Customer Service KPI Examples The 12 KPI Metrics You Need to Track!

But that approach doesn’t just apply to your supply chain management, revenue or churn rates – most fundamentally, it also applies to people and our performance. Visualization can help make complex data more accessible for everyone, and good customer support tools will include these in their reporting features. An easy way to share KPIs in a digestible format is through dashboards. Limiting the number of KPIs on the board at any given time keeps everyone on track and increases the likelihood of success. The Rockefeller Framework for management suggests having one main priority for each quarter, along with 3-5 “rocks” or KPIs that support the main goal. Any more than that, and your focus is too divided to make any real progress, says Rockefeller.

Beyond that, it helps you plan out your workflow, meaning you can easily integrate the insights it generates into your operations. The application also visualizes data in a manner that’s easy to understand. As differentiated from AFRT, ART shows whether your customers’ issues, requests, or queries get followed up promptly. It tells you, on average, how responsive and quick you are in getting back to your customers. 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.

Some are based on very tangible metrics like resolution time, while others look at your customers’ feelings towards your company and how they perceive an interaction. 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. There are several ways to optimize this customer service KPI, starting with training your agents in their communication skills.

Average Resolution Time

In our example, we can see that January brought a higher churn rate, which could mean that clients have canceled their yearly contracts and it affected the company. KPI for customer service provides insights into the quality, efficiency, and overall impact of the support provided. They help businesses track specific metrics that directly relate to customer satisfaction, issue resolution, and the overall customer experience. Some of the most important customer service metrics include first contact resolution rate, net promoter score, and customer effort score. Additionally, businesses should also track customer satisfaction, customer churn, and the number of messages and interactions per ticket.

For instance, we at HelpCrunch think that monthly recurring revenue is one of the most important customer service KPIs. So, our customer service reps’ biggest bonuses are tied to the MRR growth. Grant Aldrich of Online Degree says, “By measuring CSAT scores, you can assess how customers feel after every interaction with an agent. 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.

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. This way, you will be able to spot inefficiencies and stop them on the spot. In this article, you will find a detailed rundown of the essential customer service KPIs, critical for agents, managers, and leaders in companies that deal with customers on a daily basis. Revenue churn measures changes in your store’s incoming revenue from existing customers.

Identify important business metrics

Your average response time tracks how long it takes for your customer service team to respond to a conversation after opening a ticket. This metric measures how quickly your customers are being helped as well as how quickly each ticket can be resolved. As 60% of customers feel long holds and wait times are the most frustrating part of customer service, it’s important to factor this metric into your service practices.

• Escalation usually happens when a customer service agent is not able to resolve an inquiry and needs to hand it off to someone with more knowledge or authority.
• From all-in-one to field-specific, we’ve collected 20 solutions for you to choose from.
• Did you manage their issue well enough for it to not rupture your relationship with the customer?
• Agents will also be empowered to deliver context-rich solutions that can improve customer satisfaction and business performance KPIs.

According to a study by Qualtrics XM Institute, promoters are 4.2 times more likely to buy again and 7.2 times more likely to try a new offering compared with detractors. While NPS may seem unforgiving compared to your CSAT score, focusing on both promoters and detractors can work out for your business quite well in the long run. Another way to calculate CSAT is to take the sum of all ratings (on a scale from 1-5 or 1-10) and divide it by the total number of responses. That’s no secret—the way you treat your clients can make or break your company. Organizations can collect this feedback through surveys and meetings to gauge employee morale and potentially gather suggestions for product or process improvements.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. However, key customer support metrics may paint a more complete picture of success for the long-term viability of a business. Using this metric helps a company measure the effectiveness of its team when it comes to the promptness of support staff and whether teams have enough resources to respond to requests on time. Delays in response time can negatively affect a customer’s interaction with a business, making it one of the most monitored customer service KPIs. In other words, you might look at CPI as an overall indicator of the health of your customer support team. If it costs you too much to resolve customer issues—or even engage with a customer at all—then it’s time to look at this KPI and ask yourself where you can save on costs. The CSAT metric is typically measured by asking customers to rate their level of satisfaction with the IT support they received, usually on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10.

The average duration of each customer interaction is also one of the best individual performance metrics for customer service agents. However, it’s a good idea to measure it and see if there is a correlation between your churn rate and customer satisfaction for particular customer segments. Asking for customer feedback will help you understand why the customers are leaving and will give you a bigger picture of your situation. It’s important to note that customer satisfaction is different from customer loyalty.

A general positive brand image and high satisfaction score will directly increase your customer retention. 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. FCR measures the percentage of support issues resolved by the customer service department upon first contact with a customer. For web chats or live calls, this means your agent resolved the issue before the customer ended the chat session or hung up the phone.

This way, every chat conversation will end with customer satisfaction surveys. For users, it takes just one click to choose one of the three options — poor, average, or great. Customer satisfaction will be measured from 0 to 100% based on these rates, and you will get a full overview of customer perception and clients’ thoughts about your service.

Top customer service KPIs

Your customer support team might already measure how quickly you respond to support tickets, which is a great start. The list of metrics we share below paint a fuller picture of the larger impact customer support has on business growth. And once you can demonstrate your impact on business growth, you can start making the case for better tools and more staff.

A high FCR rate indicates that your customer service team is doing a good job of resolving customer issues on the first try. A low first contact resolution rate might indicate that your team needs more training or that your processes need to be streamlined. This is one of the metrics in customer service that can show you whether your clients are happy with their shopping experience. A high churn rate might indicate that something is wrong with your product, pricing, or customer service. It can also be a sign that you’re not acquiring new customers fast enough to offset the ones who are leaving. Additionally, tickets related to specific categories of your products or services can give you insights into areas that need improvement.

If you received the message at 8 AM on Monday and respond at 8 AM on Tuesday, your first response time is one day. Serving as the lead content strategist, Snigdha helps the customer service teams to leverage the right technology along with AI to deliver exceptional and memorable customer experiences. You need to start by clearly defining your customer service goals and objectives. You can align KPIs with these goals to ensure they are relevant to your organization’s overall mission. Also, you need to avoid overwhelming your team with too many KPIs; focus on the ones that truly reflect customer satisfaction and business success.

Agent Touches Per Ticket

Customer satisfaction is focused on the quality of the customer service experience, while customer loyalty takes into account other factors such as product quality, price, and brand image. Customer service and support are multifaceted and multidisciplinary functions. These teams deal with countless customer issues, questions, and concerns regarding your products or services and their experience working with your business. Challenge your customer service and support teams to communicate clearly and reply with thoughtful questions. Today, customer service is no longer an auxiliary business function; it actively impacts your businesses bottom line and sets your brand apart from competitors.

The operative word is “key,” which means you’ll be concentrating on indicators that impact your customer service performance and which help you reach your goals. A key performance indicator in marketing refers to a measurable metric that marketing teams use to assess the effectiveness of their campaigns and specific goals. For example, a marketing team may track the conversion rate of a campaign to determine how effectively it turns prospects into customers. A customer service KPI dashboard is a place where managers can access data in real-time – whether it’s CSAT, resolution time or effort score. Data is presented in graphs or charts and is continuously updated, enabling leaders to understand exactly how their team is performing. Within a dashboard, you can examine how your team is performing over time.

The answer to this lies in finding out what you want for your team and what your team wants from you. This could be increasing ticket deflection, reducing resolution time, and upskilling. Nothing makes customers happier than finding the right solution in the very first customer support interaction. Freshdesk immediately comes to mind with its granular approach to data and insights.

Now let’s get to know some of the tools you can use to evaluate your KPIs and important metrics. NPS is designed to measure the likelihood of your customers to recommend your brand, product, or service to others. It can be a pop-up form on your website or part of a survey distributed during certain periods.

Accordingly, you can improve the channels with low performance and maintain the service standard at the high-performing channel. It is widely used to measure the loyalty of a company’s customer relationships. It measures your client’s experience and assumes the growth of your business. Customer service dynamics may change over time, and so should your KPIs. You need to review the effectiveness of your chosen metrics regularly and be prepared to adjust them to better align with evolving business objectives and customer expectations. This can be a great way to measure the performance of your customer service.

It may not always be realistic—and sometimes the results might be out of your control—but it’s an immediate way for you to check up on your customer support efforts. Rather than ask big, bird’s-eye questions, you’ll need a better handle on how your customer support is actually working out for your customers. 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. It is especially useful when tracked over time, as it can provide insights into the effectiveness of process changes or technology investments.

These KPIs help determine how well Customer Service Teams are performing. This metric is important because it gives you an idea of how complex customer inquiries are and how much back-and-forth is required to resolve them. The average time to resolution can vary depending on the type of inquiry, but in general, it should be as short as possible.

To decrease resolution time and first response rate, companies can simply hire more agents. However, hiring an army of new agents to work around-the-clock and man all of the traditional and emerging support channels is cost prohibitive for most companies. You must also consider costs for human agent desk platforms, overhead costs, paid time off, sick days and more. The service level calculates your capacity to complete the standards set in the service level agreement provided to your customers. It is an ensemble of services agreed upon as a standard that your company is committed to maintaining.

Support KPIs and Metrics gives your support team insight into their efforts and aids them in bringing their work to the next level, always knowing where they stand. One way to measure customer satisfaction is through a Net Promoter Survey. A help desk KPI is a metric you can use to evaluate how effective your customer support efforts are. 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.

When a business knows how to analyze customer data, it can get better insights into customer preferences and behavior. You can utilize technology and analytics tools to collect and analyze relevant data. In this case, automation can streamline the process of tracking KPIs and provide real-time insights for informed decision-making. For that reason, their interactions with customers while offering requested information or resolving arising issues will determine whether customers will stick around or look elsewhere.

Teams can then use the answers to these surveys to determine the state of their customer support. The CSAT, unlike the NPS (Net Promoter Score), should not indicate satisfaction with your company, as a whole, but with specific experience. In the case of highly relevant and strategic indicators or more related to your company’s growth model, they can be called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

That way, you will have a clear picture of how well your retaining efforts and strategies work, and if there is a reason to adjust. In our example, we can see that October has brought a higher number of lost customers while December had quite a positive increase. The goal is, of course, to maintain net retention of 100% or more but, in practice, results can differ.

Your first-contact resolution (FCR) rate measures the rate of tickets resolved by your team’s first response to a customer inquiry. This is an important metric as it indicates how clearly and efficiently your team communicates and how much information you ask your customers to share when they first reach out. As you read through this guide, expect to learn the customer service and support metrics you can use to measure — and improve — your customer experience. Satisfied users are more likely to become loyal customers who contribute significantly to a company’s profitability. By tracking the level of service, businesses can gauge customer satisfaction levels and loyalty, which are key drivers of long-term success. Alright, think of customer service metrics like your business’s secret spy gadgets.

Adopting AI technology to help you respond to tickets can lower your cost per resolution. Customer service is the backbone of every business, as its relationship with its customers directly affects its success. Don’t miss out on the latest tips, kpi for support team tools, and tactics at the forefront of customer support. Just like cooking food, it might not sound like an area in which speed is always the top priority. They’re frustrated because they can’t find an answer to something that’s gone wrong.

Customer service metrics are performance indicators used for tracking, measuring, and analyzing the efficiency of customer service teams and agents. By tracking these numbers, businesses can identify areas of improvement and take steps to optimize the customer experience. For example, a customer service team might use KPIs to track how fast they respond to support tickets. By setting a target response time and monitoring their actual performance, they might find that quick responses lead to happier customers. With this insight, they could focus on improving response times and, as a result, see better customer satisfaction scores.

This shows the percentage of issues actually resolved by your agents from the number of total tickets received. It gives you an idea of individual and team efficiency and productivity. You acted on the KPI, measuring its effectivity, and made adjustments to improve the process and hit your target. This is also a key performance indicator for determining overall customer loyalty to your brand, so the implications of good customer retention go beyond repeat purchases.

This framework helps in creating KPIs that are well-defined and aligned with organizational goals. Collaborate with your customers in a video call from the same platform. These examples of KPIs for Customer Service are all about helping you to understand how the team’s speed influences the performance overall. A Customer Service KPI is a measurable value used by Customer Service Teams to track and determine their progress on specific business objectives.

A service desk, often automated, is a program that manages the communication between a company and its customers. Most platforms give businesses a collaborative system with features that include a shared inbox, canned responses and actions, app integrations, and advanced metrics reporting. Your service reps are on the frontlines of customer interaction and satisfaction.

A service level agreement (SLA) helps teams prioritize incoming tickets based on their importance and any pressing time constraints. They’re typically made between a business and its customer to ensure agents deliver on expectations. HubSpot’s State of Service Report found this metric to be the second-highest metric for performance measurement in 2021.

In essence, don’t just react to the complaints and issues that clients are raising now. Therefore, organizations should ensure the average call wait time for support is within an acceptable range. As a result of this information, you can narrow down to issues that aren’t being resolved on the first contact and address the root cause. You can gather data proactively, for example, by engaging customers with pop-ups, or passively, for instance by going over chatbot conversation analytics. For example, let’s say you have 50 open customer inquiries and your team resolves an average of 20 inquiries per day.

It’s better to start with challenging, but small goals that ladder into a larger goal over time. Below are six simple steps to help you set the right KPIs for your customer service departments and arrive at the metrics you need to measure. Instead, you can club this metric with other metrics like resolution SLA or average handle time to understand the capacity of work an agent can handle without compromising on quality or speed. Here’s an analysis of the different types of customer service KPIs in detail and a list of the essential support metrics to track under each category. You need not assess all available KPIs and report on outcomes, only the right ones – those that have a critical bearing on your customer service performance and are actionable, true, and consistent.

You can create a balanced set of KPIs that cover various aspects of customer service, such as quality, efficiency, and customer sentiment. Calculate this customer service KPI by dividing the total time customers wait in call queues by the total number of customer calls answered. 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. We’ve identified 3 key areas where we think KPIs will have the biggest impact on the success of your customer service team.

On the surface, Net Promoter Score might not seem like it has much to do with customer support. After all, it’s an evaluation of the overall quality of your company and your brand. Someone might not have had a customer support experience with you before, yet they could answer in the affirmative that they would recommend your product to a friend. But while average resolution time is a good indicator of the overall health of your customer support, that makes it tricky as a KPI to optimize. But one way you can do it is by making sure you have the information handy to help customers better understand their problem by the time they’re getting in touch with you. SLA Compliance is worth tracking because it can directly impact customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the organization’s overall reputation.