5 Customer service KPIs to measure your support success

And, while every operation is different, organizations should follow a few universal principles to best achieve their goals. 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.

IT service desk software Freshservice is a powerful solution designed for the needs of small businesses and enterprises. It features standard modules for ticket management, CMDB and knowledge base, and advanced modules for change, incident and problem management. It provides a scalable, robust way to manage IT service requests and assets.

• In your InvGate Service Desk report, select the metrics “Requests” and “Spent Time” and add “Agent” to a column.
• Visualization can help make complex data more accessible for everyone, and good customer support tools will include these in their reporting features.
• Customers, in turn, benefit from faster and better service quality, improving overall satisfaction.
• The number of tickets resolved per month also acts as a fair judge of an agent’s productivity, if you follow a system where certain types of tickets are assigned to a particular agent.

For example, for a business with a goal of improving responsiveness, a KPI around time to first response would be fitting. 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. Customer satisfaction is a measure of how pleased your customers are with the quality of service provided. A common method that businesses use to determine this is by sending surveys to customers after every support interaction.

Customer satisfaction KPIs

If your team is already up and running, revisit your KPIs today and check if they align with your long-term support targets. By setting realistic and focussed KPIs, you can extract the best from your support team and provide stellar customer service. For instance, reducing first response time could be mapped to a customer service admin since it involves improving queue management while keeping resolution SLA in check is every agent’s responsibility. 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.

That may lead to downgrades and cancellations, which should be avoided as much as possible. In our example, we can see that January brought a higher churn rate, which could mean that clients https://chat.openai.com/ have canceled their yearly contracts and it affected the company. As its name suggests, this customer service KPI tracks the costs of resolving an issue by different communication channels.

Customer retention rate measures the number of customers that stay loyal to your business over time. Organizations should prioritize customer experience and a customer-first approach to improve retention. Tickets solved per hour is how many tickets were resolved and closed within that same time frame. As with tickets handled per hour, this metric can detail how effectively a support agent operates.

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.

The CSAT metric is typically measured by asking customers to rate their level of satisfaction with the IT support they received, usually on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10. 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. Although their similarities, help desk metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have different purposes and goals.

They want a resolution to their problem or an answer to their question right then and there! Unfortunately, they are often met with barriers to quick resolution such as long mean time to resolve due to understaffing or escalation process inefficiencies. First Level Resolution Rate is a measure of an IT Support organization’s overall competency and is a proxy for Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Discover how other companies improved their most business-critical customer support KPIs. You’ll also be able to identify opportunities to proactively communicate throughout the customer journey and create ways to surprise customers and catch them before a problem becomes a pain point. When measuring the service desk, you need productivity, quality, and performance metrics.

It is especially useful when tracked over time, as it can provide insights into the effectiveness of process changes or technology investments. For example, if a new support tool or process is implemented and the cost per ticket decreases over time, it can be seen as a sign that the investment was successful. 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.

Tracking and measuring these metrics will ensure that your business remains competitive while providing high-quality support services for customers. To guarantee successful customer service, businesses must closely monitor these critical performance metrics. Thoughtfully selecting and tracking customer service KPIs can help you gain key insights into how to get (and keep) more satisfied customers.

Here’s a list of 35 more customer experience statistics to share with your team. Customer analytics helps businesses deeply understand their audience to make smarter business decisions and improve CX. Zendesk has long been committed to delivering trustworthy products to our customers and their users. We believe that trust is at the core of all our interactions with our customers. 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. These are a few of the most popular ways to evaluate your customer satisfaction, but you can choose any method that’s most relevant to your business.

Take note that there is no one approach for evaluating all your different KPIs. You’ll be using various metrics and assessment methods specific to the KPI and the goals you set. The operative word is “key,” which means you’ll be concentrating on indicators that impact your customer service performance and which help you reach your goals.

If you find that you have a low CES score, identify how to remove obstacles and friction. Customer Satisfaction Score measures how satisfied customers are with the IT support they receive. To calculate agent utilization, you need to divide the total time an agent spent on support-related activities — on InvGate Service Desk, you’ll find it as “Spent Time” — by their total available work time. For instance, if you had 50 open tickets at the beginning of the week and agents resolved 30 tickets, the backlog at the end of the week would be 20 tickets.

What are good support metrics?

On the side of customers, they can get access to a mobile-friendly knowledge base to get their questions answered. As differentiated from AFRT, ART shows whether your customers’ issues, requests, or queries get followed up promptly. It tells you, on average, how responsive and quick you are in getting back to your customers.

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. If you are able to solve them quickly and in a satisfying manner, it is a sign of good service. A combination of realistic yet motivating KPIs plus a strong set of cultural values has helped us to strike this balance.

You can also use this data to adjust your training practices and help set up your team for success. KPIs are measurable targets any team, including customer service teams, can use to track progress in certain categories. KPIs are designed to tell you how your team is performing in relation to goals and assess the overall health of your customer support program. Just as world-class service delivery organizations are obsessive about maintaining high customer satisfaction levels, they are equally committed to keeping their costs in check. That said, extremely high analyst utilization can actually increase your costs by driving analyst turnover and absenteeism higher.

customer service KPIs every support team needs to track

Monitor this KPI closely for your different support channels to keep it from going up. Tracking this metric on a weekly basis and for the different communication channels will help you stay on top of any issues or anomalies as soon as they occur. Real-time KPI tracking allows for the identification of negative short-term trends before they develop into long-term crises.

However, lower resolution times are a better marker for success as they ensure quick resolutions of customer calls. As such, measuring your customer service KPIs is crucial to successful customer interactions. Trader Joe’s customers love the company so much that the chain has the highest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) score. They need to know how to communicate professionally with customers, have intricate product knowledge, and understand how to efficiently use your customer support software.

Escalation rate is the percentage of tickets escalated to someone else like a senior manager or another support tier. It’s a valuable KPI for telling you how many support tickets could not be resolved by your first line of support. We offer features like comprehensive agent workspaces, reporting and analytics, and more to ensure your team provides outstanding support to every customer. Volume by channel refers to the amount of support tickets that come in by call, email, chat, and any other support mediums you engage in.

Monitoring these customer service metrics is important for you to know if you are performing well in comparison to this predefined goal. It does not really matter which specific metrics you chose, but it is essential to respect these agreements. Not evaluating them might let you out of track and some problems might also go unnoticed, delaying the moment you are aware of them and start fixing what has to be. Help desk KPI metrics can vary depending on the specific goals of the team and the type of support delivered. However, some organizations use it more broadly to refer to a customer service, customer support, or customer advocacy team.

Here are the 15 most important Customer Service KPI Metrics:

While definitions vary, agent touches generally refer to when an employee actively makes a change on a ticket. Attend Zendesk Relate 2024 in Las Vegas to learn about the latest industry trends and product innovations, grow your skill set and influence, and exchange ideas with CX experts from around the world. With all the insight gained from step I and II, redesign your software purchases to optimize compliance and attain a 100 percent license compliance rate. Data, when presented on a dashboard, is most valuable since it can be used to identify trends that tell a story and give insight into how to proceed. Any variance in KPIs overtime should be connected to a cause, some activity, or event that caused the number to shift.

However, it’s important to make sure that the resolution time is consistent and is not unacceptably long. Here’s where the resolution SLA comes into play as an important KPI since it helps ensure that all tickets are resolved within a set time. The CSAT score relates to overall customer satisfaction with a customer support interaction, your product, company, or other aspect of your business, usually on a scale of one to five.

Case study: Increasing software asset utilization saves a million dollars

You need not assess all available KPIs and report on outcomes, only the right ones – those that have a critical bearing on your customer service performance and are actionable, true, and consistent. Now let’s get to know some of the tools you can use to evaluate your KPIs and important metrics. 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. You acted on the KPI, measuring its effectivity, and made adjustments to improve the process and hit your target.

It is an important metric as it is well known that retaining a customer is less expensive than acquiring a new one. By maximizing this customer service KPI, you can reduce costs, or assign them to other channels that will grow your business. 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. This KPI can be used to measure the ability of the support department in answering requests in due time. If your company has a high abandonment rate, it can mean long queue times or complicated entry processes, which can lead to poor customer satisfaction rates in the long run. To avoid this, you can track this rate on a weekly basis and dig deeper into the weeks where it was higher.

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. 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. Nothing makes customers happier than finding the right solution in the very first customer support interaction.

If you have a high number of tickets resolved per month, and a high first response time, then you need to work on easing agent bandwidth. However, only if you have quantifiable data on how well your support team is doing can you improve existing processes, make better staffing decisions, and ensure customer happiness. Using KPIs for sales support, an organisation can build powerful reports to improve sales productivity and customer support metrics like call time, wait time, on-time delivery, and product order lifecycle. 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. You should track the retention rate of your customers who reached out with an issue.

• By setting realistic and focussed KPIs, you can extract the best from your support team and provide stellar customer service.
• Your business needs and priorities are different from those of other organizations.
• People are increasingly making their buying decisions based on the support they receive.
• An article in the Los Angeles Times has referred to customer service agents as the “punching bag” on the front lines.

A KPI is an indicator that helps you track the performance of a business, project, or department against strategic goals and objectives. Your business needs and priorities are different from those of other organizations. So, we’ve included 21 different statistics to ensure you’ll find something of value. Only the KPIs and metrics that are critical to your IT help desk need to be measured to improve service delivery. Customers answer this question in retrospect of their entire experience with your brand. So, the customer service department needs to focus on keeping the other KPIs in check, and creating consistent and effortless customer service experiences can help with improving your NPS.

If both figures are below your standards, it may indicate an issue with support processes or necessitate further employee training. 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. Tickets handled per hour is a help desk metric that shows how many tickets an agent opens and interacts with over an hour.

One can customize the application’s ticketing system to suit business needs using the built-in field templates. The system also features notification alerts, service levels and escalations, and proactive notifications. Also included is a plug-and-play ITIL, which eliminates the need for consultations as it adheres to best practices. A self-service portal, meanwhile, enables users to raise tickets, check older tickets, and browse the knowledge base.

By monitoring this customer service KPI you can ensure you’re resolving customer problems as quickly as possible. Maybe you don’t have a proper system for logging, routing, and closing tickets. Customer service KPIs are important statistics businesses should use to evaluate their CX efforts, the performance of their support team, and more.

When the COVID-19 pandemic crept across the world, customer service teams were dealing with a surge in volume, evolving policies and new remote work environments. Many companies stopped measuring customer satisfaction during this time as they were simply trying to get back to customers, which often took days. 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.

Help desk metrics are specific, measurable parameters that contribute to the overall KPIs and tend to remain static. On the other hand, KPIs are broader, strategic measures linked to business goals and objectives. They focus on the organization’s overall success, not just the support team’s performance. First contact resolution rate is different from the average resolution time as it measures the percentage of tickets solved during initial content.

While objective, measurable numbers are great for evaluating aspects of performance, they should not be relied on as the sole motivator. That’s why we also try to incorporate a KPI based on conversation reviews – to ensure quality, our support reps and engineers hold each other accountable through our custom built conversation review tool. Constructive feedback is extremely important in our team and we encourage teammates to practice it with each other daily. These values form the core part of a support rep or engineer’s performance profile, and KPIs form the other part. When it comes to assessing a teammate’s performance, they must be succeeding in both areas.

Customer support volume KPIs

Don’t respond with a generic, cookie-cutter support email—use some personality and personalization. Requester wait time is the length of time that a support ticket spends in new, open, and on-hold statuses. This metric accounts for how long the requester (aka the customer) has to wait for a support agent’s response during the ticket’s life. The IT help desk was unaware of this, and SLAs were set without considering these factors.

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. This is a better resolution time measurement than average resolution time (ART). 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.

Your NPS score is a good indicator of overall customer loyalty toward your brand. 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. Although fast response times are preferred, response quality should not be sacrificed for speed.

Although a low MTTR is a worthy objective, many IT Support organizations go too far in trying to enforce aggressive service levels. Those who pursue this strategy typically believe that aggressive service levels are a prerequisite for achieving high customer satisfaction kpi for support team levels. The truth is that while there is a correlation between MTTR and customer satisfaction, aggressive service levels will not necessarily lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction and cost per ticket are the yin and yang of IT Support.

By analyzing the responses on the surveys and gathering feedback, you can spot what’s working and what needs to be improved to provide better service experiences. In fact, every 1% increase in first call resolution sees a 1% rise in CSAT score. Plus, 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 focussed on keeping customers happy.

It is built to give you and your agents a tight grip on feedback to fast track resolution times. It also boasts of scalability, letting you manage a customer-oriented team, whether it is composed of a couple of agents or dozens. The customer effort score measures how much effort your customer had to put into resolving their issue. To determine the customer effort score, ask your customer to rate their resolution experience on a scale from easy to difficult.

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. KPI is linked to a target value or goal which provides actionable data so you, or any other stakeholders, can make informed decisions. A KPI gives you insight into how well your team or unit is performing in pursuit of clearly defined team goals and in line with management-defined objectives.

Boosting employee behavior and knowledge and bringing down wait times can be done through consistent training and improving agent enablement. The best way to get these insights is by measuring customer service key performance indicators or customer service KPIs. That means the ones detailed above might not always be the best for your team to track! Make sure your KPIs measure progress toward the goals you’ve set for your team. Whether you want to offer better issue resolution, or connect more authentically with customers, KPIs that relate to these goals can help give you accurate data that shows how well your team is progressing. The balanced scorecard is a mechanism that aggregates the most important metrics—all those we have covered in this Metric of the Month—into a single, all-inclusive measure of performance.

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. 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. 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. To calculate the NPS, you subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

In this case, it is divided by standard and special requests and tracked on a weekly basis. It is a valuable practice to monitor these two separately as standard requests usually take less time to be resolved than special ones. This is due to the fact that businesses usually have processes in place for common customer issues. The graph also includes trend lines for both types of requests so you can easily understand when a value is higher than it is supposed to be and can dig deeper into the reasons.

Most modern businesses have realized they must provide an outstanding customer experience (CX) to compete in the marketplace. Not only is that essentially unachievable, but as soon as one customer responds negatively, the goal is no longer possible. It’s better to start with challenging, but small goals that ladder into a larger goal over time. As discussed before, customer service plays an important role in strengthening customer relationships, making this an important KPI for support teams as well.

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. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. This means prioritizing employee retention for onboarding is the industry standard, and improving it, along with employee engagement, will likely earn your company dividends. The same rationale of applying KPIs follows for other company departments and activities. Gauging business performance isn’t as skin deep as simply viewing the results and then calling it a day. After all, organizations are composed of customer-facing units departments, each with its own sphere of activities that affect the outcomes of operations. And in a lot of cases, taking a granular approach lets you see areas of improvement that you didn’t know existed.

For example, suppose an organization invests in InvGate Service Desk software that improves efficiency and reduces the Average Handle Time for support tickets. If the investment results in cost savings and increased productivity, these financial benefits can be quantified and compared Chat PG to the initial investment cost to calculate the ROI. Cost Per Ticket measures the average cost of resolving an IT support ticket. It helps organizations understand the financial impact of their IT support processes and can inform decisions around resource allocation and efficiency.

This way, you can adjust your workforce’s workflow if the customer satisfaction rate is low. 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. Not all businesses can have large customer service teams, and many rely on service desks to manage their budgets, resources, and customer service all at once. Customer service KPIs and service desk KPIs are relatively similar, but it’s essential to understand their different applications.

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. A customer service KPI dashboard is a place where managers can access data in real-time – whether it’s CSAT, resolution time or effort score. Data is presented in graphs or charts and is continuously updated, enabling leaders to understand exactly how their team is performing.

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. 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. It lets you streamline your support by identifying bottlenecks and examining problematic tickets right from the report.