Key metrics KPIs for support and customer service team

It is an inevitable fact that support costs can be managed by a well-trained team and adjusting the staffing schedule according to your business needs. When you measure this customer service metric over time and analyze how your trend is – if the percentage is unusually high. From a customer’s perspective, being transferred to another agent or department may create frustration and lengthen the time it takes to get their inquiry resolved. This can quickly turn into a customer service horror story, especially if your customers have to explain the same problem multiple times to several different support team members.

Agents don’t need to spend time searching for information and can see who’s handling a customer support request at any given time. They can also keep a pulse on the support queue and jump in when needed. Customers, in turn, benefit from faster and better service quality, improving overall satisfaction. Customer support KPIs are a series of measurements which allow a company to track the success of their operations in relation to achieving their goals or objectives.

It could also tell you whether or not they’d return with a question or concern, based on the questions you ask. It also provides the tools essential for great customer service, like live chat, knowledge base, popup editor, and email automation. Sign up for a free trial and see how your business can benefit from it. Average time to resolution (ATR) is a customer service metric that measures the average amount of time it takes to resolve a customer inquiry.

Measuring help desk metrics is essential to ensure support teams perform at their best. To make a CSAT survey, you will need to create a list of questions about your customer’s satisfaction with your service or product. You can send CSAT surveys manually or with a customer service tool like Gorgias to automatically send CSAT surveys to customers within a specified time. The number of support tickets your customer support team converts into a purchase shows the value of your customer support team in cold, hard cash.

CUSTOMER CHURN

Even if you can’t solve the issue immediately, send something as simple as ‘Our team is already looking into the issue, we’ll keep you updated’ and make users feel heard. Instead, gauging every aspect of your company operations will allow you to make critical adjustments in the execution to achieve your strategic goals faster. 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. A combination of realistic yet motivating KPIs plus a strong set of cultural values has helped us to strike this balance.

You can use this metric to get a better picture of each agent’s efforts. The most common method is to use a 1-10 scale and count the average score. Attend Zendesk Relate 2024 in Las Vegas to learn about the latest industry trends and product innovations, grow your skill set and influence, and exchange ideas with CX experts from around the world.

For one thing, people who are willing to recommend your brand to their friends and colleagues are one step closer to becoming your brand advocates and ambassadors. HelpCrunch also provides the ‘failed searches’ report, where you can instantly see the searches people did in your knowledge base but found nothing. It might feel a bit awkward at first, but remember that satisfied customers rarely leave reviews unless you ask them to. That’s why using the number of reviews as a customer KPI will motivate your team to push forward.

And fortunately, if you know what KPIs to look for, you can take highly intangible ideas and turn them into genuine analytics and insight. Plus, don’t forget that you can also customize your ITSM dashboard to keep track of your service desk performance in real time. 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%.

The importance of measuring and tracking customer service metrics

As such, measuring your customer service KPIs is crucial to successful customer interactions. Trader Joe’s customers love the company so much that the chain has the highest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) score. To create a good average resolution time, you need the resources to respond to customers. Think of “average resolution time” as a good measure of the overall health of the entire customer support systems you have in place. Many customers are happy to wait patiently as you take care of something for them—but only if they don’t feel helpless.

Make sure to keep within the requirements of your service-level agreement (SLA) and offer a good support experience. You can also use a weighted average, which gives more weight to responses from customers who had a recent interaction with customer service. This is because their feedback is more relevant and indicative of current happiness levels. Average resolution time is the time it takes a customer service representative to solve a support ticket once it gets created. It is a compass for measures to improve customer service that, in the end, should have no impact on the customer’s perceived value in dealing with their contact. For helpdesk teams, SLA generally represents a contractual time limit for resolving open calls, a way of measuring the quality of service.

Following on the same line as the previous example, the average resolution time tracks the minutes it takes your agents to solve an issue. In this case, it is divided by standard and special requests and tracked on a weekly basis. It is a valuable practice to monitor these two separately as standard requests usually take less time to be resolved than special ones.

The handling time ends when the agent communicates the new shipping information to the customer and closes the ticket. The resolution time ends once a customer actually receives the product. It gives you a gauge for what to expect when you launch a campaign like that. It also creates a KPI benchmark which you can then use to measure the success and customer retention rates of new campaigns in the future. It can sometimes be difficult to quantify how many customers stick around because they’ve had a great customer experience. Some statistics suggest the average global value of a customer is $243, however.

Set a company-wide goal for the maximum number of unresolved tickets per day, week, and month. Your average reply time (or average response time) refers to how long it takes for you to respond to any customer support message, not just the first message of a ticket. Your average response time should be similar to the first response time. You don’t want to keep customers waiting, even in prolonged conversations. Calculating your average first response time is relatively simple — most helpdesks will report this number for you. If you don’t have a helpdesk, you can find first response times for tickets by comparing the time stamp when you first received the customer request with the timestamp of the first response.

The speed with which you adequately resolve that problem will not only affect how they feel, but how they feel about your brand—potentially for an entire lifetime. Cost Per Ticket measures the average cost of resolving an IT support ticket. It helps organizations understand the financial impact of their IT support processes and can inform decisions around resource allocation and efficiency. 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.

The metrics you choose for your KPIs should be indicators that directly relate to whether or not you achieve your objective. There are a ton of KPI options for almost every project, but not every measurable metric is a high-quality KPI. For example, tracking the number of words per post in your blog campaign wouldn’t be very useful, since the “best” post length for an article changes from topic to topic. Effective KPIs follow the SMART goal framework, meaning that they’re Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

benefits of tracking help desk KPIs

The portal allows customers to resolve issues and concerns on their own. IT service desk software Freshservice is a powerful solution designed for the needs of small businesses and enterprises. It features standard modules for ticket management, CMDB and knowledge base, and advanced modules for change, incident and problem management.

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. Customer support agents can provide helpful pre-sales answers to new customers asking about things like product sizing or your returns policy. Likewise, a helpful interaction after a purchase could make a customer feel confident and loyal enough to place a repeat purchase.

You may need to hire more agents or rebalance the workload among existing agents. By disregarding the passives and subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters, you get your NPS score (expressed as a number, not a percentage). Data, when presented on a dashboard, is most valuable since it can be used to identify trends that tell a story and give insight into how to proceed. Any variance in KPIs overtime should be connected to a cause, some activity, or event that caused the number to shift. 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.

Leading KPIs provide guidance ahead of time that maximize the project’s likelihood of success after it’s published. When it comes to measuring success, not all key performance indicators are the same. Each type of KPI plays a unique role in how it sheds light on performance and success. Understanding the differences will help any organization use key performance indicators effectively.

It’s also one of the most effective methods to motivate employees and give them their well-earned rewards. Your support team works tirelessly to help keep your customer base happy. Monitoring the performance of your support activities helps you take control and service your customers better, boosting your customer loyalty. They need to know how to communicate professionally with customers, have intricate product knowledge, and understand how to efficiently use your customer support software. For instance, they should know how to use the system to route messages and escalate requests if they cannot resolve them. By monitoring this customer service KPI you can ensure you’re resolving customer problems as quickly as possible.

But if you started the process with 45,000 customers, it means you lost some along the way. Running the formula, you’d find out that your retention rate was 88%, and that you lost 12% of customers during the process, even though you ended up net higher because of the new campaign. For instance, in the same survey, about 12% responded that they prefer a response within 15 minutes. If you offer live chat support and dip below a number like that, you’re only going to make life more irritating for your customers.

You might be wondering if you should measure all the metrics listed here? This metric is tied to a business’s revenue goals since it helps get insights about revenue potential and planning for the longevity of a business. While improving customer kpi for support team satisfaction requires a lot of moving parts, the ones in your control are employee behavior and knowledge, as well as the quality and speed of service. And like we’ve seen before, speed of service largely affects customer satisfaction.

If the topic is your product, it may indicate a product issue that needs fixing. Finally, fluctuating ticket volumes at certain times of the day or days of the year helps you identify busier and slower periods, so you can adjust support shifts to meet demand. Resolution time will vary depending on factors like the complexity of the issue and whether you have enough agents to handle it. Longer resolution times generally lead to customer dissatisfaction and vice versa. Average resolution time is the time it takes an agent to resolve a customer issue from when a ticket is opened. So if your CSAT score is low, then going back to improving your response and resolution times might be worthwhile.

They focus on the organization’s overall success, not just the support team’s performance. Help desk KPI metrics can vary depending on the specific goals of the team and the type of support delivered. However, some organizations use it more broadly to refer to a customer service, customer support, or customer advocacy team. The net retention KPI for customer service goes deeper into evaluating your business growth by monitoring the number of lost and new customers, and calculating the product or service cancellations only.

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. The question would be changed to “How likely are you to recommend our company/department as a great place to work? Customer Effort Score (CES) refers to the effort a customer has to expend to get what they want from your business. 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.

They’re like looking in the rearview mirror to understand past performance. They can be financial, such as quarterly profits, which tell you how much money was made after all sales are done and expenses are paid. To measure consistency, use AI to analyze how agents respond to different people reaching out with the same query and flag discrepancies. Track where your customers are reaching out from in order to optimize staffing and prioritize channels that would benefit most from technologies like automation. That might not be realistic, but it’s certainly a benchmark by which you can measure your progress. You gather the results from your surveys, add it all up, and find out what your customers are telling you when they’re anonymous.

Please reload the page and try again, or you can contact Zendesk for support. While definitions vary, agent touches generally refer to when an employee actively makes a change on a ticket. Discover the intricacies of SaaS Support in this guide and gain insights about how to forge exceptional custom experiences. Your Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. The answers will give you a clear understanding of whether you should improve your UX and reevaluate your design decisions.

• This metric is important because it gives you an idea of how complex customer inquiries are and how much back-and-forth is required to resolve them.
• Your SLA rate essentially tells you how well you meet customer expectations, and whether you can meet expectations on time, deliver solutions, and follow through on what you say you’ll do.
• The article focuses on the airline industry, but I would argue that agents across all industries deal with difficult customers daily.
• You acted on the KPI, measuring its effectivity, and made adjustments to improve the process and hit your target.
• While certain issues that your team is facing could be unique, here are four ways in which you can help your team achieve their KPIS.

It provides a scalable, robust way to manage IT service requests and assets. This article centers on the definition of KPIs, their difference with metrics, and the ideal performance indicators for customer support. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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. You’ll want to track and recognize your agents who have the lowest average handle time, highest first contact resolution, solve a large volume of tickets, deliver high CSAT and more. Ensure your agent desk platform allows you to drill down to specific agent performance, including both human and AI-powered virtual agents.

What does technical support have to do with selling and growing revenue? Find industry-standard metric definitions and choose from hundreds of pre-built metrics. Deliver a metric catalog with straightforward metric-centric analytics to your business users. In this section, we’re sharing the top 13 help desk KPIs that service professionals use. A shared inbox provides a shared perspective of email and improves visibility, accountability, collaboration, and, ultimately, your KPIs. Your KPIs will likely take a hit if agents are constantly overloaded with work.

The KPIs provide insight into team performance and individual agents’ work, and most importantly, it allows companies to assess their offerings in terms of customer satisfaction. Tracking and measuring these metrics will ensure that your business remains competitive while providing high-quality support services for customers. To guarantee successful customer service, businesses must closely monitor these critical performance metrics. Customer service metrics are units that measure your customer’s satisfaction levels, as well as your customer service team’s performance.

We are able to keep our service free of charge thanks to cooperation with some of the vendors, who are willing to pay us for traffic and sales opportunities provided by our website. KPI is linked to a target value or goal which provides actionable data so you, or any other stakeholders, can make informed decisions. A KPI gives you insight into how well your team or unit is performing in pursuit of clearly defined team goals and in line with management-defined objectives.

Here are a few other common examples of KPIs you’ll see in process tracking. If you do track your KPIs manually, make sure you update at regular intervals that make sense for your project. For fast-moving projects, consider sharing updates weekly so everyone is tuned in to any changes.

For instance, you can measure a KPI like service time and match it with the rate of satisfied customers within a given timeframe. This way, you can adjust your workforce’s workflow if the customer satisfaction rate is low. When it comes to the financial health of a business, key performance indicators act as vital signs.

• The customers will rate you on a scale of 1-5 based on how much effort it takes to complete a transaction, resolve a support issue, and otherwise interact with your company/product online or in person.
• For instance, we at HelpCrunch think that monthly recurring revenue is one of the most important customer service KPIs.
• You may need to hire more agents or rebalance the workload among existing agents.
• You should genuinely try to help and resolve the issue with your product or service.

You’ll have to implement a robust system for collecting and analyzing customer service data. But, if you do not know the channels from where the customers are reaching out to you, it becomes haphazard. So, measuring these channels to evaluate the performance individually is very important. Acquiring new customers indeed improves your brand image, however, retaining them for longer-term shows that you have developed trust & loyalty with the customer retention strategies. Customer service KPI metrics help businesses monitor and analyze customer relations by considering their overall journey.

You won’t be able to draw accurate conclusions if you forgot to track some weeks or if you lost the data in a messy file folder. These KPIs measure metrics that come after the post is published—or, put another way, they “lag” behind the project’s launch. Whereas leading KPIs help predict likely success, lagging KPIs measure actual success. Comparing the data from each will give you information about how accurate your predictions were and why actual performance may have deviated from predicted performance. A social media manager could measure impressions, shares, likes, follows, replies, mentions, and comments, but they shouldn’t try to track all of the KPIs available to them.

It provides insights into the current demand placed on your support team, trends, and other underlying issues. For instance, if ticket volumes continuously increase month-on-month with your team feeling swamped, it may be time to hire new agents. The KPIs vital to you will also differ from other companies and industries. That being said, there are some common KPIs that many companies and specific departments track.