There are various customer service KPIs that help us understand the success or failure of customer service operations. Without them, you can never be sure what is working and what is not.
Selecting correct KPIs is essential for this process, so today we will share with you what the essential KPIs are to track the performance of this area that is so important for your business.
What is a customer service KPI
A customer service KPI is a key performance indicator used to define performance against the goals set for an individual, team, or company.
In this case, to define your KPIs, it is important to ask yourself the following question: Does customer service meet our customers’ expectations?
If you don’t measure the quality of your customer service, how do you evaluate the success of your efforts? If you really want to improve you should evaluate your customer service indicators.
Examples of customer service KPIs that work the most
These are the KPIs that you should consider to provide better service to your clients:
- First answer
- Wait time
- Resolution rate
- Customer Service Representative Performance
- Customer satisfaction
- Cost per ticket
- Customer Effort Score
- Rate of low and high value requests
- Customer retention rate
- Employee Engagement
There are various KPIs to manage a business, but these customer service KPIs are the most important from an administration perspective because they provide information about the effectiveness of the systems and processes that are used.
There’s nothing better than allowing your customer service team to see if their efforts are in line with your company’s goals and values.
Likewise, this ability to see efforts greatly helps managers stay on track, keep contact center managers in line, identify areas for improvement, and encourage growth and progress.
1. First answer
First response time is vital to provide good service. Put yourself in the shoes of your end customer and imagine this:
You make a call to make a complaint and the person who answers transfers you to another person “more qualified and appropriate” for the situation. Before you know it, there are long wait times, several emails that go nowhere.
How will you feel the next time you contact the customer service center?
Probably not very well and you may even be unlikely to call again when you have another problem/query/complaint. The result of poor customer communication is that confidence is lost in the company’s ability to handle problems efficiently. If they can’t help you reliably, how likely are they to remain your customers?
The good news for support teams is that the first response is not only important to measure, but doing so is very easy.
The more problems you solve in the first communication exchange with the client, the happier they will be. The important thing is to have an idea of the time needed, it is always important to try to reduce response times as much as possible.
Response time is one of the customer service KPIs that you should monitor and see if it is improving or not.
2. Waiting time
Waiting time is another KPI that will help you manage customer service and understand the overall quality of service and how you balance customer needs and your resources.
In a Call Center, for example, you can measure the waiting time: before receiving a call and before the problem is resolved.
3. Resolution rate
This is another one of the customer service KPIs that you should not ignore. Often, user satisfaction is directly and strongly correlated with resolution rate, especially within the first communication exchange.
While we all know that leaving an issue unresolved is out of the question, it can be easy to be lax in this regard, the reality is that we know that every complaint, query, etc., deserves a timely and informed response.
Track how many complaints are resolved on the first call, how many communication connections there were, and how many times a similar issue was repeated through a data dashboard.
Knowing your resolution rate will allow you to take immediate action when you experience any recurring problems.
4. Customer Service Representative Performance
The performance of each agent is perhaps the best measure of productivity, but of course, it is not as easy as evaluating the first response. This is one way to measure it:
Average number of calls per month, x average time it takes to answer calls between number of days worked per month, x number of hours worked per day x 60 min/hr.
If you’re hitting a 70-80% rate, then you should probably keep an eye on your turnover rate.
Make sure you keep an eye on these customer service KPIs so that your company is not affected by cost or employee retention rate. Keep in mind that a happy customer service agent is crucial to having happy customers.
5. Customer satisfaction
Own customer service errors and work as a team to provide better service. Satisfaction is one of the customer service KPIs that will give you clarity to know if you are doing everything right, that your systems are efficient and that your agents are productive, and to know if the customer agrees or not with this.
The point is that the customer is the one who must be satisfied. Customers should have a way to review and rate the service your company offers them. However, to evaluate the overall value of this KPI, you will first need to measure the ratio of the number of surveys sent to customers compared to the number of surveys completed.
The volume of customer feedback surveys should be large enough so that you can obtain conclusive results.
If you’re at an early stage, getting a sufficient volume of completed surveys will take time. Be patient, but keep these types of customer service KPIs in mind in your next strategy.
If you have a statistically significant number of customers to survey and you manage to obtain the results, you will know “customer satisfaction.” Of course, satisfaction is made up of different KPIs, some of these are:
- Net Promoter Score
- Customer satisfaction index or CSAT
- Social sentiment
6. Cost per ticket
This is one of the customer service KPIs that you can use to evaluate the overall performance that your customer service center offers. It is worth mentioning that a large number of data inputs go into calculating this cost.
The cost per ticket includes calculating (at least) the following:
- Agent salaries and benefits
- Management salaries and benefits
- Customer Support Software Expenses
- Telecommunications expenses
- Facility expenses
Most of the cost comes from care reps and other staff, and that’s why monitoring rep usage is just as important as monitoring cost per ticket.
If your cost per ticket is higher than the industry average, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing a bad job; it may even be an indicator that the quality of your service is higher than average. Balancing quality and cost is certainly crucial here.
In general, cost per ticket is a great way to know the efficiency of processes and agents. But, as we mentioned, it is important to balance this focus on “hard” metrics with “soft” aspects, but don’t forget that everything is crucial to the success of your business.
7. Customer Effort Scoring
This indicator is related to the effort linked to the customer journey. In general, it is recommended to measure this KPI through surveys carried out immediately after the experience and to know at what stage of the customer journey the effort is greatest.
It is estimated that people who report a low level of effort are ready to buy again or pay more. In the case of customer service, it refers to how easy it was for the customer to obtain the solution they were looking for.
You can have all these indicators in a KPI report that allows you to have more clarity about what you are measuring.
8. Rate of low and high value requests
The objective of measuring the number and type of requests is to evaluate whether your contact center provides true added value.
If most of your advisors are overwhelmed by simple, recurring requests, you may need to review your customer self-support strategy and allow your advisors to spend time on requests that require real personal attention, or analysis. deeper of the problem.
9. Customer retention rate
This class of customer service KPIs indicates the percentage of customers who demonstrate their satisfaction with a brand through various actions: new purchases, additional purchases, upgrades or re-subscriptions. In this loyalty, your customer service plays a fundamental role.
10. Employee Engagement
By focusing too much on the KPIs mentioned above, it’s easy to forget a factor that’s not as obvious, but just as important: your team. If your employees are not satisfied with their work, your service will suffer.
Remember that long-term employment relationships are the key to good performance and employee motivation. On the other hand, a high employee turnover rate will cost you more than an employee’s salary as you will have to find and train new employees.