Customer Service KPIs & Metrics See 18 Top Examples

Well-performing customer service departments lead to happy customers, and happy customers are your best marketers. So, use these metrics to improve your customer service and support processes — and boost your business’s bottom line. 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.

In order to ensure this high standard across a global team, KPIs help us to identify areas for improvement and to celebrate successes. For example, companies generally have been de-prioritizing customer support email as a support channel in favor of social messaging and live chat. In a recent study, we found that customers prefer email support over all other digital channels. By tracking ticket volume per channel, you prioritize and shift resources to where your customers are. You’ll want to carefully review the interactions for people who responded with low scores to analyze what went wrong to update procedures and responses or conduct additional agent training. You may find certain patterns emerge that might correlate with higher average CSAT scores among top-performing agents, while less experienced agents might hold a lower average CSAT score.

Immediate Responses Versus Queued Calls

Average resolution time is the time it takes a customer service representative to solve a support ticket once it gets created. Similarly, high ticket volumes around a specific topic are worth keeping tabs on and investigating. If the topic is your product, it may indicate a product issue that needs fixing. Finally, fluctuating ticket volumes at certain times of the day or days of the year helps you identify busier and slower periods, so you can adjust support shifts to meet demand. Resolution time will vary depending on factors like the complexity of the issue and whether you have enough agents to handle it. Longer resolution times generally lead to customer dissatisfaction and vice versa.

• Most people want, at least, an acknowledgment that someone has started looking into the issue in a reasonable amount of time after submitting their service request.
• Depending on the platform you use, many NPS & CSAT tracking tools enable you to insert a free text field where customers can specify the reason for their score and what they think you can do better.
• Existing customers are also your biggest spenders, and they rely on quality customer support to stay loyal.
• For example, let’s say you’re calculating the average resolution time for an eight-hour shift.
• Average reply time measures how long it takes agents to respond to customer queries across all communication with a customer, not just how long it takes to respond to initial outreach.

Plus, low-effort resolutions also drive loyalty and customer retention, with 61% of customers who’ve had their problems resolved with less effort choosing to stay with the company. It goes without saying that this metric is a vital KPI for businesses focussed on keeping customers happy. Resolution time, also known as average handle time in call centers, is an important KPI for your help and service desks. This is a key service and help desk metric because it tells you how long an employee or customer must wait for their issue to be resolved—an important aspect of the overall customer experience (CX). The preferred communication channel isn’t as much a metric as it is an observation of how your customers prefer to contact you.

Product/Service Knowledge

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific strategic objective. Business leaders and senior executives use KPIs to judge the effectiveness of their efforts and make better informed decisions. Seventy-seven percent of executives have already implemented conversational bots for after-sales and customer service.

You can calculate this percentage by finding the difference between calls received and handled calls, then dividing that by the number of calls received. Customer Effort Score (CES) refers to the effort a customer has to expend to get what they want from your business. This could be how long it takes them to find an answer in your knowledge base, get a resource from your support team, or any amount of time spent interacting with your company. Customer support KPIs are crucial for assessing overall team performance, holding agents accountable, keeping everyone aligned, and improving your customer service.

Average handle time (AHT) is similar to average resolution time, but there is a slight difference. If you’re offering support across channels and using different tools for managing conversations on different channels, then your agents are spending too much time juggling between tools than you think they are. Limiting the number of KPIs on the board at any given time keeps everyone on track and increases the likelihood of success. The Rockefeller Framework for management suggests having one main priority for each quarter, along with 3-5 “rocks” or KPIs that support the main goal. Any more than that, and your focus is too divided to make any real progress, says Rockefeller.

Templated responses save your agents a lot of time and, by extension, mean customers get answers faster. 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. Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear-cut way to measure and analyze social media support tickets, so we encourage you to use a social listening tool that allows you to do a number of things. For instance, tracking brand mentions on social media, as well as how many tickets are coming in through your social platforms during various periods of time. Having all of your social metrics in one place will make them much easier to analyze than pulling them one-by-one out of several different spreadsheets.

The goal is to keep the churn rate minimal, but it happens in every company so you don’t need to panic immediately. In our example, we have visualized the monthly customer churn rate over the course of almost a year and, in this case, calculations include cancellations and downgrades. You can instantaneously spot which months performed best and which ones encountered issues. We can see that October is showing particularly higher churn rates and this information enables us to dig deeper and discover why. In customer support, KPIs offer measurable values based on metrics gathered from response time, ticket volume, active and resolved issues, escalation rates in complaints, customer feedback, conversion rate, etc. To decrease resolution time and first response rate, companies can simply hire more agents.

Combined with your overarching KPIs and business objectives, metrics should tell a clear story about your department’s performance and the value it brings to the overall company. In-app surveys allow you to easily capture customer feedback in the moment to paint a more accurate picture of your support team performance. The advantage of this approach is that you can bring your existing technologies along with you – rather than starting from scratch – as you modernize your data ecosystem. Chatbots like Resolution Bot leverage machine learning to provide answers for your most repetitive queries before a customer has even hit the enter key – so they aren’t left stranded by simple fixes, like password resets. Creating a detailed knowledge base can empower your users to self-serve, freeing up your support reps for more complex issues or valuable customers. These personalized chatbots are easy to implement and integrate into your tech stack, providing additional support behind the scenes for your team and customers.

Organizations can collect this feedback through surveys and meetings to gauge employee morale and potentially gather suggestions for product or process improvements. It’s smart to pair this metric with first contact resolution as they often correlate. If both figures are below your standards, it may indicate an issue with support processes or necessitate further employee training. Teams can then use the answers to these surveys to determine the state of their customer support.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a special set of metrics that help determine whether business is going in the right or wrong direction. At first glance, it seems that customer service KPI scores take a backseat to traditional business KPIs, like profits, costs and regional sales. However, key customer support metrics may paint a more complete picture of success for the long-term viability of a business. Self-serve pathways are an ideal way to improve lagging help desk metrics and team performance. Custom bots excel at mitigating workflow issues by collecting information up-front from the customer to triage requests, prioritize urgent issues, and route queries to the most appropriate team member. With faster, better service comes increased customer satisfaction and repeat business, allowing you to comfortably scale your support as you grow your organization.

Customer retention rate (CRR)

A good help desk software will allow you to set up flexible automation rules with various triggers including keywords, time, and events or activities performed on a ticket. Revenue churn measures changes in your store’s support kpis incoming revenue from existing customers. Businesses that sell standalone products might find this more simple to track than customer churn rate, which is better geared toward subscription-based businesses.