Customer Service KPIs & Metrics See 18 Top Examples

This could come in the form of new training and employee performance review, a need to review systems used like agent desk platforms or the need to adopt new technologies. For example, companies generally have been de-prioritizing customer support email as a support channel in favor of social messaging and live chat. In a recent study, we found that customers prefer email support over all other digital channels. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. By tracking ticket volume per channel, you prioritize and shift resources to where your customers are.

On the other hand, high agent utilization rates may tell that support staff is overworked, leading to burnout and decreased quality of work. 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. Before taking any decision, track these support metrics over several months.

For example, consider a business metric like customer churn rate, which measures how many customers you have lost over a period of time. If you identify customer service as one of the reasons for high churn, you will need to make significant changes to your support setup. You may have to hire new managers with a diverse skill-set, invest in a full-fledged help desk system, and set better long-term goals. As its name suggests, this customer service KPI tracks the costs of resolving an issue by different communication channels. Calculations of this indicator can include a variety of factors such as employee wages, license fees for software, equipment and technology expenses, and agent’s training just to name a few.

But even though KPIs and metrics for customer service are different things, they do have a lot in common. Also, repeat purchasers are more likely to spend more or purchase an upgrade. CSAT measures a customer’s happiness with a company’s products or services. To determine satisfaction levels, organizations will usually send surveys immediately after a customer interacts with an agent. Similarly, high ticket volumes around a specific topic are worth keeping tabs on and investigating.

Customer support software ProProfs Help Desk is an award-winning ticketing system designed to help support teams provide fast, efficient, and quality customer service for free. On the backend, this help desk solution is equipped with the right tools to help team managers keep track of their teams’ performance to ensure that they consistently deliver excellent customer service. A quick overview of the reports page enables you to understand how your helpdesk and support teams are performing. Every metric like agent response time, resolution SLA, or ticket created can be analyzed based on ticket variables like status, agent group, type, and more.

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 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. It is usually measured by dividing the number of customers doing repeated business/purchases by the total number of customers.

Best practices for achieving customer service KPIs

KPIs are the measuring units you’ll use to check off the “M” in your SMART goal. This metric can give you an idea of ​​how quickly your team is responding to incoming calls—and improve overall efficiency as a result. The average number of calls depends on what service or product you kpi for support team are selling. There is no right or wrong answer to how long you want your call to last. If it’s too high, it might indicate that a certain element of your product needs more resources (think knowledge bases or content resources) or you might need to fine-tune your product more.

• Salesforce Service Cloud is a leading customer support software that helps you provide outstanding customer service from anywhere you are.
• Running the formula, you’d find out that your retention rate was 88%, and that you lost 12% of customers during the process, even though you ended up net higher because of the new campaign.
• It’s not uncommon for those working in the customer service industry to see the following examples of KPIs.
• Before taking any decision, track these support metrics over several months.

Salesforce Service Cloud is a leading customer support software that helps you provide outstanding customer service from anywhere you are. With Service Cloud, agents get a 360-degree view of the customer, which enables them to personalize their interactions. In business, a key performance indicator is a measurable value that determines how effectively a company is achieving its key objectives. KPIs are used at different levels to gauge the success of an organization in hitting its targets.

How Can You Improve Your Customer Service KPI Metrics?

Utilizing these approaches, companies can confirm that their assistance teams are achieving the highest level of proficiency and meeting customer demands. Applying these tactics will cause superior KPI results and more content customers. Depending on what level you’re working from—team manager, department head, director, VP, or company leader—you may be in a position to set both short-term and long-term KPIs. When planning at the executive level, you can set KPIs by the month, quarter, or year.

There’s no way to improve this metric, but to improve your customer service overall, pay attention to the channels your customers prefer and then optimize those channels. This metric shows you how effective each message or interaction from your customer service team. It’s like figuring out your team’s superpowers and where you can be even more effective. If some metrics don’t show good results, having the complete picture helps to come up with a plan and make the whole team shine.

Here’s another example of potential OKRs and KPIs for a customer experience team. KPIs often overlap with OKRs, but the difference is that OKRs don’t have to be quantifiable measures. For example, you could set an OKR to “Improve the workplace environment as measured by employee morale,” even though your OKR, employee morale, is intangible. If you wanted to set a KPI for the same objective, you’d have to find a way to quantify employee morale—say, number of HR complaints received or new hire turnover rate. Leading indicators are a bit like a weather forecast for your business—they give you a heads-up on future performance. They can predict changes and trends before they happen, allowing companies to adjust their strategies proactively.

How to accomplish big things with long-term goals

CSAT scores are crucial because a higher score typically reflects a higher customer retention rate and lower customer churn. Once you decide on your response time and resolution time goals, any unresolved tickets that last beyond these benchmarks could be considered backlogged. 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). The following customer service and support metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you objectively measure and understand the impact of your customer service and support teams. Whether you’re tracking the performance of human or AI-powered virtual agents, you need to look at the same key metrics.

There are other metrics to consider, of course, to increase our ranking. KPIs are a great way to set quantifiable goals that connect to your strategic objectives. But if KPIs don’t feel right for you, th ere are a variety of other goal-setting methodologies you can try.

For example, the total number of individual tickets opened over the phone, via email, live chat, or social media. In addition to resolution times, providing consistent resolutions is also an important metric. Think of your customer service operation like McDonald’s where customers get consistent service across the board. No matter what agent they speak with — whether via chat, email or phone – they are providing consistent answers to customers reporting the same issue. First, you need to decide what you want to achieve with your IT support team, and then choose the right metrics to measure success. In doing so, make sure to mix productivity, quality, performance, and financial KPIs to have a complete overview.

KPIs for support teams

While objective, measurable numbers are great for evaluating aspects of performance, they should not be relied on as the sole motivator. Constructive feedback is extremely important in our team and we encourage teammates to practice it with each other daily. CES is an important metric that businesses track to ensure they deliver a seamless experience to customers. Insights have to be derived from the data, from which plans are formed to augment any identified pain point. It’s best that you check if the software you’re planning to purchase tracks all the KPIs that are relevant to your business, so you wouldn’t have to worry about setting and monitoring them.

In your InvGate Service Desk report, select the metrics “Requests” and “Spent Time” and add “Agent” to a column. Then, divide the time spent by the total number of requests, and you’ll obtain the AHT. For example, if an IT support team received 100 requests and resolved 80 of them during the initial contact, the FCR would be 80%. To calculate FCR, divide the number of support requests resolved during the initial contact by the total number of support requests received, and multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Low agent utilization rates may indicate that the support team needs to be more efficient.

Project management KPI examples

This kind of focus can really make a difference in how a team performs. ITIL service desk metrics are essential because they provide a way to measure and track the performance of support teams and the quality of their services. IT support teams are the first point of contact for all requests, issues, and problems.

As a last resort, you can revisit your SLA strategy and ensure the deadlines are achievable. Having a large volume of tickets may look good on the surface, but underneath it may be indicative of a problem. You may be having issues with your products or services; hence, many customers are complaining and reaching out to you. Useful as KPIs are, organizations are not advised to measure anything and everything that moves.

Encourage your team to juggle a few tickets at once so newer customers feel that their inquiries have been heard or seen. As always, make sure your team is well-staffed to handle all of your tickets. This metric communicates how fast your team is reaching, responding to, and resolving your tickets as well as how quickly tickets are coming in from customers. When monitoring your SLA, refer back to the initial agreements you set with the customer. Your SLAs should contain the information that helps you understand whether you’ve performed or not, so it should be your main point of reference. Also, remember to set realistic time goals for the agents and monitor their progress.

Employee Turnover Rate is the percentage of employees who leave a company within a certain amount of time. If you run a large support team, make sure you have a close pulse on your ETR so you can address issues head-on. The cost of replacing employees (recruiting, training and onboarding) is huge and any time you have a new agent, there is potential for inconsistency and other metrics to slide. Minimizing disruption in a person’s life and requiring minimal effort on their part are the cornerstones of good customer service. CES measures how much effort your customer had to put in to resolving a particular issue or answering a specific question. CES depends on a myriad of factors including time spent, total back-and-forth interactions, and the number of times a person has to reach out.

Some examples of customer service metrics include customer satisfaction (CSAT), first response time (FRT), net promoter score (NPS), and customer churn rate (CCR). There are many tools and strategies for collecting customer feedback and measuring customer service performance. Some companies choose to measure customer satisfaction with surveys, while others track customer retention rates with their sales and business intelligence tools.

The questionnaire should ask the customer how much effort they had to exert in order to get their question answered. The Ascent Group shows that 60% of companies that measure FCR for 1+ year report a 1 to 30% improvement in their performance. Therefore, any potential future issue anticipated by the agent will be addressed comprehensively and proactively.

Customer 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 challenge with this is that unless you have another KPI in place—such as customer satisfaction scores—it can be hard to bring this down to a number. It gives you a simple number that doesn’t require a complicated formula to generate. And you can look at that number and immediately tell if your customer support is where it needs to be.

This includes the time spent talking to the customer, the time spent on hold, and the time spent on any after-call work, such as writing up a report or following up with the customer. More than 80% of customers use the company’s FAQs and self-service portals, which makes it the most popular customer service channel. Creating a knowledge base and updating it with fresh articles, information, and screenshots should also be a part of the support team’s routine. For one thing, sales and customer success teams should work together in close collaboration to achieve the best results.

It would make sense to compare your results over time to see if you generate positive or negative growth. That way, you will have a deeper understanding of your customers’ fluctuations and, in that case, you can easily brainstorm ideas to increase the net retention rate. Net retention rate, sometimes called net dollar retention (NDR) or net revenue rate, measures the percentage of recurring revenue retained from your existing customers over a month, quarter, or year. Klipfolio reports that a good NRR is anywhere between 90% and 125%, depending on your brand’s niche, product, and total addressable market (TAM).

Qualitative indicators are more about the quality of something and are often subjective. They’re not always represented by numbers, and sometimes they’re captured through observations, surveys, and feedback. You know you’re going to get great service and your meal is going to taste the same as every time before. Like with their burgers, people also expect consistency when they reach out to a company – no matter the channel, the agent on the other end or time of day. Once you identify your top performers, you can not only reward their hard work but tap into their successful strategies to help improve the rest of the team.

We’ve created a whole bunch of KPIs as part of our KPI examples mini-series. This post is a small supplement to that series, which provides 12 of the most common customer service KPIs, we also include a brief description of why you may want to use each. To calculate your customer request escalation rate, simply divide the total number of inquiries that were escalated by the total number of inquiries that were received. And it usually won’t help you understand the nature of their query without asking for a follow-up and additional information. That’s why it’s important to send your first reply while customers are still on your website. Customer analytics helps businesses deeply understand their audience to make smarter business decisions and improve CX.

You need to determine the critical points in the customer journey where interactions with customer service are most likely to occur. Interactions per ticket are the average number of actions necessary to close a ticket. This involves the number of times agents joined a conversation, chat transfers, or file uploads. For example, let’s say it took your team a total of 8 hours to resolve 24 customer inquiries. This metric shows you how many messages and customer inquiries each member of your customer service team is handling. To measure your churn you usually need additional tools, such as Google Analytics.