25 Customer Service Metrics & KPIs + How to Track Them

Not all businesses can have large customer service teams, and many rely on service desks to manage their budgets, resources, and customer service all at once. Customer service KPIs and service desk KPIs are relatively similar, but it’s essential to understand their different applications. Typically after an experience with support staff, customers are encouraged to fill out a survey based on their experience. Customer Satisfaction Scores(CSAT) show how happy customers are with the service provided and how well customer service team members handle customer issues and complaints.

Send a survey asking customers to rate how easy your company made it to resolve their issue. Tracking this metric provides a good gauge of agent workload so you can identify overworked agents that may need backup. For instance, you can redirect or reassign tickets of overloaded agents to others with more capacity. For example, if Jim was assigned 100 requests in a month and resolved 60, his resolution rate would be 60%.

All of these metrics are important for building the big picture of how customers interact with and experience your business. You’re not necessarily looking for one channel in particular, but take note of customer patterns. FCR has also been directly kpi for support team correlated with improved customer satisfaction. One Oracle study found that a 1% increase in FCR leads to a 1% increase in customer satisfaction. Ensure there’s nothing holding your team back from opening new tickets and sending an initial response.

Abandon Rate

For example, Front measures crucial support KPIs including email volume, CSAT score, resolution time, and response time, as well as other email trends for each rep or across your entire team. This data is accessible via customizable analytics reports you can use to make crucial decisions like when to hire, whether training is needed, and how many staff to have on shift. You get different types of KPIs, including financial ratios (e.g., net profit), process metrics (e.g., % of defective products), and customer support KPIs (e.g., average first response time). For example, for a business with a goal of improving responsiveness, a KPI around time to first response would be fitting. For one more focused on quality, a KPI around customer satisfaction would work well.

Customers’ issues do not only exist in your desired support channels like email and chat. Rather than fight against this trend and attempt to ask customers to submit a ticket via chat, you should respond and help them. Similarly to ticket volume, you don’t need a specific formula to calculate your number of unresolved tickets. Rather, all you need is a reliable system (whether it’s a helpdesk or a process) for keeping track of how many tickets are left unresolved after a certain length of time. Your average number of unresolved tickets is a very important metric to track because unresolved tickets are a leading indicator of unhappy customers.

Pro Tip: Here Is Your Go-To Dashboard For Measuring the Performance of Your Customer Support Team

On the other hand, a low backlog can mean the support team is efficient, leading to faster resolution times and higher customer satisfaction. A high customer contact rate is an indicator that your customer experience is confusing and unclear. It also means your agents will be swamped with tickets and may not have enough time to provide quality responses. CSAT aims to get an overall benchmark for your team’s performance, plus information about the service experience each agent provides. If this score suddenly drops or peaks, you should act fast to see what happened.

Think of average resolution time as a good “first impression.” After all, it isn’t just about speed. It’s about speed to resolution, which is the goal of any customer reaching out to you. Improving your ART means all sorts of good things about your customer service. How do you measure how well-liked a particular customer support quirk might be?

Or, for a team aimed at providing an effortless experience, a customer effort score would be a great guiding KPI. The best way to get these insights is by measuring customer service key performance indicators or customer service KPIs. Its analytics capability provides with you an overview of your customer support, enabling you to see customers who are interacting with your company and monitor the service they’re receiving.

A recent Zendesk report states that 93% of survey respondents would spend more time with companies that offer their preferred option to reach customer service, so it’s an important metric to understand. Your issue resolution rate measures how many tickets are fully resolved in comparison to those that haven’t yet been resolved. This metric is also measured based on a period of time, like daily, weekly, or monthly. Look for quick response times, which demonstrate to your customers that their issues are your priority … which can lead to positive customer satisfaction measures.

The InvGate Service Desk reporting feature is a powerful way to slice, dice, visualize, and store your most crucial performance information. What’s more, service desk KPI reports can be set up to be automatically generated and distributed regularly, eliminating the need for manual reporting by agents and managers. For example, if users made 100 requests in a month and agents resolved 90 of them within the specified timeframe, the SLA compliance rate would be 90%. For example, Ticket Resolution Rate and Average Response Time (metrics) show whether the team is meeting its goal of increasing customer satisfaction for the quarter (KPI). For your service level, you can track as many KPIs for customer service as you wish – but what you should aim for is to honor the services you agreed upon and even exceed the targets. Just like the net promoter score, the customer effort score is directly linked to satisfaction rates and business growth, hence the need to lower this figure as much as you can.

These must be directly related to the delivery of value or to the development of the business. Considering that ticket volume has increased significantly across all channels, offering omni-channel support is crucial. Look for fewer interactions per ticket, which means that your team is communicating clearly, asking the right questions, and working hard to solve each problem swiftly. Your SLA rate essentially tells you how well you meet customer expectations, and whether you can meet expectations on time, deliver solutions, and follow through on what you say you’ll do. Sounds simple, but it’s an evergreen classic that can tell you more about your customers than you think.

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. You can create your own dashboard, or access out-of-the-box data platforms from agent desk software like Salesforce, Zendesk, Gladly or Freshdesk, among other customer experience management platforms. Getting back to your customers quickly is one thing, but how long it takes for you to actually resolve an issue is even more important. 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.

However, all businesses, including ecommerce businesses without subscription-based products can track churn rate. But ecommerce businesses might find revenue churn rate, which we discuss below, easier to track. Plus, you will have an easier time holding agents accountable to standards if they’re written down. You can, and should, regularly update your rubric as you dig into data to understand what ticket qualities actually produce the best results. Ticket quality isn’t a metric on its own, but it’s a metric you can create to score your agents’ tickets and work toward a consistent quality of response.

Crucial Customer Service KPI Metrics to Gauge

Customer experience is mission-critical — see above for its impact on your revenue — but it isn’t easy to measure. That’s because it encapsulates your on-site shopping experience, customer support interactions across many channels, post-purchase interactions like shipping and returns, and so much more. Existing customers are also your biggest spenders, and they rely on quality customer support to stay loyal.

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a general estimate of satisfaction with a buying or service experience, usually measured through surveys after the event. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) defines a company’s commitment to its customers, clarifying the product (or service) requirements and responsibilities of each party involved. This information tells you how your customers prefer to communicate with your business and what channels you should focus on and improve. Look for a high rate, which means that fewer tickets are being left unresolved. Considering that 92% of survey respondents say they’d spend more money with companies that ensure they won’t need to repeat information, the number of interactions per ticket is a critical metric.

• Manually assigning tickets can take up a lot of time and effort, and asking agents to take up tickets can lead to cherry-picking.
• In this post, learn about critical customer service and service desk KPIs that will help you understand your support strategies and improve customer satisfaction.
• It would make sense to compare your results over time to see if you generate positive or negative growth.
• Most platforms give businesses a collaborative system with features that include a shared inbox, canned responses and actions, app integrations, and advanced metrics reporting.
• Customers, in turn, benefit from faster and better service quality, improving overall satisfaction.

Maybe you don’t have a proper system for logging, routing, and closing tickets. Customer support KPIs help you assess overall team performance, hold agents accountable, keep everyone aligned, and improve your customer service. At Intercom we strive to have a world class support team who do whatever they can to help our customers and foster customer loyalty.

Improving training, quality of support, and revising customer service policies can help with improving FCR. Manually assigning tickets can take up a lot of time and effort, and asking agents to take up tickets can lead to cherry-picking. So you need to opt for an efficient alternative system such as automatic ticket assignment. Christopher Robinson is a senior productivity research analyst who specializes in optimizing online collaboration and project management using Scrum and agile approaches. In his work, he always emphasizes the need for distributed work training and the formation of efficient work habits. His work was mentioned in various business publications, including Entrepreneur and InfoQ.

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With this information in hand, businesses will then have the power to make educated decisions on how best to augment their customer service operations for maximum success. It’s now widely understood that for support teams, the stakes have never been higher. People are increasingly making their buying decisions based on the support they receive. Customers will stop doing business with a company after one poor customer support experience. To do that, there are specific customer service key performance indicators that need to be monitored on an ongoing basis in order to adjust processes or optimize agent training. Measuring and monitoring these KPIs give you valuable insights into the health of your business.

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. If you’re just setting up your business, ensure you prioritize customer service KPIs that resonate the most with your industry. If your team is already up and running, revisit your KPIs today and check if they align with your long-term support targets. By setting realistic and focussed KPIs, you can extract the best from your support team and provide stellar customer service.

We suggest you pick at least 2 KPIs for each of your key business objectives. His primary objective was to deliver high-quality content that was actionable and fun to read. With tools such as Tidio, you get an all-in-one tool you can use to build bot conversation workflows and collect feedback. All things considered, message volume is a good indicator of team productivity. It’s usually expressed in minutes or hours, and it can vary depending on the type of inquiry (e.g., live chat vs. email). For example, let’s say you have 100 customers and 30 of them are promoters, 60 are neutrals, and 10 are detractors.

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Escalation Rate is the percentage of requests escalated to higher support or management levels. It measures the frequency at which issues are unable to be resolved by the initial support team and require further intervention. 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.

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. There are a few core KPIs that customer service teams can use to measure their success and progress. As we mentioned before, some of them include customer satisfaction rates, first contact resolution rates, and average handle time. Additionally, teams can also track the number of support tickets closed per month or per week. A customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is a customer service report that measures how well a company’s products, services, and overall customer experience meet customer expectations.

90% of American consumers say that customer service is a deciding factor in whether or not they will do business with a company. Potential customers might ask a question about delivery or the product before making a purchase. And shoppers depend on quality support experiences after the purchase for a great end-to-end experience. If you’re interested in tracking revenue, check out our list of KPIs for your ecommerce brand, which includes more than just customer service metrics. You can separate out tickets that did not have a customer support representative work on them, and that were resolved only with automation. You can also track the amount of views your self-service resources get to understand how many tickets they deflect entirely.

We count a ticket as converted whenever a customer places an order within five days of contacting customer support. Customer churn rate measures the amount of customers your business loses over a given time period. So instead, we’ll recommend that you spot check each agent’s tickets against this rubric.

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, allow organizations to quantify the various aspects of operations and establish metrics through which a unit’s performance is measured. These are relevant in any workflow and particularly useful for critical areas like sales, marketing, and customer support. These identifiers help improve operations and apply adjustments, especially at a time when businesses are faced with COVID-19. A high turnover rate over a six-month period of time could point to deeper issues within the work environment that need addressing. Managers can use this metric to determine how much time an agent is actually on the phone with customers. Meeting modern customer expectations is getting harder to do; people expect quick, convenient high-quality resolutions on their terms.

Striving to provide consistent resolutions is something that is becoming increasingly critical – especially as people are more than eager to loudly share their negative experiences. You need to understand if you are getting more service requests because your product/service is broken or because you are getting more customers. Tracking tickets per customer can help inform resource allocation through the lens of long-term vs. short-term needs. When you’re tracking the right KPIs, you get an undoctored, objective view of your team’s performance, which increasingly, has an impact on a company’s bottom line.

Customer service has one of the highest attrition rates of any industry. Take frequent employee surveys, have 1-on-1 check-ins and encourage open communication to understand your employee satisfaction. A metric reserved for phone calls, call abandonment rate measures how many callers hang up before speaking to a service agent. Talkdesk reported that the three industries with the highest average abandonment ratewere the government and public sector (7.44%), transportation and logistics (7.4%), and healthcare (6.91%). Knowledge base views have nothing to do with customer interaction with an agent. It enables companies to identify trends in customer issues based on the volume of their searches.

It ensures that it aligns with organizational goals and meets or exceeds customer expectations. Measuring the average time to solve different types of customer inquiries can give you many valuable insights. For instance, it will allow you to forecast the number of chat operators you may need to hire.

You should prioritize metrics that reflect the customer’s perspective, such as customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score. These metrics provide insights into how customers perceive and value the service they receive. Hence, your major strategies must focus on how to measure customer service satisfaction and deliver a great experience. Conversion is one of the most important aspects of any business, both online and offline. This helps you to find out how likely a customer is to take a specific ‘favorable’ action after interacting with your customer service agents.

While this might sound very basic, you need to have the right systems in place to actually measure the business-critical KPIs before you can look to improve them. If you use multiple engagement platforms, make sure all of the data is analyzed together to provide a true picture of how your support engine is performing. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. To determine CES, you’ll ask your customers, On a scale from “Very Easy” to “Very Difficult”, how was your experience?.

• In addition, they can be biased if customers only answer the questions they want to or if they don’t have time to provide a detailed response.
• While there might be different types, you’ll notice that the metrics for each kind are closely intertwined and influence each other.
• You can collect feedback from customers right after they’ve had certain touchpoints or interactions with your company, like making a purchase or contacting the service team.
• In your InvGate Service Desk report, select the metrics “Requests” and “Spent Time” and add “Agent” to a column.

Additionally, it will help you to manage your customer service team more efficiently, potentially reducing costs and driving increased job satisfaction. Customer service metrics can help businesses track the effectiveness of their operations. Additionally, they can help identify areas where they need to make adjustments, as well as measure the impact. No matter what method you choose, it’s important to focus on the quality of your data and not just the quantity.

A satisfied customer, on the other hand, is unlikely to leave a good review. Long story short, people won’t rate your business on designated websites without a nudge. And who would know customers’ pain points and objectives better than a customer service staff member who communicates with them every day? That’s the reason upselling and cross-selling often happen in customer service. Agents could organically offer an upgrade as a solution to the user’s issue — that’s your upsell right there.

Compare your MRR over a course of a longer period of time in order to identify how sustainable is your current business model and how fast are you growing. 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. Compare this KPI to others such as the agent utilization or the ticket handle time to extract deeper conclusions about costs and how to lower them.

In fact, almost 52% of customers would be willing to pay a higher price for products or services if they could also expect a higher level of customer service. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the most important customer service metrics that measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. It’s based on users’ willingness to recommend your business to other people on a scale of 0-10. First and foremost, providing customers with self-service tools, such as FAQs, knowledge bases, and online tutorials, allows them to resolve common issues independently.

To calculate the standard customer churn rate, divide the number of customers lost during a period by the total number of customers at the start. Tickets solved per hour is how many tickets were resolved and closed within that same time frame. As with tickets handled per hour, this metric can detail how effectively a support agent operates. To calculate this metric, add all the time your support reps took to respond to tickets and divide that by the total number of tickets. For example, let’s say employee A took 20 seconds to respond to a ticket, employee B took 15 seconds, and employee C took 30 seconds. The first response time would be 65 seconds divided by three, or 21.67 seconds.

Key performance indicators are important because they keep teams focused on what matters most to an organization’s success. They act like a report card showing how well a team is doing in key areas, which helps everyone understand where they stand. To ensure your employees stay on track, achieve their goals, and satisfy your customers, it’s important to set them up with clear KPIs from the start. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and understands what’s expected of them. Seventy-seven percent of executives have already implemented conversational bots for after-sales and customer service. With more companies turning to AI, it’s important to understand the relevant KPIs for virtual agents.

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. Revenue backlog helps you measure how much revenue your business will see in a coming period. This metric is especially for ecommerce brands with a subscription-based model.

It’s typically measured by asking your customers to complete a quick survey post-service, whether by clicking a thumbs up or thumbs down or answering a few questions about their experience. How you collect this data is up to you, but it’s important nonetheless. It’s essential to measure average handle time to improve customer service efficiency. Just imagine that by reducing this figure, companies can save money on cost per ticket and enhance satisfaction. Average handle time (AHT) is a customer service metric that measures the average amount of time it takes to resolve a customer’s inquiry or issue.

Discover the most important customer service and support metrics to measure and track in order to provide the best customer experience … To improve KPIs like average resolution time and customer satisfaction, agents must be trained to deliver the best customer support. Many support teams choose the right KPIs but don’t track them throughout the year. Instead, KPIs take the backseat with team leaders glancing at them once, if at all.

Many live chat solutions come with built-in reporting features that track many customer support KPIs like average response time, message volume, or the number of handled vs. missed conversations. This data can be extremely helpful for assessing chat operator performance and identifying areas for improvement. If you’re looking to decrease your average response times, you should try live chat.