A solid set of customer service metrics can help you measure customer service efficiency and provide high-quality support to customers, whether you're just getting started as a business or your business has been on the market for a long time. In this article, we'll discuss the value of metrics in customer service, the importance of maintaining a diverse metric set, and the top 15 customer service metrics used by most businesses.
What are customer service metrics?
Customer service is essential in delivering an exceptional customer experience (CX). It's important at every point of interaction with the customer and can affect revenue - 52% of American consumers say they have switched in the past 12 months as a result of negative interactions. Make use of appropriate metrics to track your current standing, your successes with clients, and your areas of growth.
Why are customer service metrics important?
Without monitoring the results of your sales and marketing efforts, you have no idea how effective they have been in improving your consumers' shopping and user experiences or where they might be enhanced. An organization's ability to measure customer satisfaction, and hence the likelihood of returning customers, nice feedback, and referrals, may be quantified through the use of customer experience metrics. We've summarized the most important aspects, and now you may include them in your plan.
What are the 4 metrics of customer service?
The first four metrics which we want to introduce are highly important to know; the list of them below:
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer satisfaction, or CSAT, is likely to be high if and only if buyers are pleased with every aspect of their experience with the product, service, and any subsequent interactions with customer care. This key performance indicator is used by businesses to gauge the level of satisfaction their consumers feel towards the company at any given time. Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) are often offered after a transaction has been completed or a chat with a support representative has ended.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Companies can assess customer loyalty and satisfaction with an experience metric called the Net Promoter Score (NPS) by inquiring into whether or not their clients would refer them to others. Your company can benefit much from NPS because of its potential utility in forecasting future business expansion. A high Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a sign of satisfied consumers who will spread the word about your company. Customers that advocate for your business are a good sign that you're doing something right, but if they're doing it actively, you need to pay attention.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
A company's Customer Effort Score (CES) reflects how simple it is for customers to interact with them. By keeping tabs on CES and identifying its major drivers, you and your team can make adjustments and maintain a focus on growth. It is possible to improve CES by decreasing the effort customers have to invest in dealing with your business. You would get a high effort score if clients had to contact you because they could not discover the information they needed on your website. Customer acquisition and retention may be boosted by streamlining interactions with them.
Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
The Customer Retention Rate (CRR) is a crucial KPI that provides insight into how well your business is doing at keeping existing consumers as paying customers. If a business can figure out how to keep its current customers happy, it won't have to put in as much time and energy finding new ones. If you want to know what makes clients stick with your business, one way to do so is to calculate their CRR.
What are the 5 key performance indicators in customer service?
Key performance indicators in customer service show critical points that need to be fixed; otherwise, your business is unlikely to be highly productive.
Average First Response Time (FRT)
The time it takes for a customer service representative to respond to a request for the first time is known as the "first response time." Over a given time period, the average first response time measures how long it takes an agent to respond to a ticket for the first time on average. Customers are satisfied when the average initial response time is kept short, especially on time-sensitive channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and chat.
Average Response Time
Average response time is the typical amount of time it takes for a customer service representative to reply to a communication from a customer. Monitoring the succeeding response times guarantees the consumer is not kept waiting for very long. This measure is computed on an individual agent's behalf rather than for each individual ticket. Therefore, the time difference between an agent's answer and a customer's response would be the amount of time needed to calculate the average response time. This would be done by dividing the time difference by the number of tickets that were allocated to the agent. The average response time can be improved by creating scripted replies and solution templates for agents to use. In this way, you can improve your customer experience.
Average Resolution Time
Average resolution time measures how long it takes an agent, on average, to close a support issue. If you want to know how effective your service desk personnel are and how complicated your support requests are, you need to keep an eye on this measure. Whether a problem is passed from one support agent to another, is waiting for information from a third party, or occurs outside of business hours, the clock continues to run until it is resolved. The ticket will remain open until the customer's requirements have been satisfied. Looking at how long it takes to handle tickets based on their importance will show if the most pressing ones get dealt with swiftly unless they are really complex.
Resolution Service Level Agreement
Customers are generally understanding extended resolution rate delays, but it's still good service to keep them informed of the estimated time until the problem is fixed. Service Level Agreement (SLA) guidelines can be established to set expectations for your customer service staff. Depending on the urgency or importance to the company, the SLAs can be defined with differing requirements for response or resolution.
Number of Interactions Per Ticket
There will be back-and-forth between the customer and the employee while they try to address the problem. Monitoring the exchange of responses between the service agent and the customer can shed light on the nature of the issue or the effectiveness of the agent's response time. Client satisfaction is at risk when the number of customer answers is significantly larger than the number of responses from an agent. This might be due to an unresponsive agent, a mismatch in your customer service plan, or a more fundamental fault with the product. It can also affect your customer experience.
Other customer service metrics
Customer Churn Rate
A related indicator to keep an eye on is the Customer Churn Rate, which is calculated by taking the reciprocal of the retention rate. You have 20% churn if you're keeping 80% of your customers. Customer Churn may be readily calculated by taking the number of customers churned over a certain time, dividing that number by the number of active customers at the start of that period, and then multiplying that figure by 100.
Time to Resolution (TTR)
Indicators that change over time might be difficult to distinguish between. While explaining their significance, we will try our best to highlight their individual characteristics and explain how they complement one another. The average length of time it takes from when a customer conversation is opened until it is closed as "resolved" is known as the "time to resolution" (TTR). The mean Time to Resolution rate, often known as TTR or MTTR, is the average amount of time it takes to resolve a problem. As a business, you should prioritize TTR since your customers' time is valuable. Providing timely responses and relevant information to customers who need it is just as important as providing them with correct answers.
The typical length of a discussion or support engagement is measured in terms of the time it takes to reach a satisfactory conclusion. The calculation of this average might get complex due to the existence of variations. In the absence of a response, should a ticket be closed? Also, what happens if a rep responds to an email but doesn't hear back, leaving an issue unresolved? Having well-defined key performance indicators is essential for accurate measurement and better customer experience.
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
Together with evaluating First Response Time, assessing the First Contact Resolution rate (FCR) is a critical success factor since it indicates the rate at which initial answers resolve the customer's issue. The FCR rate is a measure of usefulness. The first-contact resolution rate reveals how often agents are able to resolve difficulties and how quickly they can be of assistance to customers.
The First Contact Resolution rate for effective support teams is typically around 74%. However, this will differ according to the specifics of the inquiry, the method of submission, and the receiving organization. On a scale from 1 to 100, it's preferable to land somewhere in the middle or slightly above.
Average Handle Time (AHT)
We can't stress this enough: both your and your customer's time is valuable. Typically associated with phone line customer care, "Average Handle Time" (AHT) is a crucial performance experience metric that reflects the average length of contact for a support engagement. Average Handling Time is crucial for evaluating the efficacy of both individual agents and the customer service department as a whole. While AHT is most commonly used to assess the efficacy of a support center's phone assistance, it may also be useful for omnichannel support teams by allowing them to compare the responsiveness of their phone and chat support to that of their other channels.
Employee Satisfaction (ESAT)
Maintaining happy customers and meeting their demands requires a significant investment in the time and energy of your staff and customer service representatives. All too often, in our haste to satisfy our customers, we neglect to assist those who are directly responsible for their satisfaction: our own staff. Maintaining happy workers is essential if you want them to stick around. The Employee Satisfaction Index (ESI), which assesses how satisfied employees are with their jobs and their employer's treatment of them, has been making headlines recently. So, having a good employee and customer relationship.
Customer happiness is a direct result of happy employees. Happier employees who have access to resources that improve their efficiency would more eagerly and enthusiastically give excellent service to customers. When employees are satisfied, so are customers. On the other hand, if you don't take care of your staff and provide them with the resources they need to do their jobs successfully, your customer satisfaction ratings (CSAT and NPS) will go down, and your CES will go up. Employees' emotional commitment to their jobs can be evaluated through discussions with managers and surveys of business confidence.
Ticket Volume By Channel
The number of requests for help you receive will be affected by the variety of assistance methods you provide your customers. It's crucial that your teams monitor all open support tickets over time. You add together all of the tickets and chats for a certain channel to get the ticket volume for that channel. The number of tickets filed in each channel provides an overview of how frequently customers are making use of each method. Over a long period, you can see when your agents' workloads are typically highest and lowest, as well as when they are required to provide the most assistance throughout the year. When you have a sense of where customers and agents are spending the bulk of their time, you can better manage staffing needs and plot out methods to strengthen your teams, if necessary.
What's the most important metric to measure in customer service performance?
Your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is the most important metric to measure in customer performance service. To what extent are your present customers pleased with your product or service? Your customer satisfaction score measures this to calculate customer satisfaction; businesses typically have clients fill out a brief survey on which they are asked to assess their experience on a scale from one to ten.
If you want to conduct a survey with your customers, there isn't a simpler option than a customer satisfaction survey. The purpose is to obtain a precise measure of customer satisfaction. To achieve an accurate response, make sure the survey is well-organized, brief (so the consumer isn't turned off by the apparent length), and written in simple language. Such surveys are only useful in measuring the feeling of a large customer base.
Conclusion
The main goal of 15 customer service metrics is to give you data. But the next step is working with these numbers. You should see valuable improvements in your service. For this reason, you need to implement changes quickly. The best way to make your measures fast applicable is to collaborate with productive software that can automatically download data, automate email notifications, add and update records, and be flexible to changes. AppMaster is a no-code platform that can help you with this hard task. No need for coding because of the visual programming workflow builder. Let your customer service metrics work and develop your business.
