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Top 10 KPI's for customer service

Written by Harry Dix  | 

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Top 10 KPI's for customer service

It is no secret that optimizing your customer service can have a large, positive impact on your organization, with benefits including increased customer loyalty, reduced customer service costs, and increased revenue growth (through retention and upsell).

However, at a time where more and more data is collected, analyzed, and digested it can be a challenge to choose which metrics to measure in order to track performance and make improvements.

Of course, every customer service organization is unique and while some metrics will certainly be organization-specific there are certain customer service KPI’s that are helpful to track and measure as a baseline from which you can expand your list in line with your goals and needs.

At GoodData, we’ve seen hundreds of implementations of customer service analytics and as such, we wanted to share the most important KPIs we’ve observed. So, let’s take a look at ten of the top metrics to measure:

1. Number of New Tickets

One of the most obvious customer service KPIs to measure is the number of new tickets. It is incredibly important to measure how many new tickets are being generated every day, week, month, and quarter. This enables managers to understand if new tickets are correlated to product launches and if they have enough employee bandwidth. Managers can also see how tickets have compared historically.

2. Number of Resolved Tickets

With every new ticket comes (hopefully!) a resolved ticket. During a given timeline, if your organization receives more tickets than it can resolve, then your backlog will grow. Understanding this performance over time will enable managers to optimize and streamline their customer service team’s performance.

3. Average Resolution Time

We understand that average resolution time is not a perfect metric. However, this tends to be a support KPI that is extremely useful to track over time. As your business grows or has issues, managers need to understand the general trend of how long the ticket resolution rate is. This enables them to ask and answer questions like: How long will it take to reduce my backlog this quarter? Why has my average resolution time gone up 50% over the last quarter? Understanding the average resolution time can help understand how to make customer service more efficient.

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4. Number of Tickets by Medium

Historically, you may have seen most of your tickets issued through call centers. Most consumers were conditioned to call a customer support number. However, more and more customers have now turned to contact forms, e-mail, and chat consoles. Knowing where your customer service team should invest more resources helps address customer issues quickly leading to happier customers.

5. Top 10 Customers by Active Tickets

Do you know which customers you need to pay the most attention to? This is important not only to reduce your ticket backlog, but it also helps with customer satisfaction and retention. If you can identify your customers and how many tickets they have, you may be able to answer multiple questions at once. As a result, you can increase your customer service team's efficiency and strengthen your relationship with the customer.

Top 10 Customers by Active Tickets

6. Response Time by First Reply

How long does it take for you to get back to customers? Minutes, hours, days? Customers expect a high level of engagement from their vendors. Even if you can't solve their problem during your first response, just letting the customer know that you have acknowledged the problem builds trust. Over time, as your organization becomes more and more efficient, this number should continue to trend down.

7. Average Handle Time

Even if you do respond quickly to an issue, how long is your average handle time? Acknowledging the issue is only half the battle. Customers should be kept in the loop of any resolution that your team is working towards. There should be many touchpoints and ultimately a quick resolution, if necessary or possible. A low average handle time may also be a customer satisfaction KPI.

8. Top Agents

Finding out who your top-performing agents is critical to building a healthy customer service organization. By measuring the number of tickets resolved, average handle times, and customer satisfaction - managers can benchmark agents. This not only creates a healthy level of competition, but it also identifies any agents that may need additional care to meet their job requirements.

9. Top Customers in Need

One customer service KPI that we mentioned before was finding out who your top 10 customers were. However, we’re not talking about your top 10 loyal customers, but top 10 customers most likely to churn. These customers may require a manager's attention. Or, they may have the most number of outstanding support requests, a significantly high handle time, or low customer satisfaction scores.

10. Customer Satisfaction Score

Outstanding customer service teams need to keep a constant pulse of their customer satisfaction (CSAT) score. This is the best measurement of how your service organization continues to perform. By providing an opportunity for customer feedback, managers can learn from the feedback to help them build and develop their customer service teams.

Customer Satisfaction Score

As mentioned, there are likely many more customer service KPIs that may be crucial for your customer service teams. At the end of the day, it's all about listening to your customer and doing whatever you can to assist them.

After all, it can cost up to 5 times to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, so it stands to reason that even if you have some customers that require a little more attention, it is certainly worth investing in your customer service department to improve the overall experience.

Before tracking any customer service metrics, make sure that your executives and managers are aligned on what to measure and what results you expect.

Learn more about customer service analytics

Interested in how GoodData can help you better track and improve customer satisfaction through analytics? Read how Zendesk does just that in their customer case study, or request a demo and let our team of experts take you on a guided your of the GoodData Platform.

Why not try our 30-day free trial?

Fully managed, API-first analytics platform. Get instant access — no installation or credit card required.

Get started

Written by Harry Dix  | 

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Go back to Blog's hub Blog   |   tags:  

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