Customer service is integral to the success of any organization. Making a good product or providing a useful service is basically the bare minimum for success. Without effective customer service, a business with the best products in its field would still probably struggle.
Understanding the level of customer service a business provides, as well as how to improve it, is often challenging. That’s why customer service metrics are so important.
Understanding customer service metrics
A metric is any statistic you can measure. Customer service is a mostly abstract concept. You can easily quantify sales, revenue, and profit. But there’s no one stat that reveals how effective an organization’s customer service is.
Customer service metrics are measurements that provide insight into the quality of customer service an organization provides. Different metrics apply to different aspects of the customer journey. By tracking and analyzing all the metrics detailed in this article, an organization can develop a clear picture of the overall customer experience it provides.
Why are customer service metrics important?
Without these metrics, it’s impossible for an organization to know if its customer service is adequate, exceptional, or poor. Bad customer service can be a killer, and it’s not always evident if customer service is what’s holding a company back.
By establishing and tracking customer service metrics, an organization can understand what it’s doing well and where it can improve. Customer service improvements can lead to higher customer retention and more efficient customer service processes.
11 valuable customer service metrics to track
Which metrics are really revelatory of the customer experience you provide? Each company is different, so the importance of each metric changes from case to case. Nonetheless, here are some of the more popular customer service metrics to track:
1. Customer churn
Customer churn refers to the rate at which customers stop and start doing business with a company over a given period. It is a critical metric for understanding customer retention and customer engagement. The most common way to express the customer churn rate is as a percentage of lost customers relative to the total customer base.
Some businesses naturally have high churn rates, depending on the products or services they offer. However, an abnormally high churn rate may indicate dissatisfaction with the product, service, or customer support. Many organizations want a stable churn rate or to reduce churn and boost customer retention.
2. Customer effort score (CES)
The customer effort score measures how easy or difficult it is for a customer to interact with a company. Organizations commonly gather their CES by sending out surveys after interactions, such as a purchase or a call to a contact center.
A customer effort score is like a golf score: the lower, the better. A low score suggests a smooth, user-friendly experience. By lowering their CES, a business can boost customer loyalty and satisfaction. By identifying which customers put in the most effort and when, companies can identify where they need to improve.
3. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
An organization’s customer satisfaction score is a measure of how satisfied customers are with their product, service, or customer support. CSAT is another score that derives from post-interaction customer feedback surveys. A CSAT survey typically asks customers to rate their satisfaction on a scale (e.g., 1–5).
The customer satisfaction score is one of the most popular customer service metrics. It provides immediate feedback on specific experiences, helping organizations identify their strengths and weaknesses. A high CSAT score often correlates with a strong customer retention rate.
4. First response time
This customer support metric represents the average time it takes for an agent to respond to a customer query. It’s a key metric for evaluating customer service efficiency and responsiveness. Nobody wants to wait a long time for a response, so a quick first response time is always the goal, especially for channels such as live chat and social media. A similar customer service performance metric is average handle time, which represents the average length of time required to resolve a customer issue.
5. Net promoter score (NPS)
NPS is a key performance indicator (KPI) that measures how likely customers are to recommend—or promote—a business to others. The net promoter score also relies on customer feedback surveys. For example, a survey may ask how likely a customer is to recommend a business on a scale of 0–10. Then, the survey asks why the customer gave the response they did.
A high NPS suggests strong customer satisfaction, while a low score indicates a business is failing customer expectations. NPS is a useful benchmark for gauging customer sentiment.
6. Overall contact resolution rate
This customer service metric measures the percentage of issues or support tickets that a contact center or customer support team successfully resolves. A high contact resolution rate means a customer service agent is very likely to resolve the average customer inquiry. This is a key indicator of customer service performance.
While average response time and first response time are both key contact center metrics to track, the overall contact resolution rate is perhaps even more important. If agents answer calls and respond to emails, that’s great; but if those agents can’t meet customer needs, then a new strategy is necessary.
7. Rate of answered calls
This customer service metric is the percentage of incoming customer calls that a customer service team successfully answers. This is a more basic metric than contact resolution rate or average response time, as it simply measures “How many calls get answered?”
A similar metric looks at ticket volume, which is the total number of customer inquiries across all channels. A low answered call rate suggests a need for more agents and/or the addition of self-service options.
8. Self-service usage
This customer service KPI measures how often customers use self-service options. These might be artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots or automated phone systems. Self-service tools are great for helping customers resolve relatively simple issues. This allows people to get answers to their queries quickly while freeing up customer service agents to help others with more complex issues.
9. Social media metrics
Social media has become integral to customer service performance for many brands and organizations. Analyzing social media posts across platforms is a great way to understand customer sentiment. Furthermore, each customer interaction on social media can provide key metrics. These include response time, response rate, mentions, sentiment analysis, and customer satisfaction.
10. Ticket handling time
This metric measures the total time taken to resolve a customer support ticket from initial contact to final resolution. This figure could be a three-minute phone call or a weeks-long process of back-and-forth emails, depending on the type of customer inquiry and the channel(s) used. It includes the time agents spend researching, responding, and updating customers.
11. Ticket request volume
This is the total number of customer service requests within a time period. Ticket request volume provides insight into customer demand and how much work the customer support team has to do. By analyzing increases and decreases in ticket requests, organizations can identify patterns. This information can also be useful for fine-tuning products or services and for knowing how much to invest into a contact center.
What’s the difference between operational data and experience data?
Experience data and operational data are both useful. For example, sales and channel volume are crucial to monitor, as are customer loyalty metrics, such as repurchase intention and overall satisfaction. Measuring both is even more helpful.
This enables a business to understand what customers and employees are doing, thinking, and wanting. Measuring both also helps a company keep an eye on the competition and understand what disruptions are possible from numerous strategic viewpoints.
How can you use customer service metrics to reduce customer churn?
Knowing which metrics are good and which aren’t provides actionable insights for an organization. For example, if on CSAT surveys customers indicate positive interactions with contact center agents, then an organization can conclude that its agents are performing well. However, this alone doesn’t mean a great customer experience.
For example, that same company might have a poor CES. This means the process of buying a product or service, or the process of interacting with the contact center, is too difficult for customers. The answer here might be to hire more regents, provide more self-service options, or employ a contact center optimization solution.
How to track social media and self-service performance
How an organization interacts with its customers on social media can be critical. And the quality of the self-service options a company provides is only increasing in importance. However, performance in these areas is often tricky because they fall outside the purview of many traditional customer service metrics.
Use Webex Contact Center to level up your customer service
With Webex Contact Center, it’s easy to establish, track, and share customer service metrics. As the contact center is vital to an organization’s customer service, it’s important to have a solution that delivers customers the self-service options they want while empowering agents to resolve complex issues faster and more comprehensively.
Discover Webex Contact Center and find out how our platform can help you track your customer service metrics and level up your customer experience.
The post 11 key customer service metrics appeared first on Webex Blog.