Top 10 Customer Support Metrics and KPIs

Learning how to measure each one will give you insight into what to prioritize for your current support goals. Finding ticket volume is simply a matter of adding up all tickets submitted during the time frame in question. Do that, and you’ll be able to take advantage of customer support KPIs to deliver truly exceptional customer service. Although fast response times are preferred, response quality should not be sacrificed for speed.

It’s vital to find out what could make customers more satisfied and what disappointed them so you can improve and encourage customer loyalty. In fact, research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%. A metric is the data that helps you and your team understand where you are, where you want to go, and how you’ll get there and align with your company’s goals. Your customer service KPIs should provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making, and help focus attention on what matters most. 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.

What are customer service KPIs?

Arming yourself with a customer service automation solution helps you unlock our final two metrics. The first, your automated recognition rate, measures how many customer tickets are correctly understood by your self-service chatbot. The second option is more problematic — it’s a sign that your product, website, or other resources are difficult for customers to understand. To prevent this from being the case, make sure your knowledge base is clear and fully developed. Have agents expertly trained on your business so they’re able to resolve tickets with as few touches as possible. In turn, they give leaders actionable insights to set up KPIs and improve performance.

This is the percentage of customer service cases that are resolved within the first interaction. If this number is high, that means your team is not only responding to customers but addressing their needs promptly as well. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is one of the most fundamental customer success metrics that you can measure for your business. It shows you the total revenue that you can expect a single customer to generate over the course of their relationship with your company. Customer support metrics like ticket backlog and ticket volume fluctuate constantly. With a real-time customer support dashboard, your team can see these changes as they happen.

Website key performance indicators

Agent touches per ticket measures the number of updates or responses a support rep needs to make to a ticket before it can be resolved. CCR is an important metric that measures how many customers a business loses over a given period of time. CSAT scores are a customer service metric that shows how pleased customers are with a company’s products or services.

Finally, fluctuating ticket volumes at certain times of the day or days of the year helps you identify busier and slower periods, so you can adjust support shifts to meet demand. At a very basic level, this is the question key performance indicators (KPIs) aim to answer. KPIs are measurements that track your company and departmental performance against specific goals and strategic objectives.

customer service KPIs every support team should track

It also shines the proverbial spotlight on their relevance in regard to customer satisfaction and some of the best customer support software that can help you analyze KPIs. Our AI agent Agatha, uses Natural Language Processing to understand the intent of your customers when they’re seeking support answers. She learns by taking your knowledge bases and past support tickets to learn about your customers and what they come to you for the most.

With consistent monitoring and consideration, your team can produce strong results on a regular basis, offering reliable service and solving issues without any hiccups. As a result, you can spend more time on other matters, like developing new, innovative ways to engage with customers. Support teams can show much more than ticket conversion to showcase their value to the entire organization — they can even highlight how much revenue they’ve helped generate. So, if a customer places an order within X days of contacting customer service, that counts as a converted ticket. Monitoring your backlog lets you assess your team’s workload and identify any bottlenecks that might be present.

How to keep customer support KPIs meaningful for your support team

While there are several ways to do this, most companies will typically measure and track KPIs through reporting tools and business analytics software. Tracking this metric provides a good gauge of agent workload so you can identify overworked agents that may need backup. For instance, you can redirect or reassign tickets of overloaded agents to others with more capacity. 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.

• Whether you’re in a B2B or B2C industry, customer success is a key determinant of how far your company will go.
• It displays relevant metrics like average response time, first call resolution, and NPS scores.
• FRT should be measured for each channel you provide customer support in.

This percentage can be tracked over time to determine if you’re improving your score. As discussed, many of the leading customer support applications account for KPIs while streamlining their users’ workflows. This saves you a lot of time in measuring your workforce’s performance and ensures that your company is tracking the most beneficial pieces of information.

#10 Customer Feedback Volume

We know how difficult it cna be to set goals whn you’re overwhelmed with support tickets. The Key Performance Indicators you measure demonstrate how well your organization is performing against its key business objectives. Without these metrics, you wouldn’t know where there’s room to improve and how you can go about it strategically.

For example, we can say our KPI for our website is to increase our Google ranking, say, every quarter. To achieve this goal, one metric we improve on a month over month is the number of visits to our site. There are other metrics to consider, of course, to increase our ranking. Metrics and KPIs give you the facts and figures to work with and continually improve on. As such, in the case of employee onboarding, a study by SilkRoad indicates that 70% of organizations regard employee retention as their top onboarding KPI. This means prioritizing employee retention for onboarding is the industry standard, and improving it, along with employee engagement, will likely earn your company dividends.

You’re all set!

Tracking your customer effort score over time can strongly indicate the success of any customer service department changes. The ultimate goal of your customer service team is to make your customers happy. You can analyze customer-centric metrics to get an idea of how well your customer service team is doing. By measuring average handle time, you can learn more about which customer queries can be handled over the phone and how efficient your team is in fully completing a customer’s request after the fact. You can analyze the data to see if any agent is struggling with follow-through or follow-ups and get them the support or mentorship they need to improve their efficiency for the customer’s benefit.

You don’t want to keep customers waiting, even in prolonged conversations. A customer service representative achieves first contact resolution (FCR) when they resolve a service ticket during the first interaction with that customer. There’s no transferring of customers to other support agents, and no need to follow up at a later time. According to the Zendesk Benchmark report, four hours is the average first response time across all industries for all support tickets. However, your customers’ expectations will vary by channel, age, and issue type. There are many different customer support metrics you can track, but you’ll want to choose your KPIs wisely.

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