CX (customer experience) starts with exceptional customer service and impacts sales, as it influences every point of customer contact and matters across every touchpoint with customers. Due to negative experiences, 52% of US consumers switched providers within a year due to bad experiences. You can track where clients benefit and where improvements need to be made by using appropriate metrics.
Tracking customer service metrics in 2024 is like keeping tabs on the vital signs of your business; its significance cannot be understated. Customer service metrics provide invaluable insights that help increase customer loyalty and your bottom line. Still, with so many available, it may take time to decide which to prioritize to provide customers with a great experience. Here in this blog, we outline all critical key metrics so you can immediately add them to your customer service strategy.
Customer Service Metrics
Customer service metrics measure customer happiness and show whether customers buy more, respond well to, and advocate for your brand. Relationship metrics give insight into buyers' interactions with your company. They assist customer support teams in gauging customer churn and retention levels and whether buyers would recommend your product to others.
What Is The Importance Of Customer Service Metrics?
Even if you're doing fantastic sales and marketing campaigns to improve the user or shopping experiences for your consumers, you will only be able to gauge your performance or identify areas for improvement once you track the results of your efforts. There is much importance of Customer service metrics, not to mention the squandered money, time, and energy. They can respond to queries about performance, such as:
- How well-oiled are the support staff to deliver top-notch service?
- To what extent do our consumers connect with the core messaging of our brand, product, or service?
- What are our clients' accurate opinions about us?
- To what extent do we facilitate consumer engagement?
- To what extent are our organization's sales procedures efficient?
The Top Ten Metrics To Track In Customer Service
Here are top ten metrics to track in customer service:
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer satisfaction, or CSAT for short, is a widely used KPI that measures how happy consumers are with your business's goods and services. CSAT is an experience measure that focuses on particular aspects of the customer experience by asking many questions.
Alternatively, it may inquire about how helpful the helper was or how happy you were with the delivery process. After that, the client is given a scale of 1 to 5 to record their response. How to quantify it: To find the percentage of pleased customers, compute the number of satisfied customers [those who replied with 4s and 5s] / number of survey replies) times 100.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
A Customer Effort Score is an experience measurement used to quantify how much effort customers must expend to resolve issues or requests, requests fulfilled, products purchase or questions answered. Customers tend to favor brands that make doing business more accessible for them, and by reducing customer effort, you will create a superior experience for them.
How to Measure It: In your customer surveys, ask questions that require numerical information as answers and then calculate scores to get an average. For instance, if asked: "On a scale of 1-7, how much effort was involved in getting your question answered?," you would take an average number to summarize all data points into one value.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS stands for Net Promoter Score, often considered the "gold standard" customer experience metric. NPS scores can be measured using a single-question survey and reported in numbers from 0-100; higher is desirable. Customers are divided into promoters (scoring 9 or 10), passive customers (scoring 8-9) and detractors (0-6), giving you a clear picture of loyalty to your organization.
How to Measure it: Calculate the ratio between Detractors (percent) and Promoters (percent). The result will give your Net Promoter Score, or NPS for short. In an ideal world, this Number should come as close to 100 as possible, and your score can change over time by checking it at intervals.
Social Media Metrics
Customers express both frustrations and praise via social media; unfortunately, few brands take note of them and respond quickly creating an unpleasant, one-way experience for customers. By gathering social media experience metrics data, you know when and how to respond to customer comments on social media channels and gain an understanding of their feedback so you can put systems in place that address issues more quickly while keeping what works in place, common indicators of performance could include:
Over time, brand mentions may bring about negative comments or technical account questions from clients or prospective customers. Here, you could list several questions that could be addressed through other support materials.
Read More: Empathy In Customer Service: Worth $10K? Connect Now!
Customer Churn
In its essence, customer churn (also referred to as customer attrition) occurs when customers choose not to utilize your products and services anymore. Measuring this experience metric can be difficult due to no single predictor for it - such as declining repeat purchases and purchase amounts) being key indicators; additionally, their customer journey experience provides invaluable data that allows one to determine whether they may churn. Assuming recent customer visits have declined and they gave lower NPS scores after their latest experience, these customers may present an increased likelihood of leaving.
How To Measure It: Determine the variables that could lead to a customer's departure and track these variables month by month. Also, consider what steps must be taken to keep your customers and any underlying issues that need resolving.
The First Reaction Time
Research indicates that 77% of consumers view respecting customers' time as the top factor in delivering an outstanding customer experience. Customers expect a quick reply When they reach out with queries or issues. Hence, tracking response times provides useful operational metrics to ensure customer queries are addressed swiftly.
As much as an automated reply will demonstrate to customers that their feedback has been noted and acknowledged, what truly counts when responding to customer inquiries or concerns is how quickly and efficiently you act on that feedback. Use these benchmarks as guidelines when responding to customer issues:
- Email or online forms - 24 hours or less for reply
- Social Media (60 minutes, 3 min)
- Phone (3 minutes)
- Live Chat/ Messaging (1 to 15 seconds)
How To Calculate It: Calculate (Time of Response - Customer Request Time). This will give your first Response Rate [in minutes/hours/days], and try your hardest to beat it.
Resolution Rate Analysis
When dealing with customers, your goal should always be to close the loop and resolve their complaints or questions as quickly and satisfactorily as possible. Failing to do this may make them reluctant to do business with you again, and lower customer loyalty levels can have serious repercussions for future transactions. Rising resolution rates indicate the effectiveness of customer support teams; taking note of this operational metric could yield immense returns in business success.
First Contact Resolution Rate
Customers prefer having their issues solved quickly on the first contact point with any agent; thus, the first-contact resolution rate measures how often cases require only one contact from customers for resolution. An FCR rate that exceeds 90% can be an excellent operational metric to monitor. As its name implies, an increased FCR rate typically indicates reduced customer effort required when they only need to contact your organization once.
Calculation Method: To measure the first contact resolution rate, calculate the Number of incidents resolved on initial contact / total incidents).
Customer Ticket Request Volume
Though customer interaction and ticketing systems can benefit business operations, receiving too many requests could indicate something more concerning is happening within your operation. Tracking this operational metric regularly could reveal these problems before they become full-scale problems.
How To Calculate: Compare support ticket counts month over month or week over week; pay particular attention to whether there is an upsurge after new product/feature releases.
Average Ticket Handling Time
Handling time measures the total time an agent spends working on one case; the shorter the duration, the more efficient your team is. But be wary of solely measuring this metric; too often, agents rush through customer tickets without providing quality service in exchange for this shortfall in performance metrics.
How To Calculate It: Your goal should be reducing handling times so your agents are more productive. Implement a time tracking system where agents manually or automatically track how long each ticket takes them to process; review average handling time over two weeks and four months and compare with last year's data to see whether any long-term changes exist.
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Conclusion
Customer experience and service go far beyond monitoring metrics alone; action must also be taken to make the insights you gain helpful to improve outsourced customer service. Instead of simply looking at numbers, metrics must serve as a way of monitoring customer relationship health rather than as the endpoint for all your efforts in building customer loyalty.
Metrics alone will only get you so far; to maximize their power, use these to inform a customer experience program with action at its core and track its impact afterward - this is how to optimize customer service metrics. Before trying to improve service standards, it's crucial that you first understand where they currently stand. By measuring key customer service metrics, you will gain a comprehensive view of where your existing standards stack up against industry benchmarks and where there may be room for improvement.
