15 Customer Service KPI Metrics That Propel CX Teams

Our live chat tools and 150+ integrations equip you to reach your customers — whenever and however you choose. Fortunately, your helpdesk and SMS marketing software may integrate to give you a centralized way to spark conversations if customers reach out via text or respond to SMS campaigns. With Gorgias and Klaviyo, for example, customer responses to SMS marketing campaigns get assigned directly to an agent for fast response times.

To learn more about how Gorgias can help you speed up your response times in a way that is affordable and hassle-free, book a demo today. We’ve covered a variety of ways to roll back your response times, but that’s not all these best practices accomplish. They also optimize your customer service workflow overall, ensuring your customer service interactions are positive and helpful and your team isn’t overloaded or losing time to repetitive, manual tasks. All of these tools combine to reduce the number of tickets your support team receives in the first place, which can ultimately result in faster response times for the tickets that do appear.

Many companies stopped measuring customer satisfaction during this time as they were simply trying to get back to customers, which often took days. The customer effort score measures how much effort your customer had to put into resolving their issue. To determine the customer effort score, ask your customer to rate their resolution experience on a scale from easy to difficult. 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.

The second piece of data in the CSAT score report gives us a great starting point for improvement. If you can get more people to complete the survey, you might be able to raise CSAT without putting in too much more effort. Encourage happy customers to complete the survey to get a more balanced metric. When time is up, check on the customer or follow up with your product team.

It would make sense to compare your results over time to see if you generate positive or negative growth. That way, you will have a deeper understanding of your customers’ fluctuations and, in that case, you can easily brainstorm ideas to increase the net retention rate. As its name suggests, the abandon rate tracks the percentage of clients that leave a call or other form of communication before they can speak to an agent. This KPI can be used to measure the ability of the support department in answering requests in due time. If your company has a high abandonment rate, it can mean long queue times or complicated entry processes, which can lead to poor customer satisfaction rates in the long run. To avoid this, you can track this rate on a weekly basis and dig deeper into the weeks where it was higher.

If you don’t have a helpdesk, you can find first response times for tickets by comparing the time stamp when you first received the customer request with the timestamp of the first response. If you received the message at 8 AM on Monday and respond at 8 AM on Tuesday, your first response time is one day. The more interactions the customer must have with your team, the less satisfied they will be. In this article, we’ll review the importance of customer service metrics, the key metrics to measure, and how to use them to drive performance.

We’ve put together a collection of proven templates you can start using today. Adapt as many of these as you need to fit the contours of your business, and bring them into your customer service platform of choice. On platforms like WhatsApp Business, you don’t have to wait around to hear from customers.

Average Abandonment Rate

It is the time that agents spend on after-call work, such as writing up a report or following up with the customer. Statistically speaking, people who had a negative experience with a company are more likely to leave a review. 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.

This ultimately indicates how prompt and expert your team is at resolving customer questions. Based on the business niche and overall complexity of tasks in question, this metric can be measured in minutes, hours or days. Software like Idiomatic can categorize tickets by topic, positive/negative/neutral sentiment, and also give insights on costs related to these data segments. To track average handle time, you also need timestamps for conversation start times and a robust CRM system to mark when other actions have been completed and correlate them to the first support call. That’s why, in addition to an efficient support team, you should provide self-service support so that users can solve repetitive problems on their own. This combination reduces friction in getting help and enhances user experiences as well.

In addition, track the Ratio of Views vs. Tickets Submitted for high-traffic pages. Are customers seeking help in your knowledge base and then turning to customer support when they can’t find the answer? A low views-to-tickets ratio might indicate gaps in your knowledge base or documentation and a need to expand your self-help resources. Knowing and tracking customer service KPIs over time can show you which areas of customer service performance are excelling and which need improvement. Tracking your customer effort score over time can strongly indicate the success of any customer service department changes.

Below, explore the benefits of tracking customer orders and why you should consider implementing an order tracking tool for your business. SMS reaches customers when they’re on the go in a way that email frequently doesn’t. Whatever the reason, a gentle, well-timed message can sometimes get the customer back on track. A proactive approach builds trust with your audience — they will see you going above and beyond with these efforts, and know that you’ll be upfront with potential issues. When using a chat widget, you’ll notice the same questions come up again and again. You can satisfy those FAQs by adding quick answer flows into the chat widget.

Employee satisfaction

Simply divide the total time needed to solve the tickets by the number of tickets solved. Defining the parameters and norms of service (response time, conversation scripts) is crucial to any type of support efforts. This helps to promptly identify and prevent individual issues related to employees, service, product, and company. You should be able to compare the rates of successful issue resolutions with a total number of requests.

A few of the most popular integrations are NetSuite, Reveal, Tolstoy, Magento, ChannelReply, and Shopify. There are several great choices on the market for customer order tracking systems that are both scalable and flexible depending on your needs and support kpis the ecommerce platform that you use. Standalone self-service order tracking in the Help Center is possible natively in Gorgias, no integration required. As an example, we’ll walk through setting up order tracking with AfterShip on a Shopify store.

If the number spikes, then one of your products might have gone viral, or you’ve got a PR nightmare happening. To calculate net promoter score, you first need to gather data using a customer survey. Send a survey to customers after they make a purchase that asks them, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [products or service] to a friend or colleague? ” On this scale, 0 would be not at all likely, and 10 would be extremely likely. Knowing how to evaluate customer service performance includes seizing cross-selling opportunities when available.

Revenue churn rate

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. 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. Average resolution time is how long it takes to solve a support ticket from start to finish, and the length of time usually varies based on the complexity of the issue. However, lower resolution times are a better marker for success as they ensure quick resolutions of customer calls.

One pro tip is to look back at positive customer feedback or five-star interactions to get ideas. See which answers made customers feel heard and satisfied while also solving their issues quickly. For live customer support channels such as phone calls or live chat, you can create scripts for each FAQ that representatives can follow. Many times, though, slow responses can end up increasing the workload of your customer support team. If you don’t respond quickly enough to a customer that needs assistance, they may end up contacting your company multiple times through multiple channels.

Total & Solved Tickets By Channel

Similar to the CSAT, the NPS is a common metric for measuring customer satisfaction. Customers will rate on a scale from 1 to 10 how likely they are to recommend your business to a friend. It’s best to measure this regularly, so you can determine your company’s benchmark and look for any drops or spikes in the average rating. First Call Resolution is a fantastic metric to add to your custom Playvox Performance dashboard. If agents are solving problems within a single call, your customers will be satisfied and see that your service team is well-trained and efficient.

2) Cost Per Ticket (CPT) – This is the total cost of running a customer support team divided by the number of tickets received. Arguably the largest impact on this KPI is an efficient team that is well-structured and has employees with a variety of complementary skills. You don’t want a team with glaring weaknesses, such as a lack of agents that are good on the phone. In addition, collaboration with team members on difficult customer tickets helps to resolve issues faster and keep customers happy.

The team can share these visualizations to provide real-time performance results that foster ownership, accountability, and friendly competition. There is a clear disparity between the customer expectation and what businesses are delivering, providing an opportunity for you to differentiate yourself. The health and happiness of employees is critical to the modern workplace – so much so that companies like Hitachi monitor it with live sensors. The Harvard Business Review tells us that over 70 percent of business owners cite employee engagement as a direct driver to their success. At the same time, attempting to quantify emotion can prove imprecise at best.

The two most important metrics to measure for a support team will depend on the specific goals and objectives of the organization. Still, Customer Satisfaction and First Contact Resolution Rate are considered the most important metrics for a support team. For example, suppose an organization invests in InvGate Service Desk software that improves efficiency and reduces the Average Handle Time for support tickets. If the investment results in cost savings and increased productivity, these financial benefits can be quantified and compared to the initial investment cost to calculate the ROI. Cost Per Ticket measures the average cost of resolving an IT support ticket.

The answer from a real human is what counts (so make sure it reads as such). Therefore, “after call work time” is the time a customer agent spends wrapping up a transaction at the end of a customer call. Most managers will want to reduce this time so as to minimize the cost of interaction with a customer. Companies that make their customers wait on hold for long periods of time, will struggle to please their customers. This is actually a major cause of client resentment and dissatisfaction across the globe.

Furthermore, customers feel accomplished when they are able to solve certain issues on their own and don’t have to depend on support agents every time. Although it’s a good indicator of efficiency, the average resolution time can get skewed due to more complex issues that need more time to resolve. This suggests that about a quarter of support tickets involve follow-up costs or unresolved problems. You can also add or remove products, change pricing, and add coupons after an order has been placed.

Regularly review and adjust KPIs based on changing projects, other priorities and technology challenges. In the modern workplace, the success of organizations is intricately tied to the performance and effectiveness of their teams. Percentage of incidents resolved by the first level of support (first call or contact with the IT help desk). Optimize the number of incidents and service requests, and prepare the IT team to handle the ticket load. Total number of tickets handled by the IT helpdesk and their patterns within a given time frame.

Positive customer experience leads to increased customer retention, reduced churn, and positive word-of-mouth referrals. Moreover, addressing customer concerns promptly and effectively allows companies to diminish the risk of negative reviews and reputation damage, which can have a direct impact on profitability. On the other hand, dissatisfied customers can churn any minute, so your customer service strategy should be reviewed and adjusted ASAP. There are all kinds of marketing campaigns (like email or social media promotions) aimed at collecting reviews from customers.

With the evolution of new customer service trends and technologies, businesses are going omnichannel to deliver better conversational experiences. With these insights, businesses can communicate with customers over their preferred channels such as websites, phone, email, social media, etc. You can use the below formula to find out the customer service matrix, which Chat GPT helps you to identify the quality of service your clients experience when they reach out to your support agents for assistance. This customer service KPI needs to be the key area of your focus if you don’t want to disappoint three-fourths  of your customer base. Your first response is their first impression, and you already know how important first impressions are.

To track ticket volumes, ensure every customer support ticket is automatically tagged with any support agent who deals with it. You’ll also need a tag or category for support tickets to indicate tickets that are resolved, in-progress, or not resolved. By measuring first contact resolution rate, you can understand where agents are spending their time and which types of inquires require multiple agents to solve. This might mean you need to provide extra training to allow for one agent to resolve a ticket, or route specific tickets to the appropriate department from the beginning of the interaction.

• You may be having issues with your products or services; hence, many customers are complaining and reaching out to you.
• On the other hand, skill-based routing helps lineup tickets and relay them to the ‘most qualified’ agent.
• While these numbers present heavy value to companies, customers aren’t always eager to participate.
• Meeting modern customer expectations is getting harder to do; people expect quick, convenient high-quality resolutions on their terms.
• Gauging business performance isn’t as skin deep as simply viewing the results and then calling it a day.

It can also show you the complexity of the requests you are receiving from customers, with highly complicated issues taking longer to solve. It’s essentially an evolved and more exhaustive version of the “first response time” KPI. By tracking where your customers are reaching out to you the most, you will know which channel works for you the best.

Businesses can simply measure the overall volume of tickets they receive, but it’s more valuable to track the number of tickets per customer and number of tickets per agent. These metrics give businesses a better idea of the workload reps handle, not just the amount of tickets processed overall. Two different companies with the same number of customers and support reps can have vastly different workloads based on the types of issues agents have to solve.

You can provide live chat scripts and customer surveys to improve resolution in the first interaction itself. While retention is not strictly due to customer service – things like product quality, cost, speed, and brand image can also play a big role, it is still a vital metric for CX teams to track. They are often the last line of defense when a customer is about to cancel or churn, and can provide valuable data to other teams to help improve retention rates. You can also use this data to adjust your training practices and help set up your team for success. One of the most important areas for a customer service department is monitoring and enhancing agent performance. How effectively and efficiently agents can resolve customer queries has a direct impact on cost, customer experience and retention.

Tools like Mixpanel, Qualtrics, and Optimove can also help you automatically track this metric. This AI can create a detailed strategy with all the steps to take to reach your goals. Enter the new age with a better understanding of how AI can help you achieve your goals. Finally, with FreeAgent’s advanced automation and workflow technology, you can turn your insights into actionable processes that are followed every single time. The variety of chart types and configurations that FreeAgent provides allows you to see your data in fun and easy ways. The next step is turning those data points into insights, and with FreeAgent’s comprehensive reporting capabilities, this is a breeze.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Often, they’re shuffled between numerous agents until they’re finally given one with the appropriate experience to help them. Other times, their question is simply lost in a chaotic, disconnected computer system. Collaborative customer support software that can redirect information and customer correspondence from multiple channels is the key to solving this issue. The best solutions allow agents to chat with one another directly and add notes to customer profiles, ensuring anyone who accesses that data has the same information.

This percentage can be tracked over time to determine if you’re improving your score. Depending on your team goals, you’ll want to have a specific number of metrics to work toward. Identifying the metrics you’ll measure helps encourage them to achieve their targets and have fun while doing it and ultimately, agents will perform much better. The FCR performance indicator gives you insights into how good your agents are at understanding and addressing customer issues without needing multiple interactions. CSAT helps to evaluate the client’s service satisfaction with your business, products, or services. You can measure customer service satisfaction helps to gain insights into what they think about you.

So be sure to constantly track and check in on your KPIs throughout the year to help you stay on track. While there are several ways to do this, most companies will typically measure and track KPIs through reporting tools and business analytics software. Conversations handled by a rep are simply the number of conversations or interactions each support agent handles within a specified time frame, usually a day.

Its robust features that enable support teams to deliver quality services include SLA views, custom ticket fields, ticket forms, and an admin interface available in more than 40 languages. Besides, Zendesk supports seamless channel integration allowing teams to connect with customers through mobile, web, email, Twitter, or Facebook. For a customer service department, KPIs typically focus on the efficiency, quality and speed of support interactions. This includes indicators related to contact channels, agent performance, query and complaint resolution, customer satisfaction, issue types and resolution timeframes. Tracking CS KPIs make it possible to analyze strengths and weaknesses, identify negative trends early and facilitate performance improvements.

The average handling time between a customer submitting a query and an agent’s response is determined in this metric. You’ll have to implement a robust system for collecting and analyzing customer service data. But, if you do not know the channels from where the customers are reaching out to you, it becomes haphazard.

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. The result is that teams don’t track performance, can’t keep agents accountable, and cannot improve their customer service, which affects their bottom line.

Customer satisfaction is also a factor in revenue, so you should never sacrifice customer satisfaction for a lower cost-per-ticket average. By measuring cost per resolution, you can determine appropriate budgets for staffing needs and see how you can hasten your average resolution time to get a lower cost per resolution. This can be time-consuming and difficult to track manually, so using the help of an AI-driven customer feedback software will allow you to better understand this metric.

This is another reason it’s helpful to keep your average first response time as low as possible. Keep in mind that customers expect fast response times since so many companies today can meet those expectations. If your company isn’t keeping up with the customer service offered by the competition, it could damage your brand reputation among existing customers. Of course, meeting customer expectations regarding response time is often easier said than done.

Monitoring just the revenue won’t give you the right insights to keep growing, either. A customer service Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company achieves its key business objectives. We’ve identified 3 key areas where we think KPIs will have the biggest impact on the success of your customer service team. Although a low MTTR is a worthy objective, many IT Support organizations go too far in trying to enforce aggressive service levels.

The Quality Assurance (QA) scorecard collects evaluations, rankings, and valuable feedback from every one of Todd’s team’s exchanges. Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings. Seeing your numbers from the big picture view will show you exactly how many tickets your team is handling and how you can manage your resources.

One of the biggest advantages of chatbot solutions is the fact that they allow for immediate responses to customer inquiries. Live chat solutions can also help companies reduce their wait times, though not to the same degree. To determine which solution(s) is best for your business, let’s compare chatbots and live chat software and go through the top use cases for each. Luckily, you won’t have to answer that, because these are completely avoidable problems. Once you learn the important distinctions between chatbot software and live chat software, you’ll understand how to use them both more effectively and lower blood pressures across the board.

If measuring and tracking CSAT feels complicated—or you’re not sure how or where to get data or make improvements—we’re here to help. Our team of experts at Global Response can help you implement advanced customer satisfaction analytics to unlock powerful customer data, draw holistic insights and boost your business results. First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate is a measure of how many times a customer inquiry is resolved by the first agent who responds to the concern. The rate can be calculated simply by dividing the number of tickets resolved by the first contact by the total number of cases. First Response Time (FRT) measures the amount of time elapsed between when the customer first reaches out and when an agent provides an initial response.

By checking this KPI for customer service, you can create a better projection of the employee status and hiring needs as well. Thus, conduct employee surveys as frequently as  the customer ones, have consultations, and promote open communication to better understand  your employees’ satisfaction. They can help you better understand what is working well and what needs to be eliminated, so you can create a winning customer service strategy. That’s where these specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) jump in to help you!

Connect to hundreds of services and APIs directly and build highly customizable dashboards and reports for your team and clients. In your InvGate Service Desk reports, you can select “Priority” to see how many tickets are critical, high, medium, and low. We’re standing by to either show off Spider Impact or turn your data into a prototype for free. Learn how software brings your KPIs to life with Dashboards, Reports, and performance alerts. The latest on strategy execution, KPIs, and business intelligence, straight to your inbox.

The effort involved in gathering, analyzing and acting on customer service KPIs delivers big rewards through higher efficiency, cost savings, customer retention and agent engagement. While tracking too many metrics can become noise, the top KPIs that offer greatest insight can transform the performance of any support operation. In this extensive article, we will look at the key reasons why tracking KPIs should be a priority for any customer service manager or director.

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. CSAT scores are crucial because a higher score typically reflects a higher customer retention rate and lower customer churn. The first step is to track metrics and KPIs regarding the customer experience and your customer support teams. Next, you need to understand the metrics and how to use them to maintain success or improve your customer support experience.

To determine satisfaction levels, organizations will usually send surveys immediately after a customer interacts with an agent. Similarly, high ticket volumes around a specific topic are worth keeping tabs on and investigating. If the topic is your product, it may indicate a product issue that needs fixing. Finally, fluctuating ticket volumes at certain times of the day or days of the year helps you identify busier and slower periods, so you can adjust support shifts to meet demand. Resolution time will vary depending on factors like the complexity of the issue and whether you have enough agents to handle it.

Average resolution time is the time it takes a customer service representative to solve a support ticket once it gets created. No matter the end quality of your product, your business won’t look at many chances of success if customers aren’t satisfied enough. We wouldn’t recommend ever neglecting this business operation aspect, because from our own experience we can judge the importance of quality support. Classifying requests by themes and categories, a company gets an ability to both save the servicing time and provide the best options for solving particular issues. The whole organization should be involved in this classification, not only the support team. Watch the dynamics and number of requests processed by separate support team experts.

The questions you ask on these surveys will depend largely on your support processes. In support, you need to look at a web of KPIs that, when taken together, provide a more complete picture. As you were growing your https://chat.openai.com/ business, you would have come up with strategies that strengthen the relationship between what your… Say, if your website had 200,000 visitors and 10,000 conversions last month, your conversion rate is 10%.