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

Using this metric helps a company measure the effectiveness of its team when it comes to the promptness of support staff and whether teams have enough resources to respond to requests on time. Delays in response time can negatively affect a customer’s interaction with a business, making it one of the most monitored customer service KPIs. Trader Joe’s are likely able to excel because they monitor critical metrics related to the service they provide.

Thankfully, these identifiers are already accounted for by customer support software and other relevant solutions as part of their built-in reporting and analytics features. This article centers on the definition of KPIs, their difference with metrics, and the ideal performance indicators for customer support. It also shines the proverbial spotlight on their relevance in regard to customer satisfaction and some of the best customer support software that can help you analyze KPIs.

It is a key performance indicator used to evaluate IT support teams’ responsiveness. SLA Compliance is worth tracking because it can directly impact customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the organization’s overall reputation. Customers receiving the support promised in their SLA are more likely to be satisfied and loyal to the organization, leading to increased customer retention and revenue. A high backlog can indicate that the IT support team is overwhelmed, leading to delayed resolution times and poor customer satisfaction.

You can minimize AHT by decreasing time your customers are waiting and optimizing each back-and-forth interaction. Using hybrid support models, like human+AI vs. purely human agents can significantly help reduce wasted seconds. When you’re tracking the right KPIs, you get an undoctored, objective view of your team’s performance, which increasingly, has an impact on a company’s bottom line. To calculate the AHT, you must divide the total time spent handling inquiries or requests by the total number of tickets. To calculate TTR, subtract the time at which the customer made the request from the time at which the issue was resolved.

Also, metrics apply only to past performance and not future action, which is best handled by forecasting or predictive analysis. While monitoring all these KPIs can become overwhelming, especially for small businesses, programs like Plectoare effective for keeping track of KPIs. Plecto is an engagement and motivation platform that enables companies to build custom KPIs while providing real-time reports, contests, and achievements for their staff. While they offer solutions for customer service, the all-encompassing platform has assistance for other departments like sales, marketing, and development.

While others might be tracking first contact resolution or handle time, if these don’t relate to a team’s support philosophy or goals in a meaningful way, then it’s best not to make them into KPIs. Instead, you can club this metric with other metrics like resolution SLA or average handle time to understand the capacity of work an agent can handle without compromising on quality or speed. The fix to a poor resolution SLA lies in equipping agents with better training and resources to handle complex customer issues. As a last resort, you can revisit your SLA strategy and ensure the deadlines are achievable. To add on, you can get insights about agent brandwidth by taking a look at this metric against the total number of tickets (more on this later).

If you haven’t worked with these metrics at your startup, this article will help you understand what customer service KPIs are, why they matter, which ones to track, and how to interpret the results. For your service level, you can track as many KPIs for customer service as you wish – but what you should aim for is to honor the services you agreed upon and even exceed the targets. Just like the net promoter score, https://chat.openai.com/ the customer effort score is directly linked to satisfaction rates and business growth, hence the need to lower this figure as much as you can. We also apply a weighted KPI model, which applies different emphasis to different metrics. This means that if you have a bad week on one data point (say volume of conversations pulled), you can make up for this by exceeding in another (100% customer satisfaction, perhaps).

But if you want more options than what was indicated here, feel free to view our list of customer support software and help desk platforms. Insights have to be derived from the data, from which plans are formed to augment any identified pain point. It’s best that you check if the software you’re planning to purchase tracks all the KPIs that are relevant to your business, so you wouldn’t have to worry about setting and monitoring them. Some even provide insights to let users focus on improving their operations, not the nitty-gritty. NPS is designed to measure the likelihood of your customers to recommend your brand, product, or service to others. It can be a pop-up form on your website or part of a survey distributed during certain periods.

A service desk, often automated, is a program that manages the communication between a company and its customers. Most platforms give businesses a collaborative system with features that include a shared inbox, canned responses and actions, app integrations, and advanced metrics reporting. The number of tickets by medium KPI refers to the number of tickets per different channels customers use to reach out to support teams. For example, the total number of individual tickets opened over the phone, via email, live chat, or social media. Average resolution time is how long it takes to solve a support ticket from start to finish, and the length of time usually varies based on the complexity of the issue.

#2 Average handle time (AHT)

Share them with your team and get their buy-in by explaining the “why” behind the KPIs and how it will help them become more skilled agents. The software provides a KPI dashboard and reports that allow you to view critical data at a glance without manually compiling information. Conversations handled by a rep are simply the number of conversations or interactions each support agent handles within a specified time frame, usually a day. The resolution rate should be viewed within the context of the number of reopened tickets because, on its own, it can paint an incomplete picture. For example, you may find that someone with a high resolution rate has subsequently reopened many of the closed tickets. Over 50 percent of customers will switch to a competitor after a single unsatisfactory customer experience.

With more companies turning to AI, it’s important to understand the relevant KPIs for virtual agents. You can create your own dashboard, or access out-of-the-box data platforms from agent desk software like Salesforce, Zendesk, Gladly or Freshdesk, among other customer experience management platforms. This is also a key performance indicator for determining overall customer loyalty to your brand, so the implications of good customer retention go beyond repeat purchases. Incident Severity measures the impact of an IT incident on the organization’s operations, services, or customers. It categorizes incidents based on the level of disruption or impact they have on the business. To calculate Ticket Volume, you need to track the number of tickets the support team receives over a specific period.

Whereas CSAT and CES are more granular and transactional (especially CES), NPS is strictly about measuring your full relationship with the customer. We know that these are the eight metrics that matter most because the empirical evidence from thousands of service and support benchmarks supports this conclusion. If at some point they reach an unusually high percentage, it might be good to dig deeper. Monitor the customer churn over time and see what causes higher rates in order to improve the results in the future. Compare this KPI to others such as the agent utilization or the ticket handle time to extract deeper conclusions about costs and how to lower them. We set numbers as a necessary bar to ensure quality, but acknowledge the importance of what can’t be measured, knowing that a more accurate, more human measurement of performance relies on both.

Average First Response Time (AFRT)

In your InvGate Service Desk reports, you can select “Priority” to see how many tickets are critical, high, medium, and low. For example, if an agent spends 6 hours out of an 8-hour workday on support-related activities, their agent utilization rate would be 75%. Pay careful attention to low scores and follow-up to determine why customers are dissatisfied.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a special set of metrics that help determine whether business is going in the right or wrong direction. At first glance, it seems that customer service KPI scores take a backseat to traditional business KPIs, like profits, costs and regional sales. However, key customer support metrics may paint a more complete picture of success for the long-term viability of a business.

Customer service is the backbone of every business, as its relationship with its customers directly affects its success. You can easily assign ownership over an email, so everyone knows who’s responsible for handling a support ticket. There’s no confusion over who should reply, which prevents multiple or no replies and ensures customers remain happy. You can’t improve your KPIs if your team has no knowledge of what those KPIs even are.

Whenever analyst utilization rates approach 60–70 percent, a service desk will experience relatively high analyst turnover because they are pushing the analysts too hard. Extremely high utilization leads to burnout, higher turnover, higher absenteeism, and lower morale in the service desk. A customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is a customer service report that measures how well a company’s products, services, and overall customer experience meet customer expectations. CSAT scores are crucial because a higher score typically reflects a higher customer retention rate and lower customer churn. Nine times out of ten, when customer satisfaction is lagging, you can achieve significant improvements by increasing first-contact resolution. This is why world-class support organizations pay so much attention to this metric.

To improve KPIs like average resolution time and customer satisfaction, agents must be trained to deliver the best customer support. For example, Front measures crucial support KPIs including email volume, CSAT score, resolution time, and response time, as well as other email trends for each rep or across your entire team. This data is accessible via customizable analytics reports you can use to make crucial decisions like when to hire, whether training is needed, and how many staff to have on shift. By attentively monitoring these KPIs, you can analyze your current customer service operations and easily identify which changes need to be made in order to optimize team performance. With an all-encompassing view of the key figures that shape success, businesses can provide customers with exceptional satisfaction at any given time.

Calculations of this indicator can include a variety of factors such as employee wages, license fees for software, equipment and technology expenses, and agent’s training just to name a few. An ideal situation would be to have low costs and high satisfaction rates for all your communication channels; however, this is not always the case. Monitoring this measurement closely can help you paint an accurate picture of your situation and find improvement opportunities to ensure you remain profitable.

Crucially, though, we understand that while we consider them separately, they are not distinct but complementary – mastery of the soft skills contributes to success in the conventional KPIs. Companies are starting to bring AI into their workforce to automate and augment support. The companies that leverage AI-powered virtual assistants are seeing upticks in customer satisfaction and other KPIs. With the pressure to resolve tickets quicker, agents on digital channels like live chat and social messaging are often carrying on multiple conversations at the same time. To determine CES, you’ll ask your customers, On a scale from “Very Easy” to “Very Difficult”, how was your experience?

Why are service desk KPIs and metrics important?

To calculate this metric, add all the time your support reps took to respond to tickets and divide that by the total number of tickets. For example, let’s say employee A took 20 seconds to respond to a ticket, employee B took 15 seconds, and employee C took 30 seconds. The first response time would be 65 seconds divided by three, or 21.67 seconds. Average resolution time is the time it takes a customer service representative to solve a support ticket once it gets created.

Plus, to really make KPIs count, the data must be used to assess performance and drive action. Some KPIs will mostly be meaningful to one role or department, while others will be more relevant to the rest of the business, notably, those ones that tie in most directly with overall company KPIs. Implementing a writing-box can also be a good way to receive qualitative feedback that helps you know what is working. NPS can be an indicator of growth potential for a company because peer recommendations carry so much weight in our society that is social media-obsessed. Track where your customers are reaching out from in order to optimize staffing and prioritize channels that would benefit most from technologies like automation.

To decrease resolution time and first response rate, companies can simply hire more agents. However, hiring an army of new agents to work around-the-clock and man all of the traditional and emerging support channels is cost prohibitive for most companies. You must also consider costs for human agent desk platforms, overhead costs, paid time off, sick days and more.

You can collect feedback from customers right after they’ve had certain touchpoints or interactions with your company, like making a purchase or contacting the service team. Investing in an omnichannel customer service software that streamlines conversations from different channels into a single view helps ensure that agents can offer seamless support across channels with ease. Agents will also be empowered to deliver context-rich solutions that can improve customer satisfaction and business performance KPIs. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an important metric for your business because it measures loyalty.

To provide a better experience, it’s important to identify opportunities for improvement in your customer support team. The goal is to keep the churn rate minimal, but it happens in every company so you don’t need to panic immediately. In our example, we have visualized the monthly customer churn rate over the course of almost a year and, in this case, calculations include cancellations and downgrades. You can instantaneously spot which months performed best and which ones encountered issues. We can see that October is showing particularly higher churn rates and this information enables us to dig deeper and discover why.

In addition, we recommend adding financial metrics to have an overview of the economic impact of your IT support operations. It’s important to balance AHT with other metrics, such as Customer Satisfaction and First Contact Resolution Rate. For example, an IT support representative may be able to handle requests quickly. Still, if they don’t provide effective solutions or customers are not satisfied with their interactions, AHT alone may not provide a complete picture of the quality of the IT support services. Customer Effort Score measures the ease or difficulty of a customer’s experience when interacting with an organization’s support team.

An increasing trend in the number of unplanned changes indicates the inadequate planning of changes and questions the efficiency of the change management process. Therefore, the change management process has to be improved to ensure proper planning and execution of changes. For example, a more abstract concept like employee satisfaction can be made quantitative by surveying employees periodically or by measuring employee attrition. 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.

Customer support software ProProfs Help Desk is an award-winning ticketing system designed to help support teams provide fast, efficient, and quality customer service for free. On the backend, this help desk solution is equipped with the right tools to help team managers keep track of their teams’ performance to ensure that they consistently deliver excellent customer service. Our Freshdesk reviews gave this award-winning help desk software high marks on the strength of its ease-of-use and robust features. Customer support software Zendesk allows support agents to effortlessly track, prioritize, and solve customer interactions across multiple channels.

Total breaches measure the total support tickets that didn’t meet service level agreements (SLAs). For example, suppose your company policy is to respond to all customer complaints within 24 hours, and out of 100 complaints, you do this 60 times. At a very basic level, this is the question key performance indicators (KPIs) aim to answer. KPIs are measurements that track your company and departmental performance against specific goals and strategic objectives. You can calculate cost per resolution by dividing the total cost of customer support by the issues resolved in a given period. In addition to setting the right KPIs, it’s important to objectively assess team performance, understand how different activities impact their goals, and identify ways to improve.

What’s more, service desk KPI reports can be set up to be automatically generated and distributed regularly, eliminating the need for manual reporting by agents and managers. For example, if an IT support team received 100 support requests and 10 of them were escalated to higher levels of support, the escalation rate would be 10%. To calculate the CES score, you add the total number of customers who rated their experience as “very easy” or “somewhat easy” and divide it by the total number of respondents. The resulting score can range from 0 to 100, with a higher score indicating a lower level of customer effort required. In that case, it may indicate that the team needs more resources to handle the workload or that there are underlying issues causing a higher-than-average number of incidents or requests. Christopher Robinson is a senior productivity research analyst who specializes in optimizing online collaboration and project management using Scrum and agile approaches.

Furthermore, several other volume licenses were replaced, leading to cost cuts saving the company about one million dollars in their software license purchases. In fact, the company had limited information on the software assets and the number and type of assets the organization actually needed. This, again, put the organization at the risk of over-licensing, under-licensing, and compliance penalties. Here is a simple three-phase technique to get your IT help desk team resolving tickets in the first call. One of the world’s leading financial institutions was able to improve its stability by reducing their major incidents. This reduction in the number of incidents was achieved by improving their root cause analysis process.

To measure consistency, use AI to analyze how agents respond to different people reaching out with the same query and flag discrepancies. ROI stands for Return on Investment, which measures the efficiency of an investment. Organizations use it to evaluate the financial returns of investments in IT infrastructure, software, or other technology-related projects.

If a customer service metric doesn’t directly affect progress toward a business goal, then it’s just a metric, not a KPI. For example, a business goal or objective might be to decrease customer churn. A KPI related to this goal could be measuring customer satisfaction following service interactions or the number of issues resolved in the first contact. The service level calculates your capacity to complete the standards set in the service level agreement provided to your customers. It is an ensemble of services agreed upon as a standard that your company is committed to maintaining. For instance, you stated to answer 70% of the email requests you receive within 1 business day.

Typically after an experience with support staff, customers are encouraged to fill out a survey based on their experience. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Customer Satisfaction Scores(CSAT) show how happy customers are with the service provided and how well customer service team members handle customer issues and complaints. Customer retention measures a company’s ability to retain customers over time. It’s one of the more important metrics to know because customer retention is integral to your success as a company. The key to getting any benefit, though, is choosing the right key performance indicators, tracking them over time, and using the right strategies for improvement like training agents and introducing automation. Many support teams choose the right KPIs but don’t track them throughout the year.

These measurements can live in harmony – you just have to find the balance and make a call on what you value. If you can find a way to measure more than just the numbers, you will have a more holistic and smarter indication of performance. We also have a set of team KPIs, which our global support team works towards achieving. Not only does this help to align performance across multiple offices, but it also unites the team in their efforts and means that reps around the world very much feel part of the same team. While this might sound very basic, you need to have the right systems in place to actually measure the business-critical KPIs before you can look to improve them. If you use multiple engagement platforms, make sure all of the data is analyzed together to provide a true picture of how your support engine is performing.

Average handle time (AHT) is similar to average resolution time, but there is a slight difference. Send a survey asking customers to rate how easy your company made it to resolve their issue. With a basic understanding of KPIs and why you should track them, let’s look at the top 12 KPIs support teams should track across three core categories.

Low agent utilization rates may indicate that the support team needs to be more efficient. On the other hand, high agent utilization rates may tell that support staff is overworked, leading to burnout and decreased quality of work. For example, Ticket Resolution Rate and Average Response Time (metrics) show whether the team is meeting its goal of increasing customer satisfaction for the quarter (KPI). And if further training is needed, ProProfs Help Desk has a library of online training materials that they can access anywhere and anytime. The escalation rate is a percentage that represents the number of support tickets that escalate to a person with more experience or specialized knowledge. The person receiving the escalated ticket is typically a supervisor or manager.

Analyzing the reasons why customers contact support is just as important as how fast their issues are resolved. Monitoring customer-reported issues can help you determine gaps in your instruction and training materials. If you find a pattern or that folks are reporting the same issue, it may be a sign of a larger problem.

• By maximizing this customer service KPI, you can reduce costs, or assign them to other channels that will grow your business.
• An ideal situation would be to have low costs and high satisfaction rates for all your communication channels; however, this is not always the case.
• You can calculate this metric by determining the average time to solve all tickets over a specified time range.
• Today’s customers prefer getting quality, personalized, and seamless customer service, even if they have to wait for a bit.
• You can also use this data to adjust your training practices and help set up your team for success.

Its robust features that enable support teams to deliver quality services include SLA views, custom ticket fields, ticket forms, and an admin interface available in more than 40 languages. Besides, Zendesk supports seamless channel integration allowing teams to connect with customers through mobile, web, email, Twitter, or Facebook. Automating these workflows can free agents from these repetitive tasks and also positively impact KPIs such as average handle time, and the number of tickets resolved.

Businesses today opt for omnichannel experiences, and volume by channel can help you keep track of where your customers are contacting you. Customer service KPIs can provide insight into the effectiveness of your customer support. During such scenarios, IT service desk teams must understand the requirements of the business, and redefine their SLAs as appropriate. Another major indication of stability is the recurrence of major incidents on the IT infrastructure, which can lead to service disruptions or service level deterioration. A major incident, by definition, is a high-impact, high-urgency incident that affects a large number of users, depriving the business of one or two key services.

With this information in hand, businesses will then have the power to make educated decisions on how best to augment their customer service operations for maximum success. It’s now widely understood that for support teams, the stakes have never been higher. People are increasingly making their buying decisions based on the support they receive. Customers will stop doing business with a company after one poor customer support experience. To do that, there are specific customer service key performance indicators that need to be monitored on an ongoing basis in order to adjust processes or optimize agent training. ITIL service desk metrics are essential because they provide a way to measure and track the performance of support teams and the quality of their services.

This customer service KPI tracks the perceived effort customers felt they had to make, including how much time it takes to resolve issues and the total number of interactions involved. A growing retention rate is what every company should aim for, and that’s why it should be amongst the main support metrics Chat PG to measure. A general positive brand image and high satisfaction score will directly increase your customer retention. In this article, you will find a detailed rundown of the essential customer service KPIs, critical for agents, managers, and leaders in companies that deal with customers on a daily basis.

The first call resolution rate is one of the most important customer service performance metrics to track. It measures the efficiency of your team to resolve an issue on the first call. It is an indicator used to know how good your agents are at understanding and addressing a problem without needing to transfer or return the call. There are several ways to optimize this customer service KPI, starting with training your agents in their communication skills. Providing them scripts and customer surveys, and putting a clear process in place are also best practices you should consider if you want to increase your first call resolution rate. Implementing a knowledge base gathering all the customers’ issues and how they got addressed is also a good thing to do in the long run.

In order to ensure this high standard across a global team, KPIs help us to identify areas for improvement and to celebrate successes. To calculate cost per resolution, take your total monthly operating expense (salaries, technology, training, licenses, overhead, office supplies, etc.) and divide it by the total number of tickets. If you have a high cost per ticket, or notice that it is increasing, you’ll need to look for ways to bring efficiency to your group. This could come in the kpi for support team form of new training and employee performance review, a need to review systems used like agent desk platforms or the need to adopt new technologies. Measuring employee satisfaction with their job, processes and team can alert you to any issues or attrition risks, and as a result retain your agents (and keep recruiting, training and onboarding costs at bay). Take frequent employee surveys, have 1-on-1 check-ins and encourage open communication to understand your employee satisfaction.

Some of the primary levers you have for driving job satisfaction, and hence analyst engagement, include training, coaching, and career pathing. Dig deeper into weeks with high resolution times and identify roadblocks such as a lack of agent training or not enough staff to cover demand. An article in the Los Angeles Times has referred to customer service agents as the “punching bag” on the front lines. The article focuses on the airline industry, but I would argue that agents across all industries deal with difficult customers daily. According to the publication, “Agents are subjected to verbal abuse almost daily. It’s a thankless job requiring patience and thick skin.” Agents often bear the brunt when something goes wrong – whether it’s a missing ingredient in a meal-kit, a lost bag, or lost package.

In his work, he always emphasizes the need for distributed work training and the formation of efficient work habits. His work was mentioned in various business publications, including Entrepreneur and InfoQ. He has been cooperating with the FinancesOnline team for 5 years now, and his publications always focus on practical aspects of productivity tools that can have an actual, transformative impact on a company. It allows you to quantify the efficiency of your day-to-day operations across your support team and ensures your customers’ issues are being dealt with expeditiously. KPI is used to measure performance and success, while metrics are simply numbers within a KPI that help track performance and progress. KPIs are usually initiated by high-level decision-makers in the organization based on metrics extracted and organized by activity or process.