14 Crucial Customer Service Metrics & KPIs for Your Business

Most modern businesses have realized they must provide an outstanding customer experience (CX) to compete in the marketplace. Look for positive responses, which mean great customer experiences and a well-functioning customer service team. Negative responses can also help, too, as they tell you how you can improve. This metric — which is arguably the most important — tells you how effective, helpful, and friendly your customer service team was and if your customer’s issue was fully resolved.

So, we’ve included 21 different statistics to ensure you’ll find something of value. Like I said above, speed isn’t everything in customer service, but it sure provides a positive, enjoyable experience. If your post-service survey doesn’t ask open-ended questions, consider following up with those who reported a negative (or thumbs down) experience and ask them for specific feedback. There are all kinds of marketing campaigns (like email or social media promotions) aimed at collecting reviews from customers. But no one can get positive feedback better than a customer service representative.

Sometime after implementing MRR as a customer service KPI, our live chat agents told me they began to think differently and concentrate on more relevant stuff rather than just answering routine chats. As a result, they were getting more bonuses, which is a win-win situation for everyone — for the business, for CSMs, and our customers. That’s why setting the right customer support KPIs and metrics helps business owners and managers determine whether their support team is up to par during the whole customer journey.

KPIs are the measuring units you’ll use to check off the “M” in your SMART goal. This metric can give you an idea of ​​how quickly your team is responding to incoming calls—and improve overall efficiency as a result. The average number of calls depends on what service or product you are selling. There is no right or wrong answer to how long you want your call to last. If it’s too high, it might indicate that a certain element of your product needs more resources (think knowledge bases or content resources) or you might need to fine-tune your product more.

Agent feedback

For example, the total number of individual tickets opened over the phone, via email, live chat, or social media. In addition to resolution times, providing consistent resolutions is also an important metric. Think of your customer service operation like McDonald’s where customers get consistent service across the board. No matter what agent they speak with — whether via chat, email or phone – they are providing consistent answers to customers reporting the same issue. First, you need to decide what you want to achieve with your IT support team, and then choose the right metrics to measure success. In doing so, make sure to mix productivity, quality, performance, and financial KPIs to have a complete overview.

• The only question is, what will you do next to make sure that your customer support is optimized, and that your agents and CSRs are working towards the right goals?
• Measure this customer service KPI over time and see how your trend line is.
• Analyzing the reasons why customers contact support is just as important as how fast their issues are resolved.
• It is usually measured by dividing the number of customers doing repeated business/purchases by the total number of customers.
• You can check other live chat statistics to see more benefits of using this channel.

This includes the time spent talking to the customer, the time spent on hold, and the time spent on any after-call work, such as writing up a report or following up with the customer. More than 80% of customers use the company’s FAQs and self-service portals, which makes it the most popular customer service channel. Creating a knowledge base and updating it with fresh articles, information, and screenshots should also be a part of the support team’s routine. For one thing, sales and customer success teams should work together in close collaboration to achieve the best results.

According to our customer experience study, 44% of online shoppers think the average response time should be below 5 minutes. We offer features like comprehensive agent workspaces, reporting and analytics, and more to ensure your team provides outstanding support to every kpi for support team customer. Customer service KPIs are important statistics businesses should use to evaluate their CX efforts, the performance of their support team, and more. That said, you need a way to track them efficiently—and the best way to do that is with a reliable CX partner.

So, if your organization has fewer replies, that may indicate an effective and knowledgeable support team. Ticket reopens represents how many times a ticket or incident needs to be reopened by a support agent. This metric shines a light on the status of a company’s operations, as a high level of reopened tickets can indicate problems with the product or customer experience. You can calculate cost per resolution by dividing the total cost of customer support by the issues resolved in a given period. First contact resolution (FCR), sometimes known as one-touch resolution, is the percentage of customer tickets that agents resolve on the first interaction with that customer.

Making magic: Simon T. Bailey on the platinum service principles that create lifelong customers

As discussed before, customer service plays an important role in strengthening customer relationships, making this an important KPI for support teams as well. Customers answer this question in retrospect of their entire experience with your brand. So, the customer service department needs to focus on keeping the other KPIs in check, and creating consistent and effortless customer service experiences can help with improving your NPS. The number of tickets resolved per month also acts as a fair judge of an agent’s productivity, if you follow a system where certain types of tickets are assigned to a particular agent. For instance, how-to tickets are mapped to agent 1, and tech support tickets to agent 2, and so on. The fix to a poor resolution SLA lies in equipping agents with better training and resources to handle complex customer issues.

This could come in the form of new training and employee performance review, a need to review systems used like agent desk platforms or the need to adopt new technologies. 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.

Reaction time is the time it takes an agent to take any action on a new message, whether tagging, reassigning, escalating, or responding to it. Average first response time or first reply time tells you how fast a rep responds after a customer has contacted support. These values form the core part of a support rep or engineer’s performance profile, and KPIs form the other part. When it comes to assessing a teammate’s performance, they must be succeeding in both areas. Crucially, though, we understand that while we consider them separately, they are not distinct but complementary – mastery of the soft skills contributes to success in the conventional KPIs. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” as Peter Drucker put it.

First Call Resolution (FCR)

There are other metrics to consider, of course, to increase our ranking. KPIs are a great way to set quantifiable goals that connect to your strategic objectives. But if KPIs don’t feel right for you, th ere are a variety of other goal-setting methodologies you can try.

Customers who receive a timely response to their support request are more likely to be satisfied with their service and are more likely to remain loyal to the organization. To calculate the NPS, you subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. The resulting score can range from -100 to 100, with a higher score indicating a greater likelihood of customer advocacy and loyalty. To calculate Ticket Backlog, you need to determine the number of open tickets at the beginning of a selected period and the number of closed tickets during the same period. The difference between the two will give you the ticket backlog at the end of the period.

Choosing the best KPIs for the job is a process with specific (but simple!) steps. NPS can be an indicator of growth potential for a company because peer recommendations carry so much weight in our society that is social media-obsessed. To calculate Net Promoter Score, subtract the percentage of detractors (wouldn’t recommend you) from the percentage of promoters (would recommend you).

Average time on the phone

In that way, teams can continue things that move the KPI closer to the desired state and avoid the ones that move them further away from the desired state. After all, the real power of KPIs, the ones that matter, is their ability to provide insight that informs a team’s strategy and moves them toward success. Using a suite of metrics helps teams gain a holistic perspective, but avoid over-indexing on any one metric.

Higher average resolution time means that you’re not only accomplishing that goal, but you’re identifying problems quickly enough so customers feel heard. That may be why as many as 78% of customers are happy to do business with you again even if you’ve made the mistake that required resolution in the first place. That may be why 67% of customer churn is “preventable” if you resolve something the first time, according to some statistics.

Organizations use KPIs at multiple levels—you can set an organization-wide, team-specific, or even individual KPIs, depending on which metrics you want to track. A good KPI can give you a sense of whether you’re on track to achieve your strategic goals. To answer these questions, you have to determine which KPIs apply to you.

Average Resolution Time

Below, we describe 25 of the most essential customer service metrics, organized into six categories. Some metrics have to do with your team’s performance — like how quickly and well you respond to tickets. Other metrics look deeper at your team’s impact on larger company goals, like customer retention and revenue generation.

Companies like AmplifAI leverage AI to spot these patterns and train call center agents to be more like their top-performing counterparts. While monitoring all these KPIs can become overwhelming, especially for small businesses, programs like Plectoare effective for keeping track of KPIs. Plecto is an engagement and motivation platform that enables companies to build custom KPIs while providing real-time reports, contests, and achievements for their staff. While they offer solutions for customer service, the all-encompassing platform has assistance for other departments like sales, marketing, and development. The only question is, what will you do next to make sure that your customer support is optimized, and that your agents and CSRs are working towards the right goals? If you take the time to turn these KPIs into actions, you can immediately begin creating a better reputation for your customer support offerings.

Customer retention measures a company’s ability to retain customers over time. It’s one of the more important metrics to know because customer retention is integral to your success as a company. Plus it increases customer loyalty, ROI, and helps recruit new customers. Calculating how much it costs to resolve each ticket is critical to determining staffing and operating costs.

Important KPIs and Metrics your Customer Support Team Should Be Using in 2024

For example, you may be sending delayed or unhelpful responses after launching a new product, getting a spike in ticket volume, or changing a policy like refunds and returns. Single-reply resolution rate calculates what percentage of your tickets are handled with the first reply. You need to foster a culture within your organization that prioritizes KPI for customer satisfaction.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. You’ll have to understand how customer service contributes to overall business success and helps in selecting relevant and impactful metrics. If you have a chatbot on your website or in your mobile app, you can use it to collect customer feedback and measure customer service performance. Customers can also rate the quality and helpfulness of chatbot messages by upvoting and downvoting them. Another popular method for measuring customer service performance is live chat. Not only is it a powerful tool for real-time support, but it also provides valuable insights into the performance of your chat operators.

A high number of touches per ticket can negatively affect the customer satisfaction rate. A necessary part of customer service is anticipating how many issues can arise. This metric indicates whether the team is equipped and available to handle the number of tickets. For example, suppose a support rep is resending a package to a customer.

Qualitative indicators are more about the quality of something and are often subjective. They’re not always represented by numbers, and sometimes they’re captured through observations, surveys, and feedback. You know you’re going to get great service and your meal is going to taste the same as every time before. Like with their burgers, people also expect consistency when they reach out to a company – no matter the channel, the agent on the other end or time of day. Once you identify your top performers, you can not only reward their hard work but tap into their successful strategies to help improve the rest of the team.

The questionnaire should ask the customer how much effort they had to exert in order to get their question answered. The Ascent Group shows that 60% of companies that measure FCR for 1+ year report a 1 to 30% improvement in their performance. Therefore, any potential future issue anticipated by the agent will be addressed comprehensively and proactively.

If you are able to solve them quickly and in a satisfying manner, it is a sign of good service. This metric is most common among SaaS companies and subscription-based ecommerce companies, but it can absolutely apply to all types of ecommerce brands and even other industries. You can get statistics on the utilization of your Macros in any given time period. For example, if the tag “Cancel Order” was used 100 times in one week, but the Macro was only used 50 times, then that means that your reps only used the Macro half the time.

• Also, make sure your team is handling and resolving the proper number of tickets at once — whether that’s one, five, or 10.
• Over 50 percent of customers will switch to a competitor after a single unsatisfactory customer experience.
• The service level calculates your capacity to complete the standards set in the service level agreement provided to your customers.
• 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.

This pertains to customer support requests that stay unresolved during a particular period or beyond the usual response time you set. This is crucial – studies revealed that customers don’t mind waiting as long as their issues are resolved. You have to maintain a healthy balance between fast response and fast resolution. But then not all issues are the same, and some are resolved quicker than others. A key performance indicator (KPI) is a quantitative metric of how your team or organization is progressing toward important business objectives.

To determine your revenue backlog, you’ll just need the sum of the values of your customers’ subscriptions. If you don’t exclusively sell subscription packages, you’ll need to use tools like Dataweave or Y42 to measure upcoming revenue. With Gorgias, you can measure your converted tickets and other revenue statistics in a convenient dashboard. Converted tickets can be from self-service, or automated, and manual responses. If you don’t use a helpdesk, you’ll likely have to manually review tickets to see when the template was and wasn’t used.

While 72% of businesses believe they can use analytics reports to improve the customer experience, there’s precious little information online that tells you how to do that. First Response Time is the time it takes for an IT support team to respond to a customer’s initial request for assistance. It is a key performance indicator used to evaluate IT support teams’ responsiveness. A high backlog can indicate that the IT support team is overwhelmed, leading to delayed resolution times and poor customer satisfaction.

Simply divide the total time needed to solve the tickets by the number of tickets solved. The number of interactions per ticket is a measure of how many times your customer service team interacts with the customer while their ticket is open. Essentially, how many times your team has to communicate with a customer before their issue is resolved.

This makes SLA metrics extremely important, especially if there is a fine for non-compliance. Support can be the interface between product users and its development team in more technical cases, or offer quick solutions through the information available, for example. The service team will be the bridge between your product or service and the customer, managing the incident handling process with the main goal of providing a satisfactory experience with your company. Don’t worry; there are plenty of customer service and support tools on the market to help with just that.

On the other hand, dissatisfied customers can churn any minute, so your customer service strategy should be reviewed and adjusted ASAP. Offering value-added benefits and incentives can help improve retention. Maintaining a knowledge base and keeping it fresh is a common-sense KPI for customer service representatives. Not only does it save a lot of time, but it also makes them more trained to answer all kinds of tricky questions. That’s why the first response time is one of the most important KPIs for customer service. Keep an eye on how long people have to wait on hold before someone greets them.