15 Customer Service KPI Metrics That Propel CX Teams

While speed isn’t the most important metric in customer service, it’s still critical to providing a positive customer service experience (as you’ll also see in a few of the metrics below). Customer service leaders should track progress related to customers, employees and finances. In addition, key performance indicators should cover both short- and long-term targets, including support response times, customer satisfaction and others that help reach service objectives. Your customer support team might already measure how quickly you respond to support tickets, which is a great start. The list of metrics we share below paint a fuller picture of the larger impact customer support has on business growth. And once you can demonstrate your impact on business growth, you can start making the case for better tools and more staff.

For your service level, you can track as many KPIs for customer service as you wish – but what you should aim for is to honor the services you agreed upon and even exceed the targets. Monitor the customer churn over time and see what causes higher rates in order to improve the results in the future. For example, we can say our KPI for our website is to increase our Google ranking, say, every quarter.

Customer Service Key Performance Indicators and Metrics

This metric is especially for ecommerce brands with a subscription-based model. To keep an eye on your social media brand mentions, you’ll need to tap into a social listening tool, as mentioned above. You can certainly try to do this manually and track it all in a spreadsheet, but similar to tracking the volume of tickets, digital software will make this process easier and more efficient. Of course, “effort” is subjective and highly dependent on the individual customer and their expectations. By measuring CES, you and your team members can work towards reducing customer effort, which in turn will increase the lifetime customer value and the likelihood of word-of-mouth referrals. According to The Effortless Experience, 96% of high-effort customer experiences drive customer disloyalty.

There’s no confusion over who should reply, which prevents multiple or no replies and ensures customers remain happy. 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. For example, you may find that someone with a high resolution rate has subsequently reopened many of the closed tickets. There are many more, and what works best for you will depend on the product or service you offer and the customers you have.

Track Your Customer Service to Create the Best Customer Experience Possible

A high average handle time can be traced back to poor product knowledge, inefficiencies in internal processes, and can go up to more significant business decisions such as investing in the wrong support tools. Manually assigning tickets can take up a lot of time and effort, and asking agents to take up tickets can lead to cherry-picking. So you need to opt for an efficient alternative system such as automatic ticket assignment. To determine your revenue backlog, you’ll just need the sum of the values of your customers’ subscriptions. If you don’t exclusively sell subscription packages, you’ll need to use tools like Dataweave or Y42 to measure upcoming revenue. Revenue backlog helps you measure how much revenue your business will see in a coming period.

For example, for a business with a goal of improving responsiveness, a KPI around time to first response would be fitting. For one more focused on quality, a KPI around customer satisfaction would work well. Or, for a team aimed at providing an effortless experience, a customer effort score would be a great guiding KPI. Businesses work on improving this metric to increase customer satisfaction scores, boost team efficiency, and reduce support costs. The average handle time (AHT) is an important metric to track if you offer customer service via phone.

What are the most important KPIs for customer service teams?

The rate of customers that have made more than one purchase during any given period. Count the active users in any given time, dividing that number by the number of users logged during the previous 30 days to get a percentage of product stickiness. Calculate it by multiplying the total number of paying users by their average revenue. Your phone system will likely be able to keep track of the length of each call and average them this per agent or for the whole team. How often users are getting through to an agent immediately compared to the number of calls the agents are receiving at the moment.

Customer service key performance indicators (KPIs) are important metrics that help customer support teams track and optimize performance. Businesses can use these figures to fine-tune operations, improve agent productivity, and better understand their customer interactions. But, like the 15 key performance indicators examples below, they should also have a clear view of the customer base and longer term, preventative KPIs such as employee engagement and knowledge base articles. Whether you’re tracking the performance of human or AI-powered virtual agents, you need to look at the same key metrics.

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To get any real, lasting change, you need to explain to them how each metric affects your organization’s health, revenues, profitability, bonuses, etc. Tracking (and optimizing) average handle time helps you keep your support team proactive and reduces the time customers have to wait before support kpis their issues are fixed. Ticket resolution time is the length of time it takes a support agent to resolve a help ticket after it’s created by a customer. You can calculate your CSAT score as the number of satisfied customers (i.e., No. 4 & 5 replies) divided by the total number of replies.

This can empower teams to take strategic action to improve their overall support experience for customers. Your service reps are on the frontlines of customer interaction and satisfaction. You’ll want to recognize reps that solve the most tickets, have the most first-resolution tickets, and deliver high customer satisfaction results. The number of tickets by medium KPI refers to the number of tickets per different channels customers use to reach out to support teams. For example, the total number of individual tickets opened over the phone, via email, live chat, or social media.

One can customize the application’s ticketing system to suit business needs using the built-in field templates. The system also features notification alerts, service levels and escalations, and proactive notifications. Also included is a plug-and-play ITIL, which eliminates the need for consultations as it adheres to best practices. A self-service portal, meanwhile, enables users to raise tickets, check older tickets, and browse the knowledge base. Key performance indicators, or KPIs, allow organizations to quantify the various aspects of operations and establish metrics through which a unit’s performance is measured. These are relevant in any workflow and particularly useful for critical areas like sales, marketing, and customer support.

By NPS yardstick, 0 to 6 are detractors, 7 to 8 passives, and 9 to 10 promoters. Knowing who your top performers enable you to build a strong and responsive customer service unit. Benchmarking agents or reps creates healthy competition and, conversely, lets you identify those that may need additional nurturing. 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.

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Not all businesses can have large customer service teams, and many rely on service desks to manage their budgets, resources, and customer service all at once. Customer service KPIs and service desk KPIs are relatively similar, but it’s essential to understand their different applications. Typically after an experience with support staff, customers are encouraged to fill out a survey based on their experience. Customer Satisfaction Scores(CSAT) show how happy customers are with the service provided and how well customer service team members handle customer issues and complaints. Calculating how much it costs to resolve each ticket is critical to determining staffing and operating costs.

• As discussed before, customer service plays an important role in strengthening customer relationships, making this an important KPI for support teams as well.
• At Intercom we strive to have a world class support team who do whatever they can to help our customers and foster customer loyalty.
• Customer support KPIs help you assess overall team performance, hold agents accountable, keep everyone aligned, and improve your customer service.
• You can use an automated help desk system to assign agents new requests based on their ticket queue, speed, average resolution rate, and the customer’s value.