Essential customer service KPIs that every business must track

For any business, it’s crucial that they measure the success of their different marketing and sales efforts. Customer service KPI is a means to evaluate how your customer service team is performing as their code of conduct affects the customers.

As you know, customer service representatives are humans. Therefore, it’s very natural for them to have good & bad days and high & low-energy days. But anyways, their bad performance can have a bad effect on the customer service KPI. It might lead you to lose some of your customers or get negative reviews on social media sites. So as to avoid this, you should try to find out the areas where your customer service teams need improvement.

Here, the KPIs for customer service comes into the picture. KPIs can help you measure your ecommerce customer service team’s performance. You can track how well they are performing and if it is helping you in accomplishing your business objectives.

For instance, if you aim to increase customer loyalty through video conferencing, then customer service KPI can help you evaluate if it’s working for you or not. For doing this, KPIs like Customer Retention Rate (CRR) can aid you in knowing if video conferencing is effective in keeping customers for the long term. Later, we will discuss CRR in more detail.

Customer service KPI metrics are important tools for managers and business owners to see how their employees and systems are doing. They can help you to discover the key areas of improvement. If you find out that you are not able to meet your customer service KPIs, that indicates you need to change your strategy.  For example, utilizing an automated customer service software or platform that also enables you to keep track of important metrics.

Here, in this blog, we will tell you the top 10 customer service KPI metrics that you must assess.

Top 10 customer service KPI metrics

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) 

To bring in customers to your business, it’s important that you create customer-centric strategies and tactics. You must keep the customers at the center of what you do and the result will reflect in your customer service KPI as well. Try building awesome user experiences as it fosters repeat customers, positive reviews, and a strong brand position. You must ensure that the customers are satisfied with their experience with your brand.

The customer service KPI is the best way to measure your customer satisfaction. This KPI is also known as the Happy customer service KPI. It is used to evaluate if the customer is satisfied with their experience of shopping from you.

Customer Service KPI: How to measure the CSAT? 

You can conduct customer service KPI and ask questions to your customers like:

The percentage of the answers from the respondents would describe the satisfaction level of the customers with customer service KPI. You can calculate the final percentage by taking the total number of positive responses, dividing it by the total number of respondents, and multiplying it by 100.

Asking these questions to your customers is among the crucial customer satisfaction KPIs to determine how well your customer support team is performing.

2. First Response Time 

According to a report by Dialogtech, 59% of customers are more likely to buy from you if their question is answered under a minute.  ‘First Response Time’ is the time taken by the customer support representative to answer the query of a customer.

Let’s take an example here. Supposedly, you have a doubt, and you chat with a business through their website. But even after repeatedly texting, you didn’t receive a reply. Undoubtedly, you’ll exit the site and not make a purchase as you had a bad customer experience.

Similarly, nowadays, customers have got a lot of options, and they don’t want to wait. Therefore, it’s necessary that you ensure that they just have the best experience with you. The earlier the customers get a response from you, the higher the customer service KPI will be. To get a good customer service KPI score, it’s crucial that you work on your FRT time.

How to calculate FRT? 

FRT can be calculated by subtracting the time of the first response from the time of the customer query.

3. Net Promoter Score 

NPS helps you to know how likely the customers are to recommend your product or service to their friends and family. You can evaluate it by asking your customers question like:

How likely are you to recommend our product/service to your friends, family, or anyone? 

A scoring system is used for this type of question. The customers are given a choice to choose from a scale of 1 to 10. For example, a customer who’s likely to suggest your company to others would give you a score of nine.

How to calculate NPS?

To calculate NPS or customer service KPI you can categorize the responses of the customers as follows:

Now, calculate the percentage of each by dividing the total number of people in each category by the total number of responses and multiply it by 100. You can calculate NPS or customer service KPI by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

A high NPS score or customer service KPI indicates that people are happy with your products or services. It means your business is doing good, and customer support teams are working effectively. However, a low customer service KPI suggests bad customer service that needs to be improved. 

You should start with training people who are receiving low scores. Take the customer reviews and see what people are criticizing. Focus on those points and begin improving them. For example, if people say the response time is long, you can think of ways to improve your response time.

4. Active Issues 

Checking the active issues is one of the ways of evaluating customer service KPIs. You should see the number of active issues being reported at the customer support help desk. If the issues are resolved immediately, then that’s a good sign of your customer service team working efficiently.

But in case you see that too many active issues are pending to be resolved, then that means your customer support is not doing well. This means that you need to change something about your product/service, or you need to retrain your staff.

Business owners and managers must execute regular check-ins of customer service KPIs to ensure that their staff is not struggling with something. Also, if they are, then they should try to bring out resolutions for those problems that affect the customer service KPI. Make sure that you maintain a very less count of active issues to keep the customer service KPI up. 

5. Resolved Issues

Keeping an eye on the active issues is not enough for customer service KPI. You must also know how many issues your team has resolved till now. Well, it’s not necessary that you keep a daily check of resolved issues. But you can look at the number of resolved issues periodically. This will help you to know the most common issues that your customers face that impact your customer service KPI. 

By analyzing the resolved issues, you can know how you can build more targeted and effective marketing campaigns. It will aid you in knowing the areas where your customer support team is successfully able to interact with the customers. Therefore, it is one of the best KPIs for customer support.

For example, you see the maximum number of queries come from Facebook, and they are answered over there. From this information, you can understand that most of your customers are coming from Facebook. Then, your marketing team can create Facebook campaigns to target those customers.

You can also know what questions people are frequently asking. Then, you can add those questions to your FAQ section and improve your support or help pages. This will aid in saving the time of your customer support team and improve your customer service KPI. As most customers might read the answer from there and won’t need to approach the support team.

6. Escalation Rate 

Knowing the active and resolved issues can help you in several other ways. You can examine which issues are difficult to solve and need multiple interactions. Escalation refers to when a customer contacts the customer representative with some problem and is gone at the next stage.

If the escalation rate is high, then that means there’s a major problem that needs to be solved to enhance your customer service KPI. For instance, you receive too many calls at your customer help desk. Then, it might lead to many customers not getting any agent to speak to. Hiring more customer representatives can help to solve this problem.

Additionally, you can utilize a call forwarding service. This will ensure that no customer goes unattended. Also, their issue will be solved as soon as they get a customer representative to talk.

7. Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

Most of the businesses focus on getting new customers rather than strategizing to maintain the existing ones. However, the fact is retaining customers is less exorbitant than getting new ones.

But the question is how you can retain customers. Well, the answer is simply providing a good customer service. For instance, you go to a shop where the staff is good and polite to you. You go to another shop where the staff is busy and not answering you quickly. Which shop would you prefer? Of course, the one with a good staff. The same goes for your customers as well.

Offering good customer support and service will help you in improving your customer service KPI. It will help keep your maximum customers stick to your brand for a long time.

How to calculate CRR? 

You can calculate CRR, and this customer service KPI with the following formula:

A higher customer retention rate means that customers are satisfied with your service and find it worth continuing with you. A good CRR or customer service KPI can help your business to achieve business objectives in the long haul.

8. Cost Per Conversation

Cost Per Conversation is the way of finding how much the customer service team is taking up from your budget. You can do it by comparing the total revenue and seeing if the customer support team is adding to it.

Many problems occur with the customer support team. For example, if too many issues occur, you lose customers, and if the staff is not happy, they leave. All these problems lead you to lose some part of your income. However, it’s not always the staff that causes problems. It might be the training that you are providing is not enough, or your product might not be good.

This might also be the case that you don’t have enough staff to deal with all customers. So customers give up because they don’t get a customer representative. You can consider utilizing a call center predictive dialer so that your calling agents know whom to call. In the end, you must ensure that the cost per conversation is less and gives you satisfactory results.

9. Abandoned Call Rate 

The abandoned call rate is a good way to measure customer satisfaction or customer service KPI. The most common reason of people abandoning the call is the long wait time. By evaluating the abandoned call rate, you can make strategies that help you in preventing customers from slipping. This also includes training your agents to understand customers’ issues and answer quickly.

You can carry out research to know the reason why people abandon your service calls. See if you can solve their issues on the website itself. Check if there are any missing elements on the website that are leading them to call you. Consider different ways to reduce the call traffic on your customer support team.

Try to reduce your abandoned call rate to boost your customer service KPI. A lower abandoned call rate indicates more happy and satisfied customers. Therefore, the abandoned call rate is among the best KPIs of customer service. 

10. Evaluate your Channel Performance

Most businesses use a wide range of marketing channels to promote their brand. For instance, they send out emails and use social media to target their customers. However, using a multi-channel approach is successful only when you can provide good customer support throughout.

Evaluating customer service KPI by channel can help you in investing money wisely. For example, if website chat has more frequent visitors and positive outcomes. Then, you should focus on bringing more customers to the website directly. Also, you should train your staff accordingly to respond to site visitors. This way, you can ensure a higher level of customer satisfaction or good customer service KPI.

The Bottom Line

Using KPIs for customer service is important to improve your customer satisfaction. It can help you understand where you are going wrong in terms of providing service to your customers. Measuring customer service KPI can aid you in discovering the scope for improvement. Then, you can take steps in that direction to boost your customer service KPI results.

Knowing the different customer service KPIs can help you understand if you need to provide additional training to your customer representatives. Your customer support team represents your brand. Therefore, it’s crucial that they have a thorough knowledge of your business and can answer customers perfectly.

Are you struggling with meeting these KPIs for customer service? If yes, then WebMaxy Analyzer can help you. This software can aid you in understanding your users’ behavior and enhancing their experience. It comes with a range of different features such as session recordings, heatmaps, surveys & polls, feedback, funnel view, form analytics, push notifications, and so on.

Schedule a demo with our experts to know more about WebMaxy Analyzer, or email us at info@beta.webmaxy.co.

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