Customer Support KPI Metrics and How to Use Them

Help improve both metrics by properly training your customer service agents. The more they know about your products, the easier they’ll be able to answer customer questions and resolve their issues. The more interactions the customer must have with your team, the less satisfied they will be. This article centers on the definition of KPIs, their difference with metrics, and the ideal performance indicators for customer support.

Better FCR for your organization means you’re letting your customers know that you are there and ready to aid them whenever they need it. Here’s a chart of what good first response time should look like across various channels. The information has been pulled from Zendesk’s 2020 CX Trends Report and their Multichannel Customer Care report from 2017. They’re the critical indicators of progression toward whatever intended goal you have set and give you a behind-the-scenes look at how your organization interacts with your customers. Today we want to discuss what KPIs your organization should be focused on, why they matter to your overall business performance, and how you can go about improving them. The NPS metric is useful for showing you the level of loyalty you enjoy from your customers.

Customer Service Key Performance Indicators And Metrics 2022

To calculate ticket volume by channel you take the total tickets and conversations and sum them up. You can calculate this within your helpdesk when utilizing Zendesk, Freshdesk, Talkdesk, etc. Studies have shown that the amount of effort a customer has to put into doing business with you is directly related to their loyalty to your product or service. NPS is important to your organization because it can aid in predicting business growth. Your org should aim for high NPS because it shows you have a healthy relationship with your customers and they want others to know about you.

• Benchmarking agents or reps creates healthy competition and, conversely, lets you identify those that may need additional nurturing.
• The metrics that matter have shifted, and the customer success organization is adjusting accordingly.
• But when KPIs come into action, the same intangible information converts into something quantifiable and far more substantial.
• Support conversations provide invaluable, direct insights into customer sentiment, which can have a significant impact on business outcomes like churn and retention.
• According to Zendesk, 66% of customers still typically resolve their issues with a company via telephone, making AHT a valuable metric for support organizations.

This measures the average time an agent spends on a single call or chat exchange with a customer. Unlike average resolution time, AHT doesn’t include the time a client spends waiting for an agent to pick up their ticket and make initial contact. Whether you lead a team of two support agents or 20, understanding how quickly they’re able to respond to customers is essential. Use these customer service metrics to identify lag times, rate of responses, or resolve rates to boost the customer experience. The first step is to track metrics and KPIs regarding the customer experience and your customer support teams.

KPIs for measuring customer service performance

Using AI, you can determine if any customer service actions contributed to this score. 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.

Measure the number of social media support tickets that you get every day, week, month, and quarter. It could mean that more of your customers are interacting with your social media profiles. However, it’s still important to pay attention to the benchmark metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Sudden changes could represent an issue with your product or shipping speeds.

While it’s great to know that your customers are succeeding with your brand, how can you prove that your customer success efforts are cost-effective? Customer retention cost, or CRC, outlines the total cost of your customer success program and compares it to your total number of customers. This shows you how much money you are spending on each customer to retain them. You can rate each of these areas with one category or subdivide them into several categories. Remember that customer service agents will optimize performance for whatever you are measuring, as long as reviews and ratings are delivered regularly in meaningful numbers. Different customer service teams attack their metrics and reporting in different ways.

CSAT is one of the most important measurements because satisfied customers return to your store, refer friends, leave reviews, and unlock reliable revenue for your brand. The average ticket handline time includes the total talk time and total hold time for that caller. You can calculate the average for larger periods of time to get better insights, such as per week or per month.

KPI #6: Net Promoter Score

The rep and their relationship with the customer play a major role in this rating because they’re probably the person the customer has interacted with most frequently. The old customer success playbook is no longer enough to keep customers happy and coming back. It’s one that’s focused less on making the maximum amount of calls or closing as many tickets as possible, and more on developing, maintaining, and strengthening relationships with customers.

Average response time is similar to FRT, except it focuses on the response time for all customer messages, not just the initial request. Divide the total time needed to resolve tickets by the total number of tickets. Use your CRM to see when a customer bought a product, then set a reminder to review the customer’s account when their product should be replaced.

#9 Average Response Time

Having a large volume of tickets may look good on the surface, but underneath it may be indicative of a problem. You may be having issues with your products or services; hence, many customers are complaining and reaching out to you. KPI is used to measure performance and success, while metrics are simply numbers within a KPI that help track performance and progress. KPIs are usually initiated by high-level decision-makers in the organization based on metrics extracted and organized by activity or process. Also, metrics apply only to past performance and not future action, which is best handled by forecasting or predictive analysis. You could try a chatbot, but those take months to put into place and require you to do the heavy lifting.

Read more about The Golden KPIs Every Customer Support Leader Should Keep an Eye On here.