5 KPI’s to Measure the Success of Customer Service Teams

This shows the percentage of issues actually resolved by your agents from the number of total tickets received. This article centers on the definition of KPIs, their difference with metrics, and the ideal performance indicators for customer support. It also shines the proverbial spotlight on their relevance in regard to customer satisfaction and some of the best customer support software that can help you analyze KPIs.

In your account, you’ll get visual reports showing your average resolution time in a given time period. Agents must integrate lessons learned through coaching and training into their customer interactions. This measures how effective your learning management is and identifies which agents need closer attention.

It’s a wide-reaching metric as ‘effort’ can refer to everything from the act of getting in touch to the ease of actually having an issue solved. As its name suggests, this customer service KPI tracks the costs of resolving an issue by different communication channels. Calculations of this indicator can include a variety of factors such as employee wages, license fees for software, equipment https://chat.openai.com/ and technology expenses, and agent’s training just to name a few. An ideal situation would be to have low costs and high satisfaction rates for all your communication channels; however, this is not always the case. Monitoring this measurement closely can help you paint an accurate picture of your situation and find improvement opportunities to ensure you remain profitable.

If they find some data on the dashboard is no longer relevant, that’s an indicator that you need to revisit your KPIs and define new ones to align with changing goals and strategies. By measuring ticket volumes and resolution rates, you can proactively respond to efficiency barriers. By understanding the ratio of opened tickets to resolved tickets, you can measure how efficient your teams are working. By measuring average resolution time, you can see if your team has the support and knowledge to get to the root of the customer problem quickly. Lower ATR usually means your team has the right tools, scripts, or processes to resolve customer problems quickly.

We track median number of replies per resolution in the Reporting dashboard using a line graph. Subtract the percent of detractors from the percent of promoters for a given time period to reveal NPS. Average reply time displays the median amount of time it takes to respond to a customer. Predict what else may be confusing your customers and address it before shooting out your reply to achieve a resolution. Number of conversations is directly correlated to the visibility and clarity of your knowledge base. These are short surveys that can be sent frequently to check what your employees think about an issue quickly.

Top 10 Customer Support Metrics and KPIs

The latest research has found that the customer service industry has the highest attrition rate. That leads to the conclusion that calculating employee satisfaction score (ESAT) is extremely important for measuring the team’s performance and the overall quality of customer support. Alright, think of customer service metrics like your business’s secret spy gadgets. They give you insights into how customers enjoy your service, how fast they get help, and if your support team is doing the best they can. 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.

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. 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.

It allows businesses to gauge customer satisfaction, retain loyal customers, ensure operational efficiency, identify and address pain points, and continuously improve their support processes. It is an inevitable fact that support costs can be managed by a well-trained team and adjusting the staffing schedule according to your business needs. When you measure this customer service metric over time and analyze how your trend is – if the percentage is unusually high.

• 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.
• Some of the primary levers you have for driving job satisfaction, and hence analyst engagement, include training, coaching, and career pathing.
• Delivering exceptional customer support is paramount for startups aiming to establish a strong customer base and grow their business.
• Steve Noone O’Connor, of point-of-sale service Vend, places serious focus on his CES.

Zendesk reports that 73% of consumers will switch to a competitor after several bad experiences, while almost the same number will choose to spend more with a brand that excels in CX. For one eCommerce tech startup, customer experience strategy is the glue that holds everything else together. Get the 10 most valuable customer experience analytics for small-medium businesses, broken down in practical terms, with real-life examples.

Automate and templatize your first response

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. For example, if an agent spends 6 hours out of an 8-hour workday on support-related activities, their agent utilization rate would be 75%. The software provides a KPI dashboard and reports that allow you to view critical data at a glance without manually compiling information. Pay careful attention to low scores and follow-up to determine why customers are dissatisfied. 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.

Surprisingly, the leaders using speech analytics averaged a 76% FCR rate comparatively, the followers had a 23% average FCR. And to get it you can simply ask the question, “How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend/family member/colleague? Your Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. The answers will give you a clear understanding of whether you should improve your UX and reevaluate your design decisions. Additionally, abandon rates can help you optimize resources such as utilizing staff from other departments during peak hours.

Therefore, if your department responds to customer queries faster, they will be happier with your services and will be more likely to stick around for long. Analyzing the abandon rate can help customer service departments decide what measures need to be taken to address the issue. Consequently, the CS department may agree ring-backs should be implemented where a customer has an option to request a call back after holding on to a queue.

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. 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.

Poor customer service agents’ performance can cause you to lose customer trust and loyalty. Excellent customer service agents keep your customers happy so they stay longer and brag about your business to their friends (and you increase customer retention rates and lifetime value). If you find your FRT is continually lagging or even increasing, consider Chat GPT partnering with an outsourced customer service team to get the support you need for your customers. In other words, the performance of your customer support team (and overall customer experience) directly impacts your bottom line. Customer service metrics help you understand — and improve — the value that customer service brings to your business.

Satisfied customers are more likely to find your product worth their money. Some companies are able to achieve CSAT rates of higher than 90%, even on email, which typically has lower CSAT than chat or phone. If you’re ready to request a quote or you’re interested in hearing more about our services, fill out this form and we’ll get back to you within two business days. Reach out today to learn how we integrate with your order status tracking system. Gorgias integrates with a ton of popular ecommerce tools, making it a great single-view hub.

This customer service KPI measures the performance of your customer service department. Customer satisfaction and cost per ticket are the yin and yang of IT Support. These metrics are in constant tension, and every IT Support organization grapples with how to strike an appropriate balance between the two. With no restraints on spending, it is relatively easy for a support organization to “spend its way” to high customer satisfaction. Conversely, if customer satisfaction is not an issue, a support organization can reduce its costs almost indefinitely. The vast majority of IT support organizations are tracking too many metrics – oftentimes 20 or more!

To calculate the average first response time, all you have to do is add up all of your first response times for a given period then divide that number by the number of resolved tickets during that time. In instances such as these, fast response times that lead to quick resolutions can directly translate to more or retained revenue. Modern customers have high expectations when it comes to customer service.

You can easily calculate it by dividing the total support costs by the number of issues. You need to determine the critical points in the customer journey where interactions with customer service are most likely to occur. It is highly important for your business and for the care of your customer teams that you measure this metric to know what are your busiest hours of the day, days of the week and months of the year. That way, you can point out trends in the contact volumes and not being taken off guard overwhelmed by a sudden rise.

If this score suddenly drops or peaks, you should act fast to see what happened. 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. Your average reply time (or average response time) refers to how long it takes for you to respond to any customer support message, not just the first message of a ticket. You don’t want to keep customers waiting, even in prolonged conversations. Calculating your average first response time is relatively simple — most helpdesks will report this number for you.

However, oftentimes these negative reviews are given for reasons out of an agent’s control, yet are still detrimental to their CSAT score. That’s why Kaizo created an NRR feature that allows agents to challenge these reviews allowing them to receive their true CSAT. Your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) determines exactly how happy your customers are with your team’s service.

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

This will show up on your site’s chat widget by either showing the current status as online or offline. The best part is this can not only be used for chat, but for responses to tickets coming in through other communication channels like email, social media, and SMS. Barcelona-based shoe brand ALOHAS added self-service order management flows with Gorgias after experiencing a high chat volume. This allowed customers to find information on their own without a human needing to respond.

A shared inbox provides a shared perspective of email and improves visibility, accountability, collaboration, and, ultimately, your KPIs. Your KPIs will likely take a hit if agents are constantly overloaded with work. You may need to hire more agents or rebalance the workload among existing agents. By disregarding the passives and subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters, you get your NPS score (expressed as a number, not a percentage). While definitions vary, agent touches generally refer to when an employee actively makes a change on a ticket.

CSAT is the most straightforward and effective of all KPIs for customer service that helps you determine customer satisfaction level. You can create a simple questionnaire online and ask your customers how satisfied they are with your services. At Intercom we strive to have a world class support team who do whatever they can to help our customers and foster customer loyalty.

First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate

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. It provides analytics and helps to gain insights from the data collected. The insights can be used further to engage customers in the right way and improve sales conversion.

It provides a good indication of your team’s efficiency in resolving customer requests. This is a factor that measures the time it takes for a specialist to react to a client request on average. 33% of users are ready to recommend a company that is fast at responses without considering the ultimate quality of the help provided. There are also certain niche-based norms regulating the most proper initial response time for different communication channels. A customer satisfaction software like Idiomatic can help you generate insights from this data.

Customer support cannot resolve everyone’s problems all the time (shocking, I know). We can keep open lines of communication, though, and facilitate resolutions as seamlessly as possible. Discover and hone ten customer service KPI metrics, complete with definitions, examples, and solutions to help you improve them. Before taking any decision, track these support metrics over several months. NPS is a 10,000 foot view metric that measures overall satisfaction with your brand or product over the entire customer journey.

Without knowing the end goal (ie. what your customer service team is working towards), there will be no way to measure performance and progress. Creating a plan will guide you and your team to the specific goals you want to achieve. The customers will rate you on a scale of 1-5 based on how much effort it takes to complete a transaction, resolve a support issue, and otherwise interact with your company/product online or in person.

What are customer support KPIs?

In order for a business to succeed, their customers need to feel that a product or service adds value to their work or life. Some customers will choose a business to buy from based solely on their customer support reviews. If past customers report having a positive experience with a certain organization, word will spread. A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in customer service is a measurable metric used to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of a company’s customer support processes. These indicators are crucial for monitoring and improving various aspects of customer service.

However, you can also reduce average time in queue by improving the number and quality of self-service options. Allowing customers to find answers or take care of simple concerns on their own, such as finding open stores or starting a return, can help reduce overall call volume. As a result, you’ll be better able to staff accordingly to continue to reduce time in queue and serve the customer more effectively. Employing automation to facilitate easy order tracking, status updates, and real-time delivery information for your customers is a smart move for your online business. By committing to an end-to-end order tracking system, you make it possible for your company to cut costs, increase productivity, and encourage customer retention. Gorgias is the customer support and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce businesses like yours.

According to Gorgias research, repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time customers of ecommerce brands. We estimate that by increasing your repeat customer base by 20%, you could increase your revenue up to 6%. 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. Finding your total self-service resolution rate is a bit difficult because you don’t have a ticket to open or close. You can track views on your self-service resources to understand whether they’re being adopted, and track changes to your contact rate to see if they reduce the number of tickets coming in.

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. Just as world-class service delivery organizations are obsessive about maintaining high customer satisfaction levels, they are equally committed to keeping their costs in check. That said, extremely high analyst utilization can actually increase your costs by driving analyst turnover and absenteeism higher. Whenever analyst utilization rates approach 60–70 percent, a service desk will experience relatively high analyst turnover because they are pushing the analysts too hard. Extremely high utilization leads to burnout, higher turnover, higher absenteeism, and lower morale in the service desk. The correlation between analyst utilization and cost is illustrated below.

First, you’ll choose an order tracking tool like ShipBob, ShipStation, or AfterShip — we discuss each in more detail below. These tools take order information like tracking numbers and shipment status and automate their delivery to a customer. Many order tracking apps integrate with different ecommerce systems like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, 3DCart, or WooCommerce. So, you’ll need to make sure that the tool you choose integrates well with the ecommerce system you use.

Customer satisfaction can, of course, have a huge influence on the entire organization, including the bottom line. Simply send us your job descriptions and we will set up your evaluations. Real-time KPI tracking allows for the identification of negative short-term trends before they develop into long-term crises. Check the total number of software installations vs. the total number of licenses purchased for every software application to identify over and under-licensed software. Percentage of software products and licenses in actual use by the business. An increasing trend in the number of unplanned changes indicates the inadequate planning of changes and questions the efficiency of the change management process.

When developing or optimizing your customer service strategy, it’s crucial to define your key performance indicators (KPIs) and customer service metrics. Measuring this KPI for customer service helps to implement the right strategies to deliver real-time proactive support to clients and improve their experience. Adding the service metric to your scorecard helps you spot if this is happening, so you can find out what’s holding your agents up.

Minimizing disruption in a person’s life and requiring minimal effort on their part are the cornerstones of good customer service. CES measures how much effort your customer had to put in to resolving a particular issue or answering a specific question. CES depends on a myriad of factors including time spent, total back-and-forth interactions, and the number of times a person has to reach out. In addition to resolution times, providing consistent resolutions is also an important metric.

• You can satisfy those FAQs by adding quick answer flows into the chat widget.
• Its extensive reporting possibilities enable you to keep tabs on support agent performance.
• A partner should never be left one on one with something they’re having a hard time with.

Even better are real-time alerts and SMS or email notifications at each point in an order’s journey from purchase to doorstep. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Also, these integrations help your marketing team be more aware of active support conversations to avoid tone deaf marketing. For example, by integrating Gorgias and your SMS marketing tool, you can pause marketing campaigns on customers awaiting a response from support. (Nobody wants to get marketing messages if they’re waiting on a delayed order, or troubleshooting their last purchase). Text messages are an effective method for collecting feedback from existing customers, too.

In addition to those already featured on this list, the following are additional metrics used to measure service desk performance. This KPI refers to the number of tickets an individual agent or team as a whole has received and resolved within a given period. Average handle time (AHT) is similar to average resolution time, but there is a slight difference. Unlike CES and CSAT, NPS measures a customer’s overall perception of a brand or company. Your NPS score is a good indicator of overall customer loyalty toward your brand. Tracking this metric provides a good gauge of agent workload so you can identify overworked agents that may need backup.

Or, write a pre-written email that you can use to send out shipment notifications for each step of the order process. If you try to provide order tracking yourself, you’ll save in the short term but end up spending plenty of time building and maintaining a system to send tracking information. Typically, you can automate customer order tracking notifications via SMS, app notifications, or email — we’ll cover this in more detail below. Or, create a self-service portal where customers can use their purchase order number to access order status — we’ll cover this more in a later section. A 2021 survey by OptimoRoute found that 24.6% of online shoppers said they were extremely likely to return for additional shopping if a brand provides real-time order tracking. Similar to getting orders quickly and with no shipping fees, customers expect a tracking number to see an order’s status and its location at any given time.

This provides an average that you can calculate for each agent, as well as your call center on the whole. Since at least 33% of customers say that “waiting on hold” is the single most frustrating aspect of customer service, it’s essential to reduce the average time in queue as much as possible. Peak Support is an award-winning customer service outsourcing company that provides

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The KPIs for customer service that give you an overview of the work done and your team’s efficiency are the number of total tickets and tickets per customer, respectively. Building strong customer support standards pave the way to continuous excellent work and nurturing long-term customer relationships. Furthermore, they can serve to determine the success rate of your business.

To achieve this, orgs must measure and track key metrics that reflect the quality of their support operations. If the answer is “not many,” you may need to find ways to boost productivity, provide more knowledge and tools, or even expand your customer service team. By looking at a customer support KPI such as cost per resolution or interactions per ticket, you can gauge how effective your support processes are and identify areas for improvement.

Customer support software ProProfs Help Desk is an award-winning ticketing system designed to help support teams provide fast, efficient, and quality customer service for free. On the backend, this help desk solution is equipped with the right tools to help team managers keep track of their teams’ performance to ensure that they consistently deliver excellent customer service. A quick overview of the reports page enables you to understand how your helpdesk and support teams are performing.

How do you track key performance indicators and use this information to improve individual agent performance to meet customer needs and business goals better? You can add several resources like a live chat widget, bug reporting, micro videos, tutorials, etc. The all-in-one solution reduces your support costs because you won’t need as many support staff to handle issues that users can resolve themselves. Tracking customer service metrics by channel can help you sum up the current demand for your support team by covering the entirety of support. This KPI gives the number of tickets per channel that customers use to contact your support agents.

The person receiving the escalated ticket is typically a supervisor or manager. Analyzing the reasons why customers contact support is just as important support kpis as how fast their issues are resolved. Monitoring customer-reported issues can help you determine gaps in your instruction and training materials.