If you’re looking improve your customer experience, you’re going to have to step up your customer service game as well. But you can’t take your customer service to the next level if you don’t know what level you are at right now. Here are 16 customer service metrics that you need to track.
The most important customer service metrics that your team needs to track
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a very widely used key performance indicator that tracks the level of satisfaction your customers have with the support that your organization provides. This can generally be measured after your customers have an interaction with your customer service agents even if they are using VoIP technology.
You can also track CSAT for channels, products & services, customer types, and average ratings your agents & teams. It is also possible to track a customer’s CSAT rating over time.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
The easier it is for a customer to do business with you, the more likely they are to do it. That’s where the customer effort score (CES) helps you. To get the score, you’d send a survey to a customer after their issue is resolved, asking them to show you (on a Likert scale) how much effort they felt it took to resolve the issue.
The whole idea is that your customer loyalty will go up if your customers feel like it’s easy for them to do business with you. You’ll also be creating a better experience for your customers when you reduce customer effort.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is widely considered to be the most important customer experience metric of them all. The question asked is simple - how likely will your customers be to recommend your brand to their friends, relatives, colleagues, and other people in their circles.
They’d answer on a scale of 0 to 10, and will be divided into 3 groups on the basis of their scores:
- Detractors (0–6)
- Passives (7–8)
- Promoters (9–10)
Resolution time
Quicker resolution time will always make your customers feel better. They won’t have to wait for ages to get their issues solved. A shorter response time indicates that your customer service team is more effective and efficient. Resolution time is a far more important metric than reply time. That’s because it measures the actual amount of time which your customers have to wait before they actually get what they want instead of just measuring how quickly they can get a response (which might not lead to instant resolution) from your team.
Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
Your customer retention rate is essentially the percentage of customers that your company has retained over a specific period. Knowing and increasing your customer retention rate is vital because your chances of selling something to a new customer are just about 5-20%, but they go up to 60-70% when you try selling to an existing customer. Making efforts to increase your CRR can have a very significant impact on your revenue and your customer lifetime value.
Customer Churn
This one is basically the opposite of your customer retention rate. You’d be looking at the percentage of customers who stopped doing business with you. This metric is also known as your customer attrition rate.
It’s a big enough issue that you’re losing money that you would otherwise earn from that customer if they stop doing business with you, but the worse thing is that they might warn other people against doing business with you after they churn.
First Call Resolution Rate (FCR)
This is a measure of how effective your customer support team is at resolving your customers’ issues the very first time they call you. It’s a good measure of your efficiency, and when this rate goes up, customer satisfaction levels also rise because your customers get their issues sorted out without any need for follow-ups.
First reply time (FRT)
Your First Reply Time or First Response Time is the amount of time that a customer takes to get a first response from your customer service team to their support request. It’s a rather important metric because the longer your customers have to wait for a response, the more frustrated they are going to get and their likelihood of continuing to do business with you will keep going down.
Total Number of Customer Support Tickets
If you aren’t tracking this metric, you basically don’t have the foundation that you need for the other metrics. While a spike in this number can be a sign that something is going wrong with your offerings, it’s also important to keep an eye on this number so that you can see what your support team’s workload really is and when you need to be hiring more agents, get new tools, or find more efficient workflows.
Tickets solved
This metric helps you track how effective your agents and your teams are at solving customer issues. Many organizations set daily targets for tickets solved for their agents. It is important to track this metric for individual agents as well as your entire team.
Ticket reopens
If this is high, it means that your agents aren’t doing a particularly good job of solving the issues fully. They might be fixing a surface issue while ignoring a deeper issue which comes back to annoy your customers again at a later point in time.
Reopens occur most often when your agents are dealing with particularly complex customer issues.
Replies per resolution
Replies per resolution is essentially the number of times your agents and customers have to go back and forth with each other, asking questions and providing answers before the issue can be resolved.
Handle time
Your handle time is that amount of time that your agents spend on working on a single customer service interaction. This metric is also called your average handle time (AHT), average call handleing time (ACHT), and contact handle time.
Wait time
The wait time is the amount of time for which the customer has to wait for their issue to be resolved. It is different from resolution time because it only measures the amount of time in which the customer is waiting to hear back from your customer service representatives.
Next issue avoidance
Your next issue avoidance rate shows you how many of your customers have requested multiple support requests for the same product/subject area. If this rate is high, you might want to work on your first contact with the customer. You’d want to fix complex issues right at the start, instead of just solving surface-level issues.
Number of upsells and cross-sells
This might seem like your sales team’s responsibility, but customer service teams are now playing a very large role in this. The customer support team can help you customers realize that a higher-tiered version of your product would be a better fit for their needs or that they should buy a product that complements what they are currently using and will help them achieve greater results.
The number of upsells and cross-sells can help you see how convincing your customer service team is.
