Solution Guru@ Simplify360 - 7 mins read
The success of a business is driven by much more than just the product and the pricing. Consumer research suggests that investing in providing a holistic customer experience reaps more rewards. Customers are more likely to choose to do business with a company based on their customer service. Delivering the best quality and efficient support to your customers is essential, keeping them satisfied and building customer loyalty to build a positive reputation and ensure future sales opportunities. Similar to other aspects of business, brands should rely on customer service KPIs & metrics to refine their strategy and process.
A good collection of metrics can help you understand your customer service processes’ efficiency and effectiveness and if they are meeting customers’ needs. They also provide
actionable insights into areas that can be improved, which will increase cost-effectiveness and customer impact.
The purpose of this article is to break down the KPI (key performance indicator) metrics in a way that would help you understand exactly what it’s measuring and how you can use it.
10 KPI’s and metrics for Customer Service, you should continuously measure:
1. Average Handling Time
This measures the average amount of time an agent takes to work or resolve a case. The shorter the amount of time spent resolving one case, the higher your support team’s efficiency. This is the most fundamental indicator of how your support team performs and if your customers’ needs are met.
The counting of average handling time doesn’t stop when an issue is transferred between support agents or teams, is waiting for information from a 3rd party, or is received outside of the company’s business hours. The count of time stops only when the customer’s needs are met and the issue is resolved. Having a quick response time is fine, but it is essential to maintain a low AHT (Average Handling Time).
2. First Response Time
First Response Time or FRT is the time it takes between a customer’s first message and the time it takes the agent to send their first response to that message. It indicates how long a customer has to wait before she receives support.
12% of Americans rate their number one frustration as “lack of speed”.
A low FRT is a top priority, it gives customers immediate relief knowing their issue has been addressed and buys additional time to understand and resolve the customer’s problem.
3. Ticket Volume
While it is good and important to have customer interactions and receive messages from customers, it is also important to track the volume of interactions. No matter how extraordinary your product or service is, you can be sure that you will receive a certain number of complaints from your customers. Calculating the average number of daily, weekly, and monthly tickets will help you in numerous ways.
A high ticket volume could indicate that something might be wrong, or it could be a positive response to a new initiative.
Knowing the volume of tickets you receive and monitoring any changes will help you assess your customer service agent’s workload. It could be an indicator that hires more people, changes your approach, or implements more tools.
4. The number of interactions per ticket
This helps you identify the number of interactions the agent and the customer have around a particular issue before reaching a resolution.
It measures a particular team or agent’s efficiency and effectiveness to resolve a single issue on the first response. It indicates how good the agents are at addressing and understanding a concern without needing multiple interactions. By defining an ideal number of interactions within which you would want to resolve your customers’ issues, you can reduce the number of interactions and focus on resolution of the issue.
Resolving issues without multiple interactions is a skill your agents must acquire. When solving a question, agents should understand the problem right away. If essential information is missing, they should know what is missing, make a list of questions to ask, and then suggest a solution.
5. Resolution Rate
This is another key customer service metric that needs to be monitored continuously. It represents the percentage of cases your staff resolves from the total tickets received.
While the ideal resolution rate would be 100%, there will always be issues your team may not be able to resolve. Look closely at the reasons behind every unresolved issue.
An issue can only be resolved if the customer takes a specific action. If they do not do so, check to see if it’s possible for your agents to do those actions from the backend, so their issue can be resolved.
6. Customer Satisfaction
CSAT is a key performance indicator to track how satisfied customers are with your company’s products/services. Measuring customer satisfaction after each interaction with an agent is essential, these can be measured over a period of time to analyse how a certain agent or team is performing.
To track customer satisfaction, your approach needs to use a combination of surveys and feedback ratings every time a customer makes a purchase, visits your website, or talks to an agent.
7. Backlog
Backlog is the customer service requests that have accumulated over a period of time, every company must aim to keep this number at a minimum. The more your backlog, the more frustrated customers you’ll have to deal with.
It’s important to track the number of unresolved tickets to monitor whether your customer service operation is working efficiently and if more effort needs to be taken to resolve these tickets.
8. Case by Topic
You should monitor the most common topic in customer issues, if you use tags to label and filter conversations, you can quickly notice any changes in volume that might indicate a problem in your product or a reaction to any new modifications in your product.
If a certain topic such as login issues is a frequently occurring question, businesses can invest in self-service options to reduce the workload and ticket volume.
9. Net promoter Score
NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a metric to measure how likely customers are to recommend your business to friends and family. It is a simple question that asks your customers about the likelihood of them referring your business to their friends.
The Net promoter Score metric will give you a strong estimate of how satisfied customers are with your product or service. There could be several reasons why your NPS is low, you should start investigating the product or service itself.
10. Customer Sentiment
Apart from customer satisfaction, their sentiment is just as important to monitor. Ideally, a customer’s sentiment improves upon resolution, but it is possible that their sentiment won’t change. This could be due to various reasons, but one way to make sure your agent did the best they could is by verifying the other metric, like how long it took for the agent to send the first response or how many interactions it took for a resolution.
Monitor customer’s sentiment before and after resolutions, if the overall sentiment is negative, you should see if there is a problem with the product or some other issue. Sending surveys and asking customers to leave feedback can help improve their sentiment towards your brand, as these efforts show that you value their input and experience. Another way to help improve a customers’ sentiments is by ensuring your agents are always using an empathetic tone while communicating with the customer.
Wrap up
Knowing where you currently stand and understanding the current performance is the best approach to improving your customer service. Measure and rely on the right data to understand and plan your customer service strategy.
Simplify360 is an
omni-channel digital customer service platform. Brands can map customers who are at stores, leaving reviews and engaging with their other channels such as email, WhatsApp, other social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and so on. We also allow for inbuilt AI to boost engagement with existing productivity measures to help analyse, identify and respond to end customers in the fastest possible time with best in class CSAT!
