25 Customer Service Metrics & KPIs + How to Track Them

First contact resolution rate is the percentage of customer tickets resolved within the first contact. To track first response time, you need to know how long it takes to respond to each customer service interaction (call, email, chat) and divide that by the total number of interactions. A key performance indicator (KPI) measures employee and company performance against a goal. A customer service KPI is used to evaluate how well individual employees meet job expectations, indicate how satisfied your customers are with your brand, and track your larger business goals.

The exercise measures his team’s performance and consistency, ensuring that every member offers customers top quality and presents an authentic and truly helpful experience. Identify the key metrics that relate most to your company and team goals so you can track and improve the right activities. From there, you can see all the progress you’ve made and where you can improve. No matter the source, totaling the number of tickets completed by channel tells you where your agents spend their time and customers’ preferred way of contacting you. If you’ve successfully lowered your ART, you’re potentially increasing the total number of solved tickets, too. There will, of course, be a cap based on the number of agents, but the overall amount should ideally be increasing if ART is improving.

Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT)

The ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a passionate group of customer service experts dedicated to empowering your live chat experiences with top-notch content. We stay ahead of the curve on trends, tackle technical hurdles, and provide practical tips to boost your business. With our commitment to quality and integrity, you can be confident you’re getting the most reliable resources to enhance your customer support initiatives. Responding fast is one important step, but equally important is to actually  resolve the issue. By measuring average handle time (AHT) you can determine how long it takes you to do that.

This can be tracked in real-time or over a set timeframe using contact center management software. Good customer service teams excel at responding to customers as quickly as possible. Even if you can’t resolve an issue, send a quick note that you received their message to alleviate the anxiety of an unknown wait time. Efficient support teams work to impact resolution time, rather than reply time.

CSAT (customer satisfaction score) reveals whether a customer experience was good or bad. With live chat and auto-replies producing an immediate response, customer anticipate a follow up as soon as they send a support ticket. So, look at your KPIs regularly, including the weeks and months after you implement a new policy or hold training sessions.

Average time to resolution (ATR) is a customer service metric that measures the average amount of time it takes to resolve a customer inquiry. Sometime after implementing MRR as a customer service KPI, our live chat agents told me they began to think differently and concentrate on more relevant stuff rather than just answering routine chats. As a result, they were getting more bonuses, which is a win-win situation for everyone — for the business, for CSMs, and our customers.

KPI Software

Businesses need a strategic approach when tracking and achieving the customer service KPIs listed above. And, while every operation is different, organizations should follow a few universal principles to best achieve their goals. To calculate the standard customer churn rate, divide the number of customers lost during a period by the total number of customers at the start. The support team should be available online 24/7, via every dedicated communication channel. And if they are unavailable for some time for some reason, customers should be timely notified about the issue.

You can separate out tickets that did not have a customer support representative work on them, and that were resolved only with automation. You can also track the amount of views your self-service resources get to understand how many tickets they deflect entirely. Your average number of unresolved tickets is a very important metric to track because unresolved tickets are a leading indicator of unhappy customers. Set a company-wide goal for the maximum number of unresolved tickets per day, week, and month. Conversation abandonment rate is a metric to understand how frequently your customers abruptly end interactions with customer support before reaching a clear resolution. Delivering exceptional customer support is paramount for startups aiming to establish a strong customer base and grow their business.

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. Conversion is one of the most important aspects of any business, both online and offline. This helps you to find out how likely a customer is to take a specific ‘favorable’ action after interacting with your customer service agents.

There are several ways to optimize this customer service KPI, starting with training your agents in their communication skills. Providing them scripts and customer surveys, and putting a clear process in place are also best practices you should consider if you want to increase your first call resolution rate. Implementing a knowledge base gathering all the customers’ issues and how they got addressed is also a good thing to do in the long run. Even if that requires a little bit of time to write, you will be rewarded with plenty of time saved in the future.

Determining your NRR (aka DSAT or BADSAT) will help you measure the number of negative customer reviews an agent or team receives vs the positive reviews as a percentage. One of the most important aspects of measuring progress is monitoring and analyzing results. Here, we’ll explain the most important and common KPI metrics for customer service as well as how and when to use them. This makes it absolutely essential to ensure that the customer support department and all of the processes that go along with it are operating smoothly and efficiently.

If we’re using general benchmarks, we can be very satisfied with this number. If we’re comparing against the last month, though, the report shows that we’re 13% lower. Again, it depends on the expectations you set for your company and your team. Dive into the spikes to see what’s causing them and to work on preventing it in the future.

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. To calculate Ticket Volume, you need to track the number of tickets the support team receives over a specific period. The real value comes from acting on the trends, insights and opportunities highlighted by the data.

With Gorgias Automate, you can improve your live chat widget with a self-service flows that let your customers track and manage their orders without any agent interaction. Customers can type in their question or comments and the chatbot will pull up your content that matches those keywords. If you’re Chat GPT still solely relying on traditional methods of responding to customer queries, achieving fast response times is going to be nearly impossible. Fortunately, there’s a wide variety of customer service software on the market today that can take a lot of the heavy lifting out of your workflows.

Below is a list of important KPIs for customer service evaluation and acquiring actionable feedback. Let us discuss the key metrics on how to measure customer service success with higher accuracy. Always try to ensure that your customer KPIs align with the broader business goals. You’ll have to understand how customer service contributes to overall business success and helps in selecting relevant and impactful metrics. In a nutshell, customers today are expecting more and more from the after-sales support, which stresses the need to implement customer-centric metrics to evaluate the service provided. Once you have set the indicators you want to track, measure them over time and compare them with the objectives you had set in the beginning, trying to reach them in the expected timeframe.

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. 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. Tracking key KPIs can help a business understand its own and their customer health score. Customer service is a critical function for any business, regardless of size, industry or location.

Having all of your teams and tools working together within a single system is the first step in tracking your customer support KPIs. A recent trends report by Zendesk showed that fast resolution to a customer issue is the most important aspect of a good customer service experience. Also called first response time, FRT is the number of minutes or hours elapsed between the time a customer submits a case and the time your agent responds. It’s best measured in business hours, so no one is penalized for time off the clock. Using performance indicators will help you identify exactly what, how, and when to measure data as well as give your team direction. Without knowing your KPIs, you cannot understand the reasons a customer may be unhappy, where your agents are falling behind, or how to fix it.

Our Freshdesk reviews gave this award-winning help desk software high marks on the strength of its ease-of-use and robust features. 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. CSAT provides valuable feedback on the quality of IT support services and helps identify areas for improvement. You should track CSAT regularly, ideally after each interaction with customers. Help desk KPI metrics can vary depending on the specific goals of the team and the type of support delivered.

tips to successfully incorporate messaging into your customer service strategy

We provide you with dozens of related resources as a starting point to improve each KPI. See if ShipStation is right for your ecommerce business in the Magento Marketplace. Now that you have AfterShip set up, it will sync every three hours and pull shipping information from any new orders via a shopping cart, CSV file, or marketplace. You can also opt for AfterShip to send out automatic notifications via email or SMS at each milestone in the shipping process.

On the other hand, KPIs are broader, strategic measures linked to business goals and objectives. They focus on the organization’s overall success, not just the support team’s performance. Help desk metrics are quantifiable indicators that evaluate the performance and effectiveness of support teams. They can determine whether the teams are achieving their goals and providing satisfactory customer support services.

CS KPIs make it easy to monitor satisfaction, identify pain points in the customer journey and quantify the impact of process changes. Discover how other companies improved their most business-critical customer support KPIs. You should track the retention rate of your customers who reached out with an issue. Did you manage their issue well enough for it to not rupture your relationship with the customer? This will require integrating into your CRM platform, and making sure all systems (agent desk, eCommerce, etc.) are feeding data in and out of your CRM for a 360-degree customer view.

KPIs for customer service enable the comparison of data to help you make the optimal selection and in some cases even a change of direction. These values form the core part of a support rep or engineer’s performance profile, and KPIs form the other part. When it comes to assessing a teammate’s performance, they must be succeeding in both areas.

Moreover, they are more likely to rant about your company on social media, harm your image, avoid recommending you to friends and family, and of course, complain about the customer service. We hope these KPIs help in monitoring the success of your customer support operation. The more actionable metrics customer support leadership can bring to the table, the more likely they are to prove their worth and value to the company. By keeping your KPIs focused on your customers, it can only help to create an environment that adds value to the bottom line. 4) Average Response Time (ART) – This KPI is represented by a single question… How long does it take to respond to customers? Evaluating this indicator closely is a good indicator of customer happiness because nobody likes to wait for a reply.

To calculate the CES score, you add the total number of customers who rated their experience as “very easy” or “somewhat easy” and divide it by the total number of respondents. The resulting score can range from 0 to 100, with a higher score indicating a lower level of customer effort required. In that case, it may indicate that the team needs more resources to handle the workload or that there are underlying issues causing a higher-than-average number of incidents or requests. Seventy-seven percent of executives have already implemented conversational bots for after-sales and customer service. With more companies turning to AI, it’s important to understand the relevant KPIs for virtual agents. An article in the Los Angeles Times has referred to customer service agents as the “punching bag” on the front lines.

Teams should review KPI reports frequently and discuss emerging gaps, issues and potential improvements. Meetings focused on latest service metrics help engrain a data-driven culture. Understanding customer satisfaction levels is critical for any support operation. Customer sentiment has a direct impact on retention, referrals and revenue.

Review First Call Resolution recordings and identify how successful are agents in solving a customers’ issue the first time around. Tracking the number of hours or minutes an agent spends using their helpdesk will help you understand where your agents spend most of their time. You’ll be able to see how many tickets they resolve in a specific amount of time and pinpoint holes in productivity.

This is great to use after-hours and to make sure chat requests don’t get lost overnight. Even when a customer chooses to type out a question, automation can be used to provide quick, customized service through the chat widget. But there’s a third chat option that you should consider in addition to live chat and chatbot software. Chatbots leverage AI and machine learning to deliver personalized responses, as opposed to only “canned” responses, and can better serve your customers. When comparing chatbots with live chat solutions, it’s important to recognize that each category offers its own unique advantages.

• Customer service KPIs are important statistics businesses should use to evaluate their CX efforts, the performance of their support team, and more.
• KPIs are measurements that track your company and departmental performance against specific goals and strategic objectives.
• Whether you lead a team of two support agents or 20, understanding how quickly they’re able to respond to customers is essential.
• The result is that your customer isn’t able to access their order status, which causes frustration and has them calling your customer support team.
• 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.

With Service Cloud, agents get a 360-degree view of the customer, which enables them to personalize their interactions. Moreover, Zendesk provides an impressive suite of agent productivity tools. The guided mode helps you queue tickets more strategically for your agents to speed up response time.

But if you’re posting on social media and not providing support to customers who reach out via DM, you’re missing a big opportunity. For ecommerce brands that deliver physical products, conversational support is a no-brainer. Imagine your customers get shipping updates https://chat.openai.com/ via SMS and can just respond to the message if the package isn’t delivered correctly to get immediate help. No need to open up a laptop and log into a support portal or compose an email. Membership renewals, like payments, ought to be set up as automatic occurrences.

Response and resolution timesTo gain an understanding of how efficient your reps are, look at average response times. Resolution time is also important – that is, how long does the average customer wait between the time they first open a ticket and the time it’s resolved? While a shorter resolution time isn’t always better, you need to understand average response times as well as ticket resolution times so that you can set a benchmark for your KPI. Look closely at causes and processes, which can cause many customers to suffer from unnecessary delays.

For example, Ticket Resolution Rate and Average Response Time (metrics) show whether the team is meeting its goal of increasing customer satisfaction for the quarter (KPI). You can minimize AHT by decreasing time your customers are waiting and optimizing each back-and-forth interaction. Using hybrid support models, like human+AI vs. purely human agents can significantly help reduce wasted seconds. To determine CES, you’ll ask your customers, On a scale from “Very Easy” to “Very Difficult”, how was your experience? If you find that you have a low CES score, identify how to remove obstacles and friction.

Whether you’re new to customer service or a seasoned veteran, it’s always worth getting a fresh perspective on your own stats, data, and metrics. Customer support kpis help monitor and assess various aspects of customer interactions, issue resolution processes, and overall satisfaction levels. Dig deeper into weeks with high resolution times and identify roadblocks such as a lack of agent training or not enough staff to cover demand. The intention with these KPIs is to help identify ways to improve customer service performance over the long term.

It is usually measured by dividing the number of customers doing repeated business/purchases by the total number of customers. It is an important metric as it is well known that retaining a customer is less expensive than acquiring a new one. By maximizing this customer service KPI, you can reduce costs, or assign them to other channels that will grow your business. KPIs are measurable targets any team, including customer service teams, can use to track progress in certain categories. KPIs are designed to tell you how your team is performing in relation to goals and assess the overall health of your customer support program.

This way, you will be able to spot inefficiencies and stop them on the spot. This customer service KPI tracks the perceived effort customers felt they had to make, including how much time it takes to resolve issues and the total number of interactions involved. Salesforce Service Cloud is a leading customer support software that helps you provide outstanding customer service from anywhere you are.

We’ll start by explaining what customer service KPIs are, why they are useful and some examples. We’ll then go into significant detail on the benefits of tracking CS KPIs across 4 main areas – agent performance, customer satisfaction, issue resolution and department efficiency. Under each of these sections, we will suggest relevant KPIs to track, analyze how to calculate and benchmark them, and discuss why they are important. We aim to be as thorough as possible in justifying the critical need for customer service KPI tracking.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. If you deliver services that are consistent and predictable, the lifetime value to the customer increases significantly. Customer service KPI metrics help businesses monitor and analyze customer relations by considering their overall journey. When a business knows how to analyze customer data, it can get better insights into customer preferences and behavior. You can create a balanced set of KPIs that cover various aspects of customer service, such as quality, efficiency, and customer sentiment. Modern businesses are very aware that providing a positive experience dramatically impacts business growth, and excellent customer support is equivalent to being featured in Barron’s magazine. We mentioned it earlier; the volume of calls or tickets will directly impact the average wait time of your customers calling.

Freshdesk immediately comes to mind with its granular approach to data and insights. 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.