Customer Support KPIs: How to Find & Measure the Right KPIs

This guide provides examples, templates and practical advice to help you define the right key performance indicators for your organization and team. At a more overarching level, as is widely understood in the industry, employee engagement is critical to delivering amazing customer experiences, so we measure our employee engagement as well. We use this score as it separates the support experience from the product experience. “I have a spreadsheet tool where I give everybody in the team a sample set of tickets from every other Tech Support Engineer.

• If you run a large support team, make sure you have a close pulse on your ETR so you can address issues head-on.
• Support KPIs and Metrics gives your support team insight into their efforts and aids them in bringing their work to the next level, always knowing where they stand.
• Steve Noone O’Connor, of point-of-sale service Vend, places serious focus on his CES.
• That said, you need a way to track them efficiently—and the best way to do that is with a reliable CX partner.
• Customer service is the backbone of every business, as its relationship with its customers directly affects its success.

People are all unique, and our performance can vary from hour to hour, never mind from day to day. Measuring that is support kpis inherently messy and difficult, which is why crafting effective KPIs for people’s performance is so challenging.

Complaints Not Resolved on First Call

It makes inherent sense, if you see a fast response, you are likely to be more predisposed to having a good quality experience. The Quality Assurance (QA) scorecard collects evaluations, rankings, and valuable feedback from every one of Todd’s team’s exchanges. Along with being meaningful and relating to business values and goals, KPIs must be selected and structured in ways that make them effective for your team. To argue for more investment, you can communicate which projects have produced early improvements.

They also include any tickets where the support team couldn’t provide a real solution, plus tickets that your support team forgot to follow up on. If you can choose the right ones, you’ll be able to fully understand not only how well your customer service is doing, but how you can help your agents improve their work and be happier and more loyal to your company. The better the quality of your data, the better you’ll be able to measure your results. To make sure you’re properly keeping track of your KPIs, use solid customer service tools to measure them, like analytics, reports, and AI. If you need to track data from multiple sources, consider using a dashboard that merges those different data streams.

What are the most important KPIs for customer service?

Customers’ issues do not only exist in your desired support channels like email and chat. Rather than fight against this trend and attempt to ask customers to submit a ticket via chat, you should respond and help them. You can separate out tickets that did not have a customer support representative work on them, and that were resolved only with automation. You can also track the amount of views your self-service resources get to understand how many tickets they deflect entirely.

These identifiers help improve operations and apply adjustments, especially at a time when businesses are faced with COVID-19. This customer service KPI is the number of replies it takes for customer service agents to close a customer ticket. So, if your organization has fewer replies, that may indicate an effective and knowledgeable support team.

Your goal should be to increase your number of first contact resolutions because this means customers get an answer quickly and painlessly, improving your CX. Challenge your customer service and support teams to communicate clearly and reply with thoughtful questions. Your first response time measures how long it takes for a member of your customer service team to first respond to a new ticket or inquiry — essentially how long a customer has to wait before they are helped. As you read through this guide, expect to learn the customer service and support metrics you can use to measure — and improve — your customer experience. As its name suggests, the abandon rate tracks the percentage of clients that leave a call or other form of communication before they can speak to an agent.

Playing to each individual’s strengths can help improve agent productivity and provide better service to employees and customers. Once customers complete them, you can see successful interactions or drill into tickets where the customer wasn’t happy. There’s also the Net Promoter ScoreⓇ (NPS), which asks customers to rate you on a scale of one to 10 based on how likely they are to recommend your company to friends or family. First contact resolution (FCR) refers to tickets that are resolved after the first contact with a support agent or service desk staff.

#1 First response time

They dish on how they use metrics at companies such as Google, Basecamp, Hootsuite and 99designs – all in the post below. The solution to improving your CES can range from being more accessible on different channels, offering intuitive self-service options, providing multilingual support, and improving agent training. Whether the conversation is happening via email, chat, or phone call, conversation abandonment signals something larger is wrong.

While more tickets can be a confirmation that your customer service system is accessible and working, it can actually indicate customers are having frequent issues — and that your product or service may be falling short. Look for positive responses, which mean great customer experiences and a well-functioning customer service team. This metric — which is arguably the most important — tells you how effective, helpful, and friendly your customer service team was and if your customer’s issue was fully resolved. It could also tell you whether or not they’d return with a question or concern, based on the questions you ask. Don’t worry; there are plenty of customer service and support tools on the market to help with just that. 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.

CSAT surveys are usually a follow-up to a high-stakes decision or interaction, such as after upgrading to a paid tier, discussing with a support agent, making a purchase, or completing any specific action. Your customer ticket support volume sums up the total number of open support tickets at a given time. It helps you keep eyes on your backlog, determine if you need more hands on your support team, and can reflect your support team’s productivity or lack thereof.