How to Improve Your Customer Service KPIs

KPIs is a short form for “Key Performance Indicators”. It is a metric used to determine customer satisfaction for the services rendered. In addition, KPIs are performance measurements that your customer service team and customer support management professionals can use to analyze, visualize, optimize, and monitor customer relations. 

By effectively utilizing these KPIs and creating a customer service KPI dashboard, you will undoubtedly improve your productivity, create an efficient customer service team, and monitor large amounts of data effortlessly.

Below are customer service key performance indicators and metrics that you should utilize:

1. Average Respond Time (ART)

To improve customer service KPIs, you may need an average response time. The ART helps you measure the time frame in which your customers are on hold. In other words, this is the wait time taken by your customer support team to respond to a customer call. 

Average response time plays a significant role in evaluating your team’s customer service performance. Bear in mind that this is the main factor that revolves around customer feedback and complaints. Therefore, to keep this response time low, you must consider additional staffing and a customer service team display dashboard. Enough customer service agents will handle all customer issues in record time.

2. First Call Resolution (FCR)

Another important customer service KPI that can improve your customer services is the first contact resolution or first call resolution (FCR). This customer service metric helps avoid customers calling over and over for the same problem. FCR tracks your support agents’ efficiency in resolving customers’ issues on their first calls. 

Furthermore, this first call resolution rate helps you know your agent’s knowledge base in addressing problems without having to return or transfer the call. So, their good first call resolution rate will improve the average handle time, enhance customer experience, and increase customer loyalty. It also helps to achieve a higher customer retention rate.

3. Customer Churn

Customer churn is also referred to as attrition. It is one of the top customer support KPIs that needs continuous attention, not to mention meticulous analysis. Customer churn gives you a reason to evaluate and analyze why your customers are no longer using your products or services. Make sure to monitor your customer churn over a certain period to find out the real cause of higher resolution rates in a bid to improve future results. 

4. Top Support Agents

With these performance metrics, you can easily find out who among your customer support agent is a star. The top support agents enable you to assess the performance of each agent accurately. 

You can do the assessment by reviewing various customer service metrics in order to evaluate their first-to-call resolution rate, customer satisfaction survey, and the number of customer calls they handle in an hour. Take enough time from your schedule to track these key support metrics and find an accurate ranking of your customer support agents.

5. Customer Satisfaction

This customer satisfaction key performance indicator gives you an insight into what your existing customers and new customers think about you. Keep in mind that your main goal as a business owner is to see satisfied customers. In this regard, your team’s performance should give a good impression of your business. 

As you may know, happy customers recommend you to their friends, while an angry customer discourages everyone from buying your goods or services. This calls for the customer satisfaction score by conducting regular satisfaction surveys on social media, via email, call center, chatbots, follow-ups, or through employee engagement with customers. 

6. Net Promote Score (NPS)

NPS is one of the customer support metrics that you can apply to improve customer service KPIs. NPS can help you evaluate the ability of your referrals. For this reason, you should expect responses to come in three groups that include detractors, passives, and promoters. 

Higher NPS figures should trigger you to improve your customer service experience, while the lower ones should remind you that you are on the right track. NPS is somehow correlated with business growth, so use it to make your company grow. An international benchmark company like Apple with a net promoter score of 75 is a perfect example to look up to. 

7. Customer Effort Score (CES)

In addition to metrics such as customer satisfaction score (CSAT), average handle time, average resolution time, and monthly recurring revenue rate, customer effort scores can help you improve customer service KPIs. CES provides valuable feedback based on your customer experience. 

This important customer support metric for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies makes it easy for your customers to get services or products from your company. Just like the CSAT score, the CES score needs to be at a lower rate to make your customers happy.

Final Thought

The frontline team of your customer service professionals is a determining factor in customer retention. As such, you need to train your staff on the ways to improve customer service KPIs. Apart from the above-mentioned metrics, you may consider metrics such as numbers of new tickets, number of resolved tickets, support tickets, ticket resolution rate, conversion rates, and abandonment rates.