12 Essential Performance Metrics for Customer Service

Erika is Groove’s Customer Success Manager, committed to helping you find the right software solution for your business needs. She loves finding innovative ways for your support team to scale and grow, always putting the customer first. If you ended up with 50,000 total customers but acquired 10,000 customers through the new campaign, that gives you an end result of 40,000 customers.

We set numbers as a necessary bar to ensure quality, but acknowledge the importance of what can’t be measured, knowing that a more accurate, more human measurement of performance relies on both. These measurements can live in harmony – you just have to find the balance and make a call on what you value. If you can find a way to measure more than just the numbers, you will have a more holistic and smarter indication of performance.

Throughput is a rate that can be related to the stock level of unresolved items. Basically, it will be the ratio between the number of calls closed over open in a period of time. If the result of this division (throughput) is greater than 1, you have reduced the stock of tickets. This metric tells you about the efficiency of your customer service team and, potentially, the complexity of issues from your customers. Positive customer experience leads to increased customer retention, reduced churn, and positive word-of-mouth referrals. Moreover, addressing customer concerns promptly and effectively allows companies to diminish the risk of negative reviews and reputation damage, which can have a direct impact on profitability.

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For example, if a new support tool or process is implemented and the cost per ticket decreases over time, it can be seen as a sign that the investment was successful. To calculate the AHT, you must divide the total time spent handling inquiries or requests by the total number of tickets. To calculate the CES score, you add the total number of customers who rated their experience as “very easy” or “somewhat easy” and divide it by the total number of respondents. The resulting score can range from 0 to 100, with a higher score indicating a lower level of customer effort required.

• Look for positive responses, which mean great customer experiences and a well-functioning customer service team.
• Asking for customer feedback will help you understand why the customers are leaving and will give you a bigger picture of your situation.
• It allows you to quantify the efficiency of your day-to-day operations across your support team and ensures your customers’ issues are being dealt with expeditiously.
• In the case of highly relevant and strategic indicators or more related to your company’s growth model, they can be called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

These KPIs provide valuable insights into your team’s effectiveness and are also useful from a financial standpoint because they impact your revenue and profits. Product improvement is the process of making meaningful product changes that result in new customers or increased benefits for existing customers. There are many more, and what works best for you will depend on the product or service you offer and the customers you have. Investing in these agent productivity boosters will help ensure that KPIs like resolution SLA, and first response resolution see a positive uptick.

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And considering that your own industry may have higher lifetime values for customers, it goes to show how worthwhile it is to invest in good interactions with your customers. The happier you can keep them, the easier your customer interactions will be in the future. In the 1950s, a restaurant was born that would revolutionize customer service metrics forever. McDonald’s optimized its entire kitchen to focus on uniform quality and speed, demonstrating that you didn’t have to cut corners in the end product’s strength to provide fast service to the customer. From the customer’s perspective, this may be the most important of all the customer service metrics.

Customer churn is the percentage of customers who stop doing business with you over a certain period of time. It’s usually expressed as a monthly or yearly rate, and it can be a good predictor of future business performance. Interestingly, this is also a good internal metric for self-assessment of customer service teams themselves.

For example, many support teams will track average resolution time to gauge whether customer problems are being resolved swiftly. The key to effectively measuring customer service performance is not to measure all industry-recognized metrics. You need to track a set of customer service KPIs that align with your business goals and team objectives. Reducing customer churn is a crucial aspect of business success that requires constant customer engagement to understand and address customers’ issues with your brand and product. It goes without saying that the onus of doing that lies with the customer support team.

If that’s the case, it may be a good idea to count the whole chain of events as one ticket with several interactions. The average message volume per agent can vary greatly depending on the industry, company size, and customer support model. For example, a small business with a few hundred customers might have an average of messages per day per agent. A large enterprise with millions of customers might have an average of hundreds of messages per day. Businesses need a strategic approach when tracking and achieving the customer service KPIs listed above.

Boosting employee behavior and knowledge and bringing down wait times can be done through consistent training and improving agent enablement. Each type contains a suite of metrics that evaluate either the team’s performance, customers’ satisfaction, or the subsequent business impact. While there might be different types, you’ll notice that the metrics for each kind are closely intertwined and influence each other. As discussed, many of the leading customer support applications account for KPIs while streamlining their users’ workflows. This saves you a lot of time in measuring your workforce’s performance and ensures that your company is tracking the most beneficial pieces of information. For this to work, however, corresponding analyses and action plans have to be enacted, especially if your organization is trying to curb the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

If you plan to monitor the KPIs for an inbound call center, there are a few classic metrics to keep in mind. It’s all about the KPIs you decide to measure—both on an individual and a team level. So how are you supposed to get actionable tips out of something like tickets per customer? By tracking ROI over time, the organization can determine whether the investment was successful and whether further investments in similar technology are warranted. To obtain it, divide the number of support requests that are escalated by the total number of support requests received and multiply by 100 to get a percentage.

Twenty-three percent have reported that customer service has grown slightly or significantly worse. To calculate cost per resolution, take your total monthly operating expense (salaries, technology, training, licenses, overhead, office supplies, etc.) and divide it by the total number of tickets. If you have a high cost per ticket, or notice that it is increasing, you’ll need to look for ways to bring efficiency to your group.

Customer satisfaction is a measure of how pleased your customers are with the quality of service provided. A common method that businesses use to determine this is by sending surveys to customers after every support interaction. By analyzing the responses on the surveys and gathering feedback, you can spot what’s working and what needs to be improved to provide better service experiences. Today’s customers prefer getting quality, personalized, and seamless customer service, even if they have to wait for a bit. However, it’s important to make sure that the resolution time is consistent and is not unacceptably long. Here’s where the resolution SLA comes into play as an important KPI since it helps ensure that all tickets are resolved within a set time.

Still, if they don’t provide effective solutions or customers are not satisfied with their interactions, AHT alone may not provide a complete picture of the quality of the IT support services. Customer Effort Score measures the ease or difficulty of a customer’s experience when interacting with an organization’s support team. It assesses the customer’s effort to resolve an issue or complete a transaction.

Depending on the number of tickets you receive, ensure you have enough representatives on your customer service team to handle the ticket volume. Customer retention rate (CRR) measures the percentage of customers who continue to do business with a company over a specified time period. Agents will also kpi for support team be empowered to deliver context-rich solutions that can improve customer satisfaction and business performance KPIs. By attentively monitoring these KPIs, you can analyze your current customer service operations and easily identify which changes need to be made in order to optimize team performance.

Top 12 KPIs for support teams

If they’re dependent on a manager, trainer, or product specialist, it’ll likely take longer to get back to customers with answers and solutions. Also, make sure your team is handling and resolving the proper number of tickets at once — whether that’s one, five, or 10. If they’re too overwhelmed, it could slow down your customer service process. What form fields do you have in your customer support web form, and what instructions do you provide when you share your email, social media, or phone number? The more information customers provide upon initial contact, the quicker your customer service team can provide support — ideally in a single response. Your ticket backlog is a measure of how many unresolved tickets are waiting to be handled by your customer service team.

Churn rate is one of the key performance indicators connected with measuring customer retention. In fact, Customer Retention Rate can be viewed as a complementary metric. If your churn rate is 10% then your retention rate should be about 90%. However, it’s easier to focus on your churned customers as one segment and figure out how to prevent them from leaving. That’s why businesses use churn rate as one of the primary indicators of their performance.

With the help of the NPS score, you can know how likely your customers are to recommend you to their friends and relatives. NPS replies are less influenced by the customer’s mood, unlike CSAT which aims at emotion, not intention. Your KPIs adhere to the SMART criteria – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Embracing change, the customer service way

It generally consists of two questions – how likely the customer is to recommend or promote (scored from 0 to 10), and why. By NPS yardstick, 0 to 6 are detractors, 7 to 8 passives, and 9 to 10 promoters. It allows you to quantify the efficiency of your day-to-day operations across your support team and ensures your customers’ issues are being dealt with expeditiously. KPI is used to measure performance and success, while metrics are simply numbers within a KPI that help track performance and progress. KPIs are usually initiated by high-level decision-makers in the organization based on metrics extracted and organized by activity or process. Also, metrics apply only to past performance and not future action, which is best handled by forecasting or predictive analysis.

End users are also given the capability to raise issues and request service from their mobile devices. It is capable of securing data and automating the whole help desk apparatus. Finally, with its flexible pricing plans, the system attracts users from businesses of any size.

CSAT helps to evaluate the client’s service satisfaction with your business, products, or services. You can measure customer service satisfaction helps to gain insights into what they think about you. The above quote effectively addresses the importance of keeping clients happy. Customer service is a vital element of business processes that can impact your bottom line and affect how your company is viewed in the public eye. Many times customer retention depends on the quality of service and products offered. Even more, what can ultimately count the most is the experience the customer gets while dealing with your business on a human level.

Setting up goals and measuring effects are integral parts of success in any business. You can easily assign ownership over an email, so everyone knows who’s responsible for handling a support ticket. There’s no confusion over who should reply, which prevents multiple or no replies and ensures customers remain happy. You can’t improve your KPIs if your team has no knowledge of what those KPIs even are.

Keeping an eye on these key performance indicators helps you figure out how close you are to hitting your goals and what you might need to tweak to get there. Marketing efforts can be gauged using website traffic as a key performance indicator. For example, if a new blog post aimed at explaining the different types of KPIs sees a 50% increase in visitors, the content can be considered effective in attracting more interest. Discover how other companies improved their most business-critical customer support KPIs. You should track the retention rate of your customers who reached out with an issue.

If the number of new issues spikes up, you might need to investigate and resolve the root cause. The most common method is to take the number of customers who respond with a rating of “satisfied” or “very satisfied” and divide it by the total number of responses. So, how to use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in customer service, and which metrics are the best?

A customer service department needs to keep track of your customer satisfaction (CSAT) score. This customer service KPI measures the performance of your customer service department. In addition, CRM systems often come with surveys and reporting features that can be used to collect customer feedback and measure their satisfaction levels.

• As discussed, many of the leading customer support applications account for KPIs while streamlining their users’ workflows.
• To measure consistency, use AI to analyze how agents respond to different people reaching out with the same query and flag discrepancies.
• If your team is already up and running, revisit your KPIs today and check if they align with your long-term support targets.
• Support KPIs and Metrics gives your support team insight into their efforts and aids them in bringing their work to the next level, always knowing where they stand.

Let’s say your total operating costs are $20,000 per month and your team resolved 2,000 tickets. Add all of these numbers up and you’ll arrive at the overall umbrella of the money you put towards customer support. You can then tally all of the customer interactions you had within a certain time frame. Divide the number of interactions from the total money invested and you’ll have an idea of what it costs every time you help out a customer. When measuring the service desk, you need productivity, quality, and performance metrics.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for support teams are essential metrics that businesses use to evaluate and optimize their customer service operations. Using these handy indicators for your support team is vital in delivering superior service quality to customers every single time. Moreover, KPI measurements can not only be used to assess team performance, but also individual agents’ accomplishments. By doing so, customer service teams are able to understand objectively if they have met customers’ expectations or not.

An article in the Los Angeles Times has referred to customer service agents as the “punching bag” on the front lines. The article focuses on the airline industry, but I would argue that agents across all industries deal with difficult customers daily. According to the publication, “Agents are subjected to verbal abuse almost daily. It’s a thankless job requiring patience and thick skin.” Agents often bear the brunt when something goes wrong – whether it’s a missing ingredient in a meal-kit, a lost bag, or lost package.

Key actions like signing up or contacting support should take zero thought and effort. Product demos shouldn’t take more than 20–30 minutes of their time, but their effect is much more powerful than that of any other channel. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Once people see how your business can solve their problems in real time, making a buying decision is much easier. Pay careful attention to low scores and follow-up to determine why customers are dissatisfied. But by stringing together the right people and plan, product design workshops will become an important part of your team’s process.

Customer contact rate measures the percentage of active customers who contact support each day, month, or year. Being a customer service adherent, her goal is to show that organizations can use customer experience as a competitive advantage and win customer loyalty. With REVE Chat, you can start a free trial of feature-rich customer support software and redefine your customer service. These metrics provide valuable insights and help companies to enhance their services and build long-lasting relationships with their customers.

Customers receiving the support promised in their SLA are more likely to be satisfied and loyal to the organization, leading to increased customer retention and revenue. Ticket Volume (no, not our podcast) is the number of incidents or requests IT support receives and handles within a given period. When setting up a help desk KPI program for your IT support team, the most important thing to remember is that you’re trying to improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, and output quality. For example, say your agents often ask customers to repeat information or lose time copy/pasting order information from your ecommerce platform to customer support conversations. You could make the case a helpdesk that unifies all your customer support channels and store data in one platform.

The result is that teams don’t track performance, can’t keep agents accountable, and cannot improve their customer service, which affects their bottom line. The resolution rate is the percentage of support tickets resolved from those assigned to a specific department or person. It provides a good indication of your team’s efficiency in resolving customer requests.

We also apply a weighted KPI model, which applies different emphasis to different metrics. This means that if you have a bad week on one data point (say volume of conversations pulled), you can make up for this by exceeding in another (100% customer satisfaction, perhaps). We also have a set of team KPIs, which our global support team works towards achieving. Not only does this help to align performance across multiple offices, but it also unites the team in their efforts and means that reps around the world very much feel part of the same team.