Customer Support KPIs: Which Metrics Should You Track?

A high customer contact rate is an indicator that your customer experience is confusing and unclear. It also means your agents will be swamped with tickets and may not have enough time to provide quality responses. Single-reply resolution rate calculates what percentage of your tickets are handled with the first reply. Your average reply time (or average response time) refers to how long it takes for you to respond to any customer support message, not just the first message of a ticket. Your average response time should be similar to the first response time.

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. Add all of these numbers up and you’ll arrive at the overall umbrella of the money you put towards customer support. You can then tally all of the customer interactions you had within a certain time frame. Divide the number of interactions from the total money invested and you’ll have an idea of what it costs every time you help out a customer.

Customer churn rate (CRR)

To do this, you’ll need customer service tools to help you keep track of your incoming cases. For example, a ticketing system can set up digital records of your cases that are easily categorized and stored. And, a help desk can provide the reporting tools you need to calculate first contact resolution rate without having to manually crunch the numbers. Monthly recurring revenue, or MRR, is a great metric to use to determine how much your customer base — or their spending — have grown since working with your business.

• “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it,” said Scottish scientist William Thomson.
• If you’re on a mission to measure how your customer service team performs (and stacks up against the rest of your industry), check out our benchmark report.
• The resolution rate should be viewed within the context of the number of reopened tickets because, on its own, it can paint an incomplete picture.
• AI analysis can uncover the main topics of every support ticket and present them alongside your other customer service metrics, like customer sentiment and resolution.

This can get tricky to calculate since there are nuances that can affect the average. Should a ticket be marked as resolved if it does not have an answer attached? Or what if an agent replies to an email but doesn’t get a response and has a pending ticket?

SaaS Customer Success Metrics

This customer service KPI is an indication of how well your agents can handle multiple tickets at once, as well as manage fluctuating ticket volumes. Its analytics capability provides with you an overview of your customer support, enabling you to see customers who are interacting with your company and monitor the service they’re receiving. It lets you see usage statistics, evaluate performance reports, and learn from customer satisfaction ratings. Its extensive reporting possibilities enable you to keep tabs on support agent performance.

We set numbers as a necessary bar to ensure quality, but acknowledge the importance of what can’t be measured, knowing that a more accurate, more human measurement of performance relies on both. These measurements can live in harmony – you just have to find the balance and make a call on what you value. There are many more, and what works best for you will depend on the product or service you offer and the customers you have. Customer service KPIs and metrics will help you and your team level up everything from your daily tasks to your annual goals. Determine those long-term goals are and work your way backward.

Additionally, be sure to include any new customers who did churn during the time period with your overall churn total. Since the churn for these customers occurred during the assessment period, you should include them when measuring for churn rate. The benefit of an NPS is that it provides both quantitative and qualitative data about your customers. Not only does it ask participants to rate their experience on a numeric scale, but it also asks them to provide an explanation for their score. That way, your business can analyze feedback based on the scores, then examine the customer experiences if you come across abnormal or outlying results.

You can pay attention to brand mentions with a social listening and brand monitoring software. Generative AI, intelligent workforce tools, and employee experience are at the forefront. In developing your own KPI model, we recommend getting feedback and guidance from your more tenured reps and engineers as they are the ones on the front line day in and day out. People are all unique, and our performance can vary from hour to hour, never mind from day to day. Measuring that is inherently messy and difficult, which is why crafting effective KPIs for people’s performance is so challenging.

It is also true that businesses have to, most importantly, drive the best value for customers to keep their net scores afloat. While they may differ from business to business, there are plenty of KPIs right now that overall assess customer satisfaction and maximize retention. In your modern-day company, chances are you’re already looking for effective KPIs to monitor customer success. Customer success is crucial because most businesses, especially in the software corner, run on a recurring revenue model. You may be wondering why it’s important to measure customer service key performance indicators and there are a few reasons you should.

Again, the ideal numbers vary from industry to industry, but you want to keep this rate as low as possible. If you have several options for customers to contact you – such as live chat, email, phone, or social networks – it’s essential to track how each channel performs. With platform-specific analyses, you can more quickly identify the source of support issues and work on resolution plans. By diving into channel-specific metrics, you see that each week, customers are much less satisfied with the quality of support they get via email than from phone or chat. Now you can start working with your team to figure out how to improve customer service via email.

Next, you need to understand the metrics and how to use them to maintain success or improve your customer support experience. Your customer service teams are the frontline, and how well they do their job reflects on your company as a whole. Poor customer service agents’ performance can cause you to lose customer trust and loyalty.

As a result, teams must track and analyze the right customer service metrics to ensure their teams are meeting these expectations. The definition of a “positive response” will depend on your questions and your scale. If the customer can respond on a scale of one to five, with five being the best experience, then you would probably count a four or a five as a positive response. If your CSAT is low, looking at individual sources might give you an idea of where to focus improvement efforts.

To place yourself in that category, it is crucial to enhance the way you communicate with your customers. Managing customer support quality requires persistent, conscientious effort. 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. Conversations handled by a rep are simply the number of conversations or interactions each support agent handles within a specified time frame, usually a day.

Questions about our new AI chatbot, Fin? Here’s everything you need to know

The application also visualizes data in a manner that’s easy to understand. The agent can access all customer information from the console to get the context he/she needs for the interaction. On the side of customers, they can get access to a mobile-friendly knowledge base to get their questions answered.

Better FRT for your organization means you’re letting your customers know you’re there and ready to serve their needs as they come. Every day we publish thousands of dashboards, process billions of rows, store terabytes of data for companies just like yours. After you run the numbers, you will be left with a percentage of your users that you lost at the end of a given period. Imagine that you lost 50 customers in the last two weeks, but currently have 3,000 engaged customers. Even if the chatbot can’t resolve a question, it can still collect vital customer information before routing it to the most qualified agent for the job. If your number of mentions skyrockets, that could mean one of your products is a viral hit.

Zendesk Support users can measure CSAT simply by enabling it on their account. Customers are sent a CSAT survey within 24 hours of their ticket being closed. They’re asked to rate their support experience as “Good” or “Bad,” and are given the option to provide written feedback for the customer support team. And research even shows that satisfied customers lead to improved customer retention and reduced customer churn. First response time (FRT) is how long it takes a customer service representative to respond to a support ticket once a customer submits it.

However, very large ecommerce brands may choose to provide phone call support as well. Below, we describe 25 of the most essential customer service metrics, organized into six categories. Some metrics have to do with your team’s performance — like how quickly and well you respond to tickets. Other metrics look deeper at your team’s impact on larger company goals, like customer retention and revenue generation. In other words, metrics and key performance indicators are the lingua franca of the customer service industry. They’re a set of standard measurements that allow you to compare your operation’s performance against others.

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

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