21 customer service KPIs every support team needs to track

Monitoring the performance of your support activities helps you take control and service your customers better, boosting your customer loyalty. Discover how other companies improved their most business-critical customer support KPIs. Meeting modern customer expectations is getting harder to do; people expect quick, convenient high-quality resolutions on their terms. Twenty-three percent have reported that customer service has grown slightly or significantly worse. For example, companies generally have been de-prioritizing customer support email as a support channel in favor of social messaging and live chat.

To keep KPIs at the top of teams’ minds, they should be communicated and updated regularly. In fact, over 50% of employees say that more company information and data sharing significantly impacted their productivity and performance. Limiting the number of KPIs on the board at any given time keeps everyone on track and increases the likelihood of success. The Rockefeller Framework for management suggests having one main priority for each quarter, along with 3-5 “rocks” or KPIs that support the main goal. Any more than that, and your focus is too divided to make any real progress, says Rockefeller. Below are six simple steps to help you set the right KPIs for your customer service departments and arrive at the metrics you need to measure.

So, you must opt for an efficient alternative system such as automatic ticket assignment. 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.

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. To calculate cost per resolution, take your total monthly operating expense (salaries, technology, training, licenses, overhead, office supplies, etc.) and divide it by the total number of tickets. If you have a high cost per ticket, or notice that it is increasing, you’ll need to look for ways to bring efficiency to your group. 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. This is a better resolution time measurement than average resolution time (ART).

The key to effectively measuring customer service performance is not to measure all industry-recognized metrics. You need to track a set of customer service KPIs that align with your business goals and team objectives. Today’s customers prefer getting quality, personalized, and seamless customer service, even if they must wait a bit. However, it’s important to ensure the resolution time is consistent and not unacceptably long. Here’s where the resolution SLA comes into play as an important KPI since it helps ensure all tickets are resolved within a set time.

Ticket reopens represents how many times a ticket or incident needs to be reopened by a support agent. This metric shines a light on the status of a company’s operations, as a high level of reopened tickets can indicate problems with the product or customer experience. As you’ll no doubt have gathered, there are some common themes when it comes to making improvements to the most common customer service KPIs. FCR is measured by dividing https://chat.openai.com/ the number of issues resolved on the first call by the total number of customer issues, then multiplying by 100 to get the percentage. This can be measured over specific time frames in order to see how things are improving. 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.

Tracking tickets per customer can help inform resource allocation through the lens of long-term vs. short-term needs. 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. Some even provide insights to let users focus on improving their operations, not the nitty-gritty. And if further training is needed, ProProfs Help Desk has a library of online training materials that they can access anywhere and anytime.

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. Compare your MRR over a course of a longer period of time in order to identify how sustainable is your current business model and how fast are you growing. Monitor this KPI closely for your different support channels to keep it from going up. If you are able to solve them quickly and in a satisfying manner, it is a sign of good service.

While first contact resolution results in a solution being provided in the initial outreach, average resolution time measures the amount of time it takes to completely close a case. If you are in a service industry where issues escalate or move to other departments, measuring ART takes the true view of your performance out of your hands. You don’t want your customers to have to reach out to you multiple times to resolve a single issue. That’s why measuring first contact resolution, or whether or not you resolved an issue in a single chat session, phone call or email response, is a good indicator of how your team is performing. If your customer needs to reach back out or be escalated to another source for support, it does not count as first contact resolution.

In a recent study, we found that customers prefer email support over all other digital channels. By tracking ticket volume per channel, you prioritize and shift resources to where your customers are. 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. For this to work, however, corresponding analyses and action plans have to be enacted, especially if your organization is trying to curb the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. One can customize the application’s ticketing system to suit business needs using the built-in field templates.

Click here If you’re in search of a comprehensive and adaptable customer experience management software tailored for your business needs. Plus, to really make KPIs count, the data must be used to conduct effective customer service performance reviews and drive action. This KPI is crucial for optimizing workforce management and ensuring agents are adequately funded and utilized. Higher occupancy rates indicate a well-balanced workflow, contributing to operational efficiency and agent satisfaction. This metric is tied to a business’s revenue goals since it helps get insights about revenue potential and planning for the longevity of a business.

Businesses can use these figures to fine-tune operations, improve agent productivity, and better understand their customer interactions. The most straightforward KPI for customer service teams is tallying the total number of customers submitting support tickets. In addition to tracking the top-line figure, you’ll want to analyze to identify how volume fluctuates based on times of day, day of the week, or based on seasons.

Software Development

The handling time ends when the agent communicates the new shipping information to the customer and closes the ticket. To calculate the standard customer churn rate, divide the number of customers lost during a period by the total number of customers at the start. Customer service KPIs can provide insight into the effectiveness of your customer support. Reducing Customer Effort Score means listening to what customers are saying and making changes before there’s a risk of reputational damage. If, for instance, you have the tools in place to detect a recurring pattern of high effort around a billing issue, or long hold times, you need to be proactive in fixing those issues.

So start by taking a look at your business’s goals and work forward from there. To calculate ROI, you have to divide the Net Profit by the Cost of Investment and multiply it by 100. Net Profit refers to the total amount of revenue generated by the investment minus the cost of the investment itself. By tracking ROI over time, the organization can determine whether the investment was successful and whether further investments in similar technology are warranted. To obtain it, divide the number of support requests that are escalated by the total number of support requests received and multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Customers who receive a timely response to their support request are more likely to be satisfied with their service and are more likely to remain loyal to the organization.

With better processes in place, you’ll avoid situations where interactions last longer than they need to. AHT is measured by adding the total duration of all customer interactions and support kpis dividing it by the number of interactions during a specific period. This can be measured daily, weekly or monthly, or over any other time period depending on how you track your KPIs.

This data is accessible via customizable analytics reports you can use to make crucial decisions like when to hire, whether training is needed, and how many staff to have on shift. Many support teams choose the right KPIs but don’t track them throughout the year. Instead, KPIs take the backseat with team leaders glancing at them once, if at all. The result is that teams don’t track performance, can’t keep agents accountable, and cannot improve their customer service, which affects their bottom line. However, some of the most important KPIs you should measure are customer satisfaction scores, first response time, and customer churn. This customer service KPI is the number of replies it takes for customer service agents to close a customer ticket.

Establish a well-defined process for continual improvement of first call resolution rate. Percentage of incidents resolved by the first level of support (first call or contact with the IT help desk). Total number of tickets handled by the IT helpdesk and their patterns within a given time frame.

Here’s a list of 35 more customer experience statistics to share with your team. Of course, there are other ways to achieve your goals, but if you use these steps as a springboard, you’ll be sure to find success in your support efforts. Employee engagement surveys can help measure how happy your support team members are in their roles and with your business. It can refer to how confident they feel in their job title, how supported they feel regarding development and promotions, their work-life balance, and more.

Customers will stop doing business with a company after one poor customer support experience. To do that, there are specific customer service key performance indicators that need to be monitored on an ongoing basis in order to adjust processes or optimize agent training. 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. By collecting and analyzing data on KPIs, business leaders can identify areas for improvement, optimize teams’ processes and services, and deliver better customer support.

Business-level KPIs tell you how customer service impacts the overall health of your business. You can use them to make strategic decisions that will improve the quality of service and impact revenue positively. Most businesses focus on improving their CSAT survey scores since it’s an important indicator of the customer experience. A 10% increase in a company’s CSAT score can lead to a 12% increase in customer trust. In addition, you can get insights about agent brandwidth by looking at this metric against the total number of tickets (more on this later).

The Ascent Group shows that 60% of companies that measure FCR for one year or more report a one to 30% improvement in their performance. Your RR helps represent the percentage of solved tickets that have been reopened by a customer reply. These are tickets that were solved initially but are automatically reopened by a customer replying to (or calling back about) a previously solved ticket. FinancesOnline is available for free for all business professionals interested in an efficient way to find top-notch SaaS solutions.

We can see that October is showing particularly higher churn rates and this information enables us to dig deeper and discover why. With the ability to deflect up to 70% of conversations, Freshbots enables your support team to prioritize tasks that significantly impact customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Investing Chat PG in omnichannel customer service software that streamlines conversations from different channels into a single view helps ensure that agents can offer seamless support across channels with ease. Agents will also be empowered to deliver context-rich solutions that can improve customer satisfaction and business performance KPIs.

Key help desk metrics and KPIs

Customer service metrics and KPIs are the numbers that help you measure how well you’re delivering on your business’s brand promise. They’re more than just a set of statistics, though—they’re also a set of principles and standards. This creates more work for agents that results in wait time and longer resolution times. 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.

As a result, you can increase your customer service team’s efficiency and strengthen your relationship with the customer. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a special set of metrics that help determine whether business is going in the right or wrong direction. At first glance, it seems that customer service KPI scores take a backseat to traditional business KPIs, like profits, costs and regional sales. However, key customer support metrics may paint a more complete picture of success for the long-term viability of a business. 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.

Many companies stopped measuring customer satisfaction during this time as they were simply trying to get back to customers, which often took days. First contact resolution rate is different from the average resolution time as it measures the percentage of tickets solved during initial content. While it is a marker for efficiency, it can skew metrics as some issues are more complex and require more time to resolve. Customer service KPIs are performance metrics businesses can use to evaluate their CX efforts, analyze their support agents’ effectiveness, and develop better relationships with their customers. This guide details the 21 most important customer service KPIs you should track to hit your business goals. Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that measures the ease with which customers get their issues resolved.

• 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.
• This percentage can be tracked over time to determine if you’re improving your score.
• Again, AI can help here by listening in on calls and – in real time – perform script compliance and issue resolution monitoring.
• His work was mentioned in various business publications, including Entrepreneur and InfoQ.
• A customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is a customer service report that measures how well a company’s products, services, and overall customer experience meet customer expectations.

It is calculated by dividing the total score received by the total number of responses and multiplying it by 100 to get a percentage score. Customer Satisfaction Score measures how satisfied customers are with the IT support they receive. You can’t improve your KPIs if your team has no knowledge of what those KPIs even are.

#3 Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

First Response Time is the time it takes for an IT support team to respond to a customer’s initial request for assistance. It is a key performance indicator used to evaluate IT support teams’ responsiveness. Customer Effort Score measures the ease or difficulty of a customer’s experience when interacting with an organization’s support team.

Visualization can help make complex data more accessible for everyone, and good customer support tools will include these in their reporting features. For KPIs to be effective motivators, there needs to be widespread buy-in from the team. Team members have a wealth of knowledge that can be tapped to understand what’s important to customers and what’s achievable. The answer to this lies in finding out what you want for your team and what your team wants from you. This could be increasing ticket deflection, reducing resolution time, and upskilling.

Customer Success

Outstanding customer service teams need to keep a constant pulse of their customer satisfaction (CSAT) score. This is the best measurement of how your service organization continues to perform. By providing an opportunity for customer feedback, managers can learn from the feedback to help them build and develop their customer service teams. During a given timeline, if your organization receives more tickets than it can resolve, then your backlog will grow. Understanding this performance over time will enable managers to optimize and streamline their customer service team’s performance.

KPIs are measurements that track your company and departmental performance against specific goals and strategic objectives. Customer support KPIs help you assess overall team performance, hold agents accountable, keep everyone aligned, and improve your customer service. A service desk, often automated, is a program that manages the communication between a company and its customers. Most platforms give businesses a collaborative system with features that include a shared inbox, canned responses and actions, app integrations, and advanced metrics reporting. Customer Effort Score (CES) refers to the effort a customer has to expend to get what they want from your business. This could be how long it takes them to find an answer in your knowledge base, get a resource from your support team, or any amount of time spent interacting with your company.

For example, many support teams will track average resolution time to gauge whether customer problems are being resolved swiftly. Trader Joe’s are likely able to excel because they monitor critical metrics related to the service they provide. In this post, learn about critical customer service and service desk KPIs that will help you understand your support strategies and improve customer satisfaction. Reducing Average Handle Time is crucial for enhancing operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. A shorter AHT indicates that your customers’ issues are being resolved quickly, leading to higher productivity and reduced costs.

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. Our Freshdesk reviews gave this award-winning help desk software high marks on the strength of its ease-of-use and robust features. In customer support, KPIs offer measurable values based on metrics gathered from response time, ticket volume, active and resolved issues, escalation rates in complaints, customer feedback, conversion rate, etc. The service level calculates your capacity to complete the standards set in the service level agreement provided to your customers.

Abandon rate, often referred to as call abandonment rate, is a call center KPI that reflects the number of customers that hang up while on hold with customer support. You can calculate this percentage by finding the difference between calls received and handled calls, then dividing that by the number of calls received. Training and coaching play a huge part in ensuring your contact center is delivering top-notch customer service. But manually sampling calls is a really inefficient way to check on quality and consistency. Again, AI can help here by listening in on calls and – in real time – perform script compliance and issue resolution monitoring. Reducing your Customer Effort Score is how you’ll build long-term customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Efficient communication leading to fewer replies benefits customer satisfaction and operational productivity, highlighting the need for clear and concise communication skills. See how easy great support can be with AI-driven self-service, ticketing, and insights all in one solution. ROI stands for Return on Investment, which measures the efficiency of an investment. Organizations use it to evaluate the financial returns of investments in IT infrastructure, software, or other technology-related projects. To calculate the NPS, you subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. The resulting score can range from -100 to 100, with a higher score indicating a greater likelihood of customer advocacy and loyalty.

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. These identifiers help improve operations and apply adjustments, especially at a time when businesses are faced with COVID-19. The net retention KPI for customer service goes deeper into evaluating your business growth by monitoring the number of lost and new customers, and calculating the product or service cancellations only. That way, you will have a clear picture of how well your retaining efforts and strategies work, and if there is a reason to adjust.

Number of New Tickets

Here is a simple three-phase technique to get your IT help desk team resolving tickets in the first call. One of the world’s leading financial institutions was able to improve its stability by reducing their major incidents. This reduction in the number of incidents was achieved by improving their root cause analysis process. An increasing trend in the number of unplanned changes indicates the inadequate planning of changes and questions the efficiency of the change management process. Therefore, the change management process has to be improved to ensure proper planning and execution of changes. For example, review conversations and if you notice a bottleneck is caused by a specific question or agent, you’ll have a better understanding of the cause and can implement a solution.

You may be having issues with your products or services; hence, many customers are complaining and reaching out to you. You acted on the KPI, measuring its effectivity, and made adjustments to improve the process and hit your target. Integrating Freshworks’ Customer Service Suite into your strategy revolutionizes how you manage customer interactions, significantly impacting your key performance indicators (KPIs). This adaptation requires keeping up with technological advancements, changing consumer trends, and optimizing every customer interaction for satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction KPIs

To calculate the AHT, you must divide the total time spent handling inquiries or requests by the total number of tickets. 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. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. For example, Ticket Resolution Rate and Average Response Time (metrics) show whether the team is meeting its goal of increasing customer satisfaction for the quarter (KPI). 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. Don’t respond with a generic, cookie-cutter support email—use some personality and personalization.

• There should be many touchpoints and ultimately a quick resolution, if necessary or possible.
• You can collect feedback from customers right after they’ve had certain touchpoints or interactions with your company, like making a purchase or contacting the service team.
• Calculate it by adding together the number of tickets an agent handles in an hour.
• Often that means implementing robust training programs, building a comprehensive knowledge base, and using AI tools that can provide agents with insights and next steps during each support query..

Average handle time (AHT) is similar to average resolution time, but there is a slight difference. It’s smart to pair this metric with first contact resolution as they often correlate. If both figures are below your standards, it may indicate an issue with support processes or necessitate further employee training. On the customer side, improvement in CX and support can make a huge difference.

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. In fact, every 1% increase in first call resolution sees a 1% rise in CSAT score. Low-effort resolutions also drive loyalty and customer retention, with 61% of customers who’ve had their problems resolved with less effort choosing to stay with the company. It goes without saying that this metric is a vital KPI for businesses focused on keeping customers happy. For example, Front measures crucial support KPIs including email volume, CSAT score, resolution time, and response time, as well as other email trends for each rep or across your entire team.

Monitoring tickets handled per hour helps in assessing the effectiveness of training programs, tools, and processes in place, guiding efforts to streamline operations and improve customer service response times. Businesses work on improving this metric to increase customer satisfaction scores, boost team efficiency, and reduce support costs. If a customer service metric doesn’t directly affect progress toward a business goal, it’s just a metric, not a KPI. A KPI related to this goal could be measuring customer satisfaction following service interactions or the number of issues resolved in the first contact. Ticket Backlog measures the total number of tickets that agents have not resolved in a given period. It provides insights into the IT support staff’s workload, the support system’s efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

Identifying the metrics you’ll measure helps encourage them to achieve their targets and have fun while doing it and ultimately, agents will perform much better. Without knowing the end goal (ie. what your customer service team is working towards), there will be no way to measure performance and progress. Creating a plan will guide you and your team to the specific goals you want to achieve. In this article, we’ll review the importance of customer service metrics, the key metrics to measure, and how to use them to drive performance.

Beyond that, it helps you plan out your workflow, meaning you can easily integrate the insights it generates into your operations. 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. 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.