21 customer service KPIs every support team needs to track

Having all the metrics that matter to enhance your customer support and visualizing them all in a glimpse will save you a lot of time. It will also help you greatly when you will need to support kpis share your data story with your teams, management, colleagues, etc. Make it personal, make it as you like, and more importantly make it relevant to your business, products or services.

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.

However, very large ecommerce brands may choose to provide phone call support as well. 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. Cost per ticketSupport desks are plagued by methods that do not make good use of their agent’s time.

Additionally, it will help you to manage your customer service team more efficiently, potentially reducing costs and driving increased job satisfaction. 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. When it comes to the metrics of IT service and support, less really is more! With better processes in place, you’ll avoid situations where interactions last longer than they need to.

Customer support KPIs are a series of measurements which allow a company to track the success of their operations in relation to achieving their goals or objectives. Key Performance Indicators help managers evaluate how their employees are doing, the value they bring to a team and how their work (and the customer experience) can be improved. For one thing, sales and customer success teams should work together in close collaboration to achieve the best results. While the former can push the right buttons and razzle-dazzle, customer service agents can provide knowledgeable advice and put people in the right direction. First Level Resolution Rate is a measure of an IT Support organization’s overall competency and is a proxy for Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Training and coaching play a huge part in ensuring your contact center is delivering top-notch customer service.

Moving forward with identifying the right KPIs to track

Monitor the customer churn over time and see what causes higher rates in order to improve the results in the future. FinancesOnline is available for free for all business professionals interested in an efficient way to find top-notch SaaS solutions. We are able to keep our service free of charge thanks to cooperation with some of the vendors, who are willing to pay us for traffic and sales opportunities provided by our website. For example, we can say our KPI for our website is to increase our Google ranking, say, every quarter. To achieve this goal, one metric we improve on a month over month is the number of visits to our site.

Having multichannel customer support options offers a couple of advantages. To build your scripts, start by identifying common questions and issues that your support team encounters most frequently. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. You can then create helpful boilerplate answers with blank spots to plug in customer details using your software or other tools. Good customer service doesn’t mean that you always have to solve a customer’s issue on the first response. In many cases, simply acknowledging their email and letting them know that you’re working on a solution is enough to keep customers temporarily satisfied and buy your customer service team some time.

Following on the same line as the previous example, the average resolution time tracks the minutes it takes your agents to solve an issue. In this case, it is divided by standard and special requests and tracked on a weekly basis. It is a valuable practice to monitor these two separately as standard requests usually take less time to be resolved than special ones. 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. A key objective for all customer service teams is resolving customer issues quickly and effectively.

Response times and customer expectations

Let’s see how the platform can help you provide excellent customer service and improve your KPIs. Moreover, you can add multiple UI patterns such as checklists, modals, tooltips, slideouts, and banners to build easy experience flows. It helps customers learn more by doing and experiencing value from your product much faster. Here are the five different ways you can improve the feedback from customer service KPIs. To measure the FCR rate, divide the number of requests resolved on 1st contact by the total requests completed, and multiply the result by 100.

Perhaps the customer walked away from a previous encounter or seems to be stuck on the customer journey based on other CRM data. You can create variations of this one for delays or other order status updates, and even customize it further to include tracking information. With certain integrations — Klaviyo, for example — you can even use Gorgias attributes to segment and build campaigns. Use this function for win-back campaigns, or to send a special offer to customers who posted low CSAT scores.

Link to knowledge base articles within replies to give customers even more information and prevent further questions. Correlate those dates with product issues or changes to understand what happened. Brainstorm ways to get ahead of issues to keep volume more steady in the future.

They can also help prevent problems before they happen by identifying where there might be opportunities for improvement. Moving on, when it comes to account summary, this usually refers to the way in which a customer service agent… OKRs are goal-setting tools that deliver disciplined execution of goals and ideas. OKRs help teams set objectives that can help teams determine what is expected of them and their performance. 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.

Those who pursue this strategy typically believe that aggressive service levels are a prerequisite for achieving high customer satisfaction levels. The truth is that while there is a correlation between MTTR and customer satisfaction, aggressive service levels will not necessarily lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction. Reducing Customer Effort Score means listening to what customers are saying and making changes before there’s a risk of reputational damage. If, for instance, you have the tools in place to detect a recurring pattern of high effort around a billing issue, or long hold times, you need to be proactive in fixing those issues. First contact resolution rate identifies the percent of total tickets wherein you fully resolve an inquiry within a single response. Managers should constantly be looking to improve the average time by optimizing and streamlining processes for their team members.

Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT)

The simple answer is that metrics and KPIs are closely related, but not synonymous. While metrics track all the various characteristics of your service, KPIs are the ones you focus on to try and build tangible performance improvement. After all, we already have an article listing the customer service metrics you should be tracking. With that as an outline plan, you can start to think about all the customer service metrics you already measure and pick out the ones that directly relate to or inform it.

The ultimate goal of tracking KPIs is to help you make changes that’ll actually make a difference to your customer support strategy. Regularly discuss your metrics with your entire team so everyone understands what they mean. Watch out for trends and then work together to devise and implement improvements to get your metrics moving in the right direction. These customer service metrics each measure one aspect of customer service or support.

The difference between the two will give you the ticket backlog at the end of the period. 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. Adopting AI technology to help you respond to tickets can lower your cost per resolution.

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. Ticket Volume (no, not our podcast) is the number of incidents or requests IT support receives and handles within a given period. Tracking customer health metrics helps identify pain points and areas for better customer experience. For example, a drop in NPS may indicate an emerging issue with service quality. Customer service leaders should review satisfaction KPIs regularly and act rapidly on negative trends.

Then, you can decide how you’ll make improvements, whether it’s offering more tailored training, clarifying how to talk about a certain policy, or showing your team how to better use support tools. You can collect data for customer support KPIs with tools like customer satisfaction surveys, customer journey mapping (PDF), and social media feedback. Useful as KPIs are, organizations are not advised to measure anything and everything that moves. In fact, managers have to be selective on which areas have to be measured to avoid unnecessary expenses and costly distractions. Analysis is required in both identifying and extracting insights from KPIs to truly make them work for critical departments like customer support and marketing. Thankfully, these identifiers are already accounted for by customer support software and other relevant solutions as part of their built-in reporting and analytics features.

Otherwise, your data can become muddied and will present a lopsided story. For example, a great FCR rate might be a sign that things are going well—or it could be an indication that agents are marking issues as resolved before they are, just to hit their targets. Create a seamless experience for your customers and support team by integrating your order tracking tool with your helpdesk. By linking all shipping data and tracking information, you can get resolutions to customers faster and access all necessary information in one place. The customer experience you provide on your ecommerce platform is essential to business growth.

It’s also one of the most effective methods to motivate employees and give them their well-earned rewards. This is the measure of the number of repeated calls or support tickets from a customer within seven days from their first contact. The customer callback KPI encourages agents to resolve current as well as future (anticipated) issues. A customer service department needs to keep track of your customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.

Nine times out of ten, when customer satisfaction is lagging, you can achieve significant improvements by increasing first-contact resolution. This is why world-class support organizations pay so much attention to this metric. They engage in a variety of tactics to continuously improve first-contact resolution, including analyst training, investments in knowledge management, and remote-control tools. The strong correlation between FCR and customer satisfaction is illustrated in the two charts below.

Measuring help desk metrics is essential to ensure support teams perform at their best. With the pressure to resolve tickets quicker, agents on digital channels like live chat and social messaging are often carrying on multiple conversations at the same time. A necessary part of customer service is anticipating how many issues can arise.

Unlock the full potential of your customer service team with our comprehensive list of key performance indicators (KPIs). Measure and track progress to optimize performance and deliver outstanding customer service. You’ll also be able to identify opportunities to proactively communicate throughout the customer journey and create ways to surprise customers and catch them before a problem becomes a pain point. Your service reps are on the frontlines of customer interaction and satisfaction.

ITIL service desk metrics are essential because they provide a way to measure and track the performance of support teams and the quality of their services. IT support teams are the first point of contact for all requests, issues, and problems. By collecting and analyzing data on KPIs, business leaders can identify areas for improvement, optimize teams’ processes and services, and deliver better customer support. It’s more important than ever for customer service teams to understand how you are performing against your customers’ expectations. There are core KPIs that every customer support team needs to be tracking closely.

One of the fundamental metrics of a particular product’s or of the company’s overall success. In most cases, an intensive inflow of customer support requests means that there could be product dysfunctions or some insufficient service moments (in terms of logistics, advertising, etc.). A well-developed client-base is fundamental to the ultimate success of any business.

Customer service key performance indicators (KPIs) are important metrics that help customer support teams track and optimize performance. Businesses can use these figures to fine-tune operations, improve agent productivity, and better understand their customer interactions. Customer satisfaction is the result of various influences, including operational efficiency, ease of access and interactions with agents. Support reps must be friendly and personable with all the tools and information they need at their disposal. While individual businesses have their own specific goals, these customer service KPIs reflect the priorities of any support team.

One of the best ways to use data to consistently improve the customer experience is to implement a quality assurance (QA) process. With NPS, you get a measure of the percentage of customers who are promoters, or advocates, of your brand. Typically, this data is gathered by sending customers a 1-question survey asking them to rate “How likely are you to recommend [your brand] to a friend or family member? The Average Abandonment Rate refers to the number of callers who hung up or otherwise were dropped from the queue before their call was answered. Of course, a higher abandonment rate typically indicates lower customer satisfaction.

• When it comes to data, in particular, the complexity and abundance of it can be overwhelming.
• That said, you need a way to track them efficiently—and the best way to do that is with a reliable CX partner.
• We also apply a weighted KPI model, which applies different emphasis to different metrics.
• Here are some of the best order tracking providers that you can use to create a successful project management pipeline when it comes to tracking customer purchases.

As we just mentioned, tracking a full suite of customer support metrics can also help you find specific areas of improvement. If you don’t keep track of many customer support metrics, you’ll only have extremely high-level impressions and small samples of customer feedback to paint a picture of your strengths and weaknesses. Net retention rate, sometimes called net dollar retention (NDR) or net revenue rate, measures the percentage Chat GPT of recurring revenue retained from your existing customers over a month, quarter, or year. Klipfolio reports that a good NRR is anywhere between 90% and 125%, depending on your brand’s niche, product, and total addressable market (TAM). 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.

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. How efficiently your team operates will have a direct effect on customer satisfaction and likewise, on the overall business value, the customer service team brings to the table. 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. The balanced scorecard is a mechanism that aggregates the most important metrics—all those we have covered in this Metric of the Month—into a single, all-inclusive measure of performance. The value of this metric, when tracked over time, is that it lets you determine whether overall performance is improving or getting worse.

KPI is linked to a target value or goal which provides actionable data so you, or any other stakeholders, can make informed decisions. A KPI gives you insight into how well your team or unit is performing in pursuit of clearly defined team goals and in line with management-defined objectives. Gauging business performance isn’t as skin deep as simply viewing the results and then calling it a day. After all, organizations are composed of customer-facing units departments, each with its own sphere of activities that affect the outcomes of operations. And in a lot of cases, taking a granular approach lets you see areas of improvement that you didn’t know existed.

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. By listening in on calls and chats, AI can surface useful knowledge base articles, deliver insight-driven discounts, or simply remind agents about important customer history details.

A high backlog can indicate that the IT support team is overwhelmed, leading to delayed resolution times and poor customer satisfaction. On the other hand, a low backlog can mean the support team is efficient, leading to faster resolution times and higher customer satisfaction. By tracking issue resolution KPIs over time, managers can identify spikes in volume, backlogs and delays before customers notice.

Transactional surveys ask your customers how satisfied they are after every interaction with your company. By measuring satisfaction rates consistently over time you will get the most accurate measurement and will also be able to set benchmarks for your unique organization. This will allow you to make the most of your KPIs by identifying upward or downward trends quickly so that you can make adjustments as needed. There are many different customer support metrics you can track, but you’ll want to choose your KPIs wisely.

However, it’s virtually impossible to build an effective loyalty and retention strategy without a solid, reliable, and viable product or service. Let’s walk through some of the most essential metrics to measure the quality of customer service. It just might open your eyes to the areas for improvement and show how satisfied your customers are.

In addition to using an auto-responder to send out an automated first response, one simple way to speed up your reply time is to make use of scripts and email templates. You can organize them based on factors such as the date and time received, priority, subject matter, and some other categories. If you’re on a mission to measure how your customer service team performs (and stacks up against the rest of your industry), check out our benchmark report. 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.

Our modern and intuitive interface, combined with our robust, easy-to-use toolset, provides everything your support team needs to make every customer a happy customer. A CRM not only captures all of your customer interactions, it tracks every employee activity performed within the system. This provides the information you need to start measuring your customer support KPIs. You can also use surveys such as NPS (net promoter score) or CSAT (customer satisfaction score) to evaluate the experience directly. It’s important to understand how successful your customer support efforts are if you want your company to grow in long term.

Or if customer satisfaction scores are falling, it could mean that customers feel that the quality of their interactions has declined. The first call resolution rate is one of the most important customer service performance metrics to track. It measures the efficiency of your team to resolve an issue on the first call. It is an indicator used to know how good your agents are at understanding and addressing a problem without needing to transfer or return the call.

Customer support KPIs help you assess overall team performance, hold agents accountable, keep everyone aligned, and improve your customer service. 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.

Focus on decreasing the time it takes for your support specialists to take up requests. 77% of users believe that it is the best service quality indicator when they can feel that their personal time is valued. American companies lose around $62 billion annually due to mediocre customer support. Because https://chat.openai.com/ of bad service, 51% of users are ready to cease turning to a particular business at all. This shows how well educated in the matter and competent your staff is in general. Depending on the niche specifics and set goals, a number of processed or resolved questions per unit of time is considered.

• If you’re an ecommerce business looking for an all-in-one customer support solution that includes live chat support and AI-powered chatbots, Gorgias is your one-stop shop.
• With the rating system alone, you will be able to get a general idea of your team’s and team members’ performance when it comes to how they handle the customers’ concerns.
• While CSAT scores help you measure customer service externally, quality assurance is an important way to measure customer service internally.
• This allows businesses to offer both immediate responses, as well as more in-depth support for complex issues.
• When a business knows how to analyze customer data, it can get better insights into customer preferences and behavior.

Ticket volume measures the total number of conversations in your support inbox. Because even though support is a high-touch discipline that thrives on human connections, elevating good customer service to exceptional only takes place when you know the cold, hard numbers. Having periodic, hour-long meetings for an informal chat with every team member is an excellent way to get a true sense of what’s happening with them. Since it is a safe and private conversation, it helps you get better details about an issue. Monitor the revenue churn not just as a bigger picture, but also on an individual (customer) level so that you can identify reasons for churn and improve in the future. Tracking this metric on a weekly basis and for the different communication channels will help you stay on top of any issues or anomalies as soon as they occur.

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. Companies like AmplifAI leverage AI to spot these patterns and train call center agents to be more like their top-performing counterparts. Customers look to have their problems solved quickly, so they typically dislike the constant back and forth to solve a problem.

Tracking these KPIs over time highlights high performers, skills gaps, training needs and opportunities to improve efficiency. Agents should be coached using KPI trends and benchmarks to drive continual improvement. To measure consistency, use AI to analyze how agents respond to different people reaching out with the same query and flag discrepancies. Track where your customers are reaching out from in order to optimize staffing and prioritize channels that would benefit most from technologies like automation. Organizations can collect this feedback through surveys and meetings to gauge employee morale and potentially gather suggestions for product or process improvements. It’s always better to employ experienced, qualified experts and motivate them decently.

It’s human nature to be impatient when in need of technical support or customer service. It doesn’t matter if customers are calling their bank, their cable company, or their company’s internal technical support department. They want a resolution to their problem or an answer to their question right then and there!

For others, a dedicated tool like a helpdesk or survey automation tool will save tons of time. Ideally, customers should have no reason to complain or criticize an agent during a call. Using a speech analytics software could help analyze what customers are complaining about and allows you to pinpoint the problem so you can provide an effective solution.

Track the total number of tickets received monthly and compare them not only to the previous month but also on a YoY (year over year) basis. Spot trends via customer support reporting and understand how the volume directly correlates to business decisions being made in other departments. This metric is also very valuable for staffing and recruiting as some companies do have seasonal volume fluctuations.

You’ll want to recognize reps that solve the most tickets, have the most first-resolution tickets, and deliver high customer satisfaction results. 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.

Sentiment analysis helps you monitor your brand to determine if feedback or customer actions are generally positive, negative, or neutral. Every customer action, including customer service interactions and support tickets, are given a sentiment score using machine learning software like Idiomatic. This helps you see if changes in customer service procedures or up-skilling of your staff are having the desired effect on customer satisfaction. Your business is likely already tracking key performance indicators such as revenue, but when evaluating customer service teams, you’ll need to track a unique set of customer service KPI metrics. Your customer service teams are the frontline, and how well they do their job reflects on your company as a whole.

Moreover, you can add qualitative follow-up questions to CSAT surveys, CES surveys, and NPS surveys to get more detailed feedback. In both cases, you can send them an in-app message at the right time to guide them or inform them of a new feature. NPS surveys ask users to rate their willingness to recommend your business to others on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 meaning “Not Likely” and 10 meaning “Very Likely”. To compile this white paper, we spent many hours looking for every publicly available data source we could find.