Ticket Backlog measures the total number of tickets that agents have not resolved in a given period. It provides insights into the IT support staff’s workload, the support system’s efficiency, and customer satisfaction. A growing retention rate is what every company should aim for, and that’s why it should be amongst the main support metrics to measure.

If you don’t measure any KPIs and metrics in your company, you can never say how your business performs. Monitoring just the revenue won’t give you the right insights to keep growing, either. A customer service Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company achieves its key business objectives. Do that, and you’ll be able to take advantage of customer support KPIs to deliver truly exceptional customer service.

“If you can not measure it, you can not improve it,” said Scottish scientist William Thomson. This adage underscores the relevance of establishing and applying KPIs in any organization regardless of its nature. These identifiers are flexible enough to encapsulate many of the major areas of a department like customer support.

OKRs, or objectives and key results, are another type of measurement tool that functions in a similar way to KPIs. Project managers often use a « balanced scorecard, » a strategic KPI framework that evaluates initiatives from various perspectives—financial, customer, process, and growth. It’s not uncommon for those working in the customer service industry to see the following examples of KPIs. Key performance indicators are the compass that guides organizations towards their goals. Once you’ve defined your business objective, you need to decide which metrics are relevant to that objective.

For longer-term, slower-moving projects, consider reporting biweekly or monthly to ensure each update includes enough information to be useful. KPI data isn’t something you neglect until it’s time for your quarterly report. Rather, stakeholders should use KPI reports to make minor and major decisions throughout a project’s lifecycle. That’s why it’s important to keep your KPI data up to date and make it accessible to everyone at any time. If you’re not sure where to start, check out some relevant metrics for each department in your organization.

Whether the conversation is happening via email, chat, or phone call, conversation abandonment signals something larger is wrong. Most conversation abandonment happens after customers wait too long or become frustrated by poor service. By measuring CES, you and your team members can work towards reducing customer effort, which in turn will increase the lifetime customer value and the likelihood of word-of-mouth referrals. For others, a dedicated tool like a helpdesk or survey automation tool will save tons of time. For eg, Out of 100 requests, 40 are from Live Chat, 20 are from Facebook Messenger, 10 are from email, 20 are from the phone, and 10 are from Telegram. The breakdown performance of the channels helps you to know which channel is effective for your business.

Whether it’s improving customer satisfaction, reducing response times, or increasing first-contact resolution, clarity on objectives is crucial. You can improve your response times by providing reliable customer support tools for communication. We strongly recommend omnichannel platforms, like HelpCrunch, that can handle any ticket volumes and keep all user inquiries in the same inbox for easy management. Choose a solution that offers automation options like a chatbot, saved responses, and a knowledge base to reduce response time metrics. “According to HubSpot, 54% of customers expect a response within 10 minutes or less.. Monitoring time to first response and number of open tickets will give you a good idea of your capacity and whether you are keeping up.

This means prioritizing employee retention for onboarding is the industry standard, and improving it, along with employee engagement, will likely earn your company dividends. The same rationale of applying KPIs follows for other company departments and activities. For a closer look at project management metrics, consider these other examples of KPIs. When exploring financial metrics, you’ll frequently find these examples of KPIs in use.

In order to ensure this high standard across a global team, KPIs help us to identify areas for improvement and to celebrate successes. Like we’ve said before, KPIs can be assessed alongside one another to identify important dependencies. Business-level KPIs tell you how customer service impacts the overall health of your business.

But if you want more options than what was indicated here, feel free to view our list of customer support software and help desk platforms. And if further training is needed, ProProfs Help Desk has a library of online training materials that they can access anywhere and anytime. The agent can access all customer information from the console to get the context he/she needs for the interaction. On the side of customers, they can get access to a mobile-friendly knowledge base to get their questions answered. Knowing who your top performers enable you to build a strong and responsive customer service unit. Benchmarking agents or reps creates healthy competition and, conversely, lets you identify those that may need additional nurturing.

Additionally, businesses can use data mining techniques to monitor customer service interactions and extract insights. In addition, social media can be used to collect customer feedback in real-time. You can set up keyword alerts to track mentions of your company or specific keywords related to your customer service. Setting up custom automations (for example, Instagram bots for automatic DM replies) can also help you gain more insights about your customers and measure their satisfaction levels. Customer service KPIs are performance metrics businesses can use to evaluate their CX efforts, analyze their support agents’ effectiveness, and develop better relationships with their customers. This guide details the 21 most important customer service KPIs you should track to hit your business goals.

Read our in-depth guide to CSAT score for more tips on improving your CSAT score and CSAT survey response rates. REVE Chat is an omnichannel customer communication platform that offers AI-powered chatbot, live chat, video chat, co-browsing, etc. Before coming to omnichannel marketing tools, let’s look into one scenario first! It is calculated by taking the percentage of promoters (9-10) out of the total respondents and subtracting it from the detractors (0-6).

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. This is a new way of measuring the impact of an automated customer service technology platform. Virtual agents are performing human work and need to be measured in the same way. That may lead to downgrades and cancellations, which should be avoided as much as possible.

Tools like Mixpanel, Qualtrics, and Optimove can also help you automatically track this metric. It requires considerable effort and resources which makes it feel complex. Say, if your website had 200,000 visitors and 10,000 conversions last month, your conversion rate is 10%. Surprisingly, the leaders using speech analytics averaged a 76% FCR rate comparatively, the followers had a 23% average FCR. Customer satisfaction can, of course, have a huge influence on the entire organization, including the bottom line.

Companies that make their customers wait on hold for long periods of time, will struggle to please their customers. This is actually a major cause of client resentment and dissatisfaction across the globe. If the department is unable to keep the resolution time low, it might be an indication that your team is understaffed. These examples of KPIs for customer service will help you understand how happy your customer is overall.

For KPIs to be effective motivators, there needs to be widespread buy-in from the team. So, involving your team from the start increases the likelihood kpi for support team of buy-in. Team members have a wealth of knowledge that can be tapped to understand what’s important to customers and what’s achievable.

In other words, don’t just collect feedback for the sake of it—make sure you’re actually using the insights to improve your processes. If customers feel like they’re not getting the help they need from a specific support agent, they may be more likely to escalate their inquiry. A typical customer journey can be very complex, and handling a customer service ticket may also involve multiple touchpoints. For example, customers reach you via phone calls, then send an email, and ultimately your team has to send them a custom proposal.

Fast resolution is always a stable determinant of customer satisfaction. Addressing customers’ queries in real-time is imperative for you to keep them from leaving you at risk. The FCR performance indicator gives you insights into how good your agents are at understanding and addressing customer issues without needing multiple interactions. If a metric highlights an issue, there should be a clear path for the customer service team to address and resolve the underlying problem.

By tracking your revenue backlog, you’ll be able to see if revenue is going to drop before it actually does. This will help you discover the agents who deserve praise and bonuses, and which ones might need training. If you find an agent that is always closing too few tickets, it may be time to let them go, unfortunately. Of course, “effort” is subjective and highly dependent on the individual customer and their expectations. If you use Gorgias, you’ll see your support performance score over time, plus a breakdown of each metric that makes up your score. You’ll have to figure out the most effective communication channels for your business.