What Are KPIs? Defining Key Performance Indicators 2023

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. 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. Getting back to your customers quickly is one thing, but how long it takes for you to actually resolve an issue is even more important. You’ll want to carefully review the interactions for people who responded with low scores to analyze what went wrong to update procedures and responses or conduct additional agent training.

Contact resolution rate (CRR), also known as first-contact resolution (FCR rate), is a customer service critical metric that measures the percentage of customer issues resolved on the first contact. This means that the problem is resolved without the need for any further interaction with the support team. By monitoring and tracking these performance indicators, managers can gain insight into the success of their customer service teams and make educated decisions to boost customer experience. Analyzing KPIs for the customer service teams is an essential initiative that provides businesses with valuable insights into how employees are interacting with customers and addressing questions quickly. With this data, decision-makers can make wise decisions to ensure improved client satisfaction rates, extended retention levels, and heightened profitability.

Cost Per Conversation

You know abandoned call rates are a major part of measuring KPI for customer satisfaction. When customers have to wait for a long time to get in touch with the agent, it becomes frustrating for them. It provides analytics and helps to gain insights from the data collected. The insights can be used further to engage customers in the right way and improve sales conversion. If a metric highlights an issue, there should be a clear path for the customer service team to address and resolve the underlying problem. You should prioritize metrics that reflect the customer’s perspective, such as customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score.

• To determine the customer effort score, ask your customer to rate their resolution experience on a scale from easy to difficult.
• 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.
• Maybe you don’t have a proper system for logging, routing, and closing tickets.
• 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.
• This could be how long it takes them to find an answer in your knowledge base, get a resource from your support team, or any amount of time spent interacting with your company.

A good KPI can give you a sense of whether you’re on track to achieve your strategic goals. 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.

Conversation metrics

CSAT measures a customer’s happiness with a company’s products or services. To determine satisfaction levels, organizations will usually send surveys immediately after a customer interacts with an agent. Similarly, high ticket volumes around a specific topic are worth keeping tabs on and investigating. If the topic is your product, it may indicate a product issue that needs fixing.

Plus, you will have an easier time holding agents accountable to standards if they’re written down. You can, and should, regularly update your rubric as you dig into data to understand what ticket qualities actually produce the best results. Ticket quality isn’t a metric on its own, but it’s a metric you can create to score your agents’ tickets and work toward a consistent quality of response. Divide the number of customers who contact your customer service team for help over the course of a month by the number of total customers. Customer contact rate measures the percentage of active customers who contact support each day, month, or year.

However, key customer support metrics may paint a more complete picture of success for the long-term viability of a business. It is usually measured by dividing the number of customers doing repeated business/purchases by the total number of customers. It is an important metric as it is well known that retaining a customer is less expensive than acquiring a new one. By maximizing this customer service KPI, you can reduce costs, or assign them to other channels that will grow your business.

Does your team struggle with addressing each and every customer’s problem within a reasonable time period? Consider adding knowledge base management and self-service tools, such as customer service chatbots, to your website. Customer churn is the percentage of customers who stop doing business with you over a certain period of time. It’s usually expressed as a monthly kpi for support team or yearly rate, and it can be a good predictor of future business performance. Interestingly, this is also a good internal metric for self-assessment of customer service teams themselves. In the context of customer service, many support departments use a variant of NPS called Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) to measure employees’ happines with their job.