6 customer service KPIs & metrics for 2023 & beyond
Customer Support KPI Metrics and How to Use Them
First Response Time, or FRT, measures how long it takes a company to provide an initial response to a ticket. It tells you the average amount of time between customer contacts and agent responses. At the end of the day your goal is to meet your customers where they’re at in order to support them and increase customer satisfaction. Working to track these metrics will help guide your team to success and help streamline processes for how you’re serving customers and agent needs. Using customer feedback analysis software like Idiomatic, you can get actionable insights from all forms of customer feedback and data, including data related to customer service tickets.
First response time is a measure of your support team’s efficiency because it indicates how long a customer has to wait before being helped. “A first response perceived as fast can set you onthe right track for a positive first impression.”You can track first response time for each customer support rep, as well as the average across the team. If the average is too high, tracking times for individual agents can help you see who might need additional help or training.
Make a case for additional training, staffing, and tools
Customers will rate on a scale from 1 to 10 how likely they are to recommend your business to a friend. It’s best to measure this regularly, so you can determine your company’s benchmark and look for any drops or spikes in the average rating. Calculating your average first response time is relatively simple — most helpdesks will report this number for you. If you don’t have a helpdesk, you can find first response times for tickets by comparing the time stamp when you first received the customer request with the timestamp of the first response. If you received the message at 8 AM on Monday and respond at 8 AM on Tuesday, your first response time is one day.
The portal allows customers to resolve issues and concerns on their own. You acted on the KPI, measuring its effectivity, and made adjustments to improve the process and hit your target. Useful as KPIs are, organizations are not advised to measure anything and everything that moves. In fact, managers have to be selective on which areas have to be measured to avoid unnecessary expenses and costly distractions. Analysis is required in both identifying and extracting insights from KPIs to truly make them work for critical departments like customer support and marketing.
Retention Rate
This dashboard example by Tableau presents several metrics at once, like the number of support requests received and how that compares year-over-year. If your team is making decisions about customer success strategy, try a dashboard like this to get a broad overview of your company’s progress. With just about every SaaS product, your customer service team will be able to track how often each user accesses it. Ideally, you want your overall product usage rate to progress over time until it reaches your ideal usage frequency. To calculate CRC, you’ll need to audit the expenses of all of your customer success efforts. This includes expenses spent on payroll for your customer success and service teams, engagement and adoption programs, professional services and training, and customer marketing.
When you’re focused on a clear set of goals you can also make advancement to make your agent’s work day better. Focusing on improving things for customers will in turn improve things for agents. Erika is Groove’s Customer Success Manager, committed to helping you find the right software solution for your business needs. She loves finding innovative ways for your support team to scale and grow, always putting the customer first. It may not always be realistic—and sometimes the results might be out of your control—but it’s an immediate way for you to check up on your customer support efforts.
Top 19 customer support metrics
A KPI gives you insight into how well your team or unit is performing in pursuit of clearly defined team goals and in line with management-defined objectives. You could maybe outsource some of the work, but you’re working with people you don’t get to talk to and communication can be lost. You know those surveys you’ll see that literally ask you, “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend X Company to your friends and family? KPIs tell you where your customers are being delighted by your organization and tell you where you need to put more effort into improving. This KPI allows you to seek out more ways to satisfy your customers since you can survey them to find out what is missing from their experience that could make it a better one.
So,
to accurately gauge what produces the best results, it’s crucial for businesses
to measure a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs) throughout the buying
process. From initial customer inquiries to overall employee engagement, you
need to keep an eye on the entire journey to reach a happy endpoint. Share your customer support KPIs with your team regularly, such as by displaying them on a TV dashboard or sharing them via Slack or in a daily email. If they find some data on the dashboard is no longer relevant, that’s an indicator that you need to revisit your KPIs and define new ones to align with changing goals and strategies.
Tracking conversation volume over a long period of time (years), can give you incredible insight into your customer support team trends. You’ll find your busiest periods and understand when you need to hire more staff. The quality of your support interactions affects almost all relevant KPIs and customer service metrics. By analyzing your interactions according to internal standards, you find gaps in your knowledge. Customer Dissatisfaction (DSAT) is a metric used to counter satisfaction rate.
It measures how many customers are dissatisfied with your support, or the service/product that your company provides. We’ve compiled a list of the top customer service metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) every customer service leader should know. Familiarize yourself with the acronyms and calculations to decipher which are most relevant to you and your goals. Compare ticket backlog to total ticket volume to see the percentage of submitted tickets still unresolved at the end of the week. If the ratio is high week over week, you may need to expand your support team. Your entire support team can view the same inbox and see a complete history of client interaction.
According to Hubspot, 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a customer service question; 60% of customers define “immediate” as 10 minutes or less. Calculate this metric by dividing the total customer time spent waiting for a reply by the number of customer messages needing a reply. While CSAT scores help you measure customer service externally, quality assurance is an important way to measure customer service internally. Improving your overall QA score may mean something different for each company, so ensure you focus your positive and negative feedback on aligning with the team’s quality criteria and goals.
- A key performance indicator that goes hand–in-hand with measuring First Response Time is First Contact Resolution, or FCR, which measures what proportion of first responses solve the customer’s problem.
- Working to track these metrics will help guide your team to success and help streamline processes for how you’re serving customers and agent needs.
- You might also want to measure the number of tickets closed per agent for a certain time period.
- Organizations should be measuring CSAT to find out what their customers think about them and to see how happy they are with the organization.
Read more about The Golden KPIs Every Customer Support Leader Should Keep an Eye On here.
