Customer Service KPIs: What Metrics To Track & How To Improve Them With Actionable Strategies
Having trouble deciding which customer service KPI to use?
There are some vanity metrics among the KPIs for customer service. They might seem important in theory, but in practice, they just clutter the information you need to make good business decisions.
So let’s look at the most important KPIs that will help you create strategies to provide superior customer service and boost retention.
TL;DR
- Customer service KPIs measure the performance of customer service teams and customer support management.
- You should track customer service KPIs to measure the performance of your support teams, improve customer satisfaction, and boost customer retention and loyalty.
- The 10 key customer service KPIs are Customer Satisfaction Score, Customer Effort Score, First Response Time, First Contact Resolution Time, Net Promoter Score, the volume of support tickets, number of Resolved Tickets, tickets volume per channel, cost per conversation, and knowledge base views.
- Here are 4 actionable strategies to improve your customer service KPIs:
- Use interactive walkthroughs to give step-by-step guidance to customers and reduce dependency on the support team.
- Segment users and trigger contextual in-app messages just when a customer might need them.
- Build an in-app help center to offer self-service support, reduce pressure on the support team, and decrease support costs.
- Create AI-generated micro videos to provide quick help to customers.
- Userpilot allows you to provide top-notch customer support by allowing you to create experience flows using a wide range of UI patterns and building an in-app resource center and knowledge base.
What are customer service KPIs?
Customer service KPIs are a set of metrics that measure the performance of the customer service team and customer support management. You can track and analyze these KPIs to get an advanced 360-degree view of users and optimize customer relations.
Why should you track customer service key performance indicators?
As it was mentioned before, customer service KPIs are the key to a successful business. There are a number of ways they help you build strong customer relationships. Let’s discuss the three major ones.
Measure the performance of your support team
Your customer support team is at the forefront of your company’s interactions with customers. One bad experience with your support team can cost you customers as well as your brand reputation.
Customer service KPIs help you measure your team’s effectiveness in dealing with service requests. They need to provide prompt support whenever users encounter problems so they don’t leave out of frustration.
By using the right customer service KPIs, you can find out knowledge gaps in the support team and develop plans to train them, improve their service quality, and help them achieve performance benchmarks.
Improve customer satisfaction
Satisfied customers are more likely to find your product worth their money.
The insights from customer service KPIs can help you identify the bottlenecks in your customer service and resolve them to improve customer satisfaction.
Increase retention and drive customer loyalty
Analysis of the customer satisfaction scores will allow you to align your product and customer service to your users’ needs and boost user retention.
Offering personalized customer service is an excellent way of building strong customer relations and gaining loyalty. It’s easier to convert loyal users into brand advocates who are willing to give positive reviews and participate in word-of-mouth marketing.
Greater customer retention translates to higher potential profitability and thus higher customer lifetime value.
Most important customer service KPIs and customer service metrics to keep an eye on
Now let’s look at the 10 most important customer service KPIs and metrics you should track.
- Customer Satisfaction Score
- Customer Effort Score
- First Response Time
- First Contact Resolution Time
- Net Promoter Score
- The volume of support tickets
- Number of Resolved Tickets
- Tickets volume per channel
- Cost per conversion
- Knowledge base views.
Customer service KPI #1 Customer Satisfaction Score
The customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is the most popular and straightforward metric for measuring customer satisfaction. It helps you gauge user sentiment toward your product, service, or specific user interactions.
All you need to do to measure this metric is create a microsurvey, such as the one shown below. Or you can ask them how satisfied they were with a recent support interaction or purchase on a scale from 1 to 5.
Low CSAT scores can identify customers who are at risk of churn. You need to carefully review previous interactions with such users to understand what went wrong with your product or customer support.
You might have to update your self-service support, make product improvements, or provide special training to the support team.
Customer service KPI #2 Customer Effort Score
The customer effort score (CES) measures how much effort users need to give to a particular interaction with your product or resolve a specific problem. Thus it can give more granular insights.
A CES survey asks users how a recent experience was on a scale from “Very Easy” to “Very Difficult”. In-app CES surveys let you easily automate responses based on users’ answers.
To calculate CES, divide the number of all “agree” responses by the total number of responses, and multiply the ratio by 100.
A high CES score for customer service indicates that users find it difficult to get support. Therefore, you must make the necessary improvements and reach out to them with solutions.
Customer service KPI #3 First Response Time (FRT)
The First Response Time (FRT) is the time it takes for a support agent to first respond to a particular support ticket.
To measure the average FRT, calculate the ratio of the time taken to send the first response during a given period to the number of tickets whose first responses were sent during that period.
Many businesses have a baseline for FRT that is included in their service level agreements. If you don’t offer 24/7 customer service, it’s best to measure the average FRT during business hours so that the ratio isn’t skewed by receiving requests on the weekends or at night.
The average first response time has a direct correlation with customer satisfaction. Customers typically don’t like to keep waiting in lines, so this metric should be as low as possible.
Customer service KPI #4 First Contact Resolution time
The First Contact Resolution time is the ratio of customer queries that get resolved on the first attempt.
The industry standard for the FCR rate ranges from 70% to 75%. This suggests that about a quarter of support tickets involve follow-up costs or unresolved problems.
To measure the FCR rate, divide the number of requests resolved on 1st contact by the total requests completed, and multiply the result by 100.
Although it’s a good indicator of efficiency, the average resolution time can get skewed due to more complex issues that need more time to resolve.
Customer service KPI #5 Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a popular customer service KPI that measures customer satisfaction and loyalty.
NPS surveys ask users to rate their willingness to recommend your business to others on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 meaning “Not Likely” and 10 meaning “Very Likely”.
The scores give you three groups of customers.
- Detractors: 0 to 6 range
- Passives: 7 to 8 range
- Promoters: 9 to 10 range.
The NPS metric is equal to the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. If you have more detractors than promoters, your score will become negative.
Dissatisfied customers can leave your product at any moment so you need to pay special attention to their expectations. You should also quickly review and adjust your customer care strategies.
Customer service KPI #6 The volume of support tickets
The ticket volume is the total number of support tickets in your support queue over a specific period. It gives the exact number of unique interactions with your support team over a day, week, or month.
If you track this metric over time, you can get a 360-degree, macro-level view of customer support trends.
This metric helps you find the number of instances where users experienced friction, so you should reduce the volume of support tickets. You can also understand whether you have enough support agents to meet demand in every channel.
Customer service KPI #7 Number of Resolved Tickets
This metric measures the number of resolved tickets your customer support team or an individual agent received and resolved during a particular period.
A high number of resolved tickets shows that, in general, your customer service is effectively resolving customers’ issues.
Customer service KPI #8 Tickets volume by channel
This KPI gives the number of tickets per channel that customers use to contact your support agents. These channels include email, phone, social media, and live chat.
Tracking customer service metrics by channel can help you sum up the current demand for your support team by covering the entirety of support. You can also identify the weak channels and take action accordingly.
Customer service KPI #9 Cost per conversation
This is the percentage of support costs of your total number of customer support conversations. You can measure this metric by dividing the total support costs by the total number of issues.
There are three cost components you should track to offer the highest quality support at the lowest costs.
- Team training and management costs
- Resource costs – in terms of agents’ salaries
- Infrastructure costs.
Customer service KPI #10 Knowledge base views
A knowledge base usually consists of a wide range of educational material that different users can avail of to get self-service support.
Knowledge base views is a measure of the number of page views on support pages. This lets you observe trends in customers’ issues based on their search volume.
Too many knowledge base views for a particular page can indicate your users are facing problems in a related issue. Then you should reach out to them to understand what improvements you should make.
5 Actionable strategies to drastically improve your customer service KPIs
Here are the five different ways you can improve the feedback from customer service KPIs.
Use interactive walkthroughs to guide customers and remove the guesswork
Interactive walkthroughs have become a popular alternative for product tours, which can tend to dump a lot of information without teaching much effectively.
They offer step-by-step guidance and minimize guesswork for new users or existing customers who are being introduced to a new feature. Walkthroughs are also contextual, which means users only see them in relevant situations.
Moreover, you can add multiple UI patterns such as checklists, modals, tooltips, slideouts, and banners to build easy experience flows. It helps customers learn more by doing and experiencing value from your product much faster. This can increase both the activation and conversion rates.
Here’s an example of Kommunicate’s interactive walkthrough.
Segment customers and prompt contextual in-app messages at the right time
Every customer is different and has different expectations and levels of engagement with your product. Thus it’s useful to segment them based on in-product engagement.
To create customer segments, first, you need to track in-app feature usage. If a particular feature is underused, it’s either because users find it difficult to use or they don’t know it exists.
In both cases, you can send them an in-app message at the right time to guide them or inform them of a new feature. You may also need to make improvements to the feature.
Along with in-app messages, you can even trigger experience flows at the right time to further enhance the user experience. This helps to decrease the need to contact support agents.
Build an in-app help center to provide support on-demand and minimize the workload on customer service agents
It’s not safe to put the entire customer service workload on your support team, especially when they get busy with complex, time-consuming issues.
That’s why, in addition to an efficient support team, you should provide self-service support so that users can solve repetitive problems on their own. This combination reduces friction in getting help and enhances user experiences as well.
Furthermore, customers feel accomplished when they are able to solve certain issues on their own and don’t have to depend on support agents every time. Plus, they can easily access help anytime they need it again.
The best way of providing self-service support is through a help center. It typically comes with resources such as tutorials, a live chat option, FAQs, troubleshooting tips, support documentation, and a link to your knowledge base.
Here’s an example of Userpilot’s resource center, which you can build on your own using our tool, code-free!
Use AI-generated micro videos to assist customers through short tutorials
You can now incorporate AI into your customer service and mix it with human elements.
Using AI-generated micro videos, you can reach the right target audience at the right time. These videos don’t take up much time but yet manage to educate users on certain aspects of your product.
Userpilot allows you to integrate with Sythesia AI to easily generate micro-videos from content.
Send microsurveys after customer interactions to collect feedback and act on
Last but not least, send microsurveys after critical user interactions to collect customer feedback.
Customer feedback gives you direct insights into how they feel about products and customer service. You can then analyze responses to identify trends and patterns as well as find areas of improvement.
You should send these surveys after key interactions with your support team to get more in-depth insights into users’ experience with customer service.
Moreover, you can add qualitative follow-up questions to CSAT surveys, CES surveys, and NPS surveys to get more detailed feedback.
You can analyze their answers by tagging responses, such as grouping some similar complaints under the ‘missing support documentation’ tag, and take action as soon as possible.
How to provide top-notch customer service and exceed customer expectations with Userpilot?
Userpilot is an onboarding and product growth platform that is completely code-free.
It offers a 14-day free trial and three paid subscription plans: Traction, Growth, and Enterprise. Billed annually, the pricing starts at $249/month, $499/month, and $1,000/month, respectively.
Let’s see how the platform can help you provide excellent customer service and improve your KPIs.
Use a wide range of UI patterns to create experience flows and unlock self-service support
Userpilot enables you to use a variety of UI patterns to create flows and enhance the customer experience.
You can create welcome screens, interactive walkthroughs, onboarding checklists, tooltips, modals, and banners to shorten the learning curve and make the user journey more engaging.
Moreover, you can obtain detailed analytics on how users interacted with these UI patterns so that you can trigger in-app messages or reach out with help whenever needed.
Create a code-free in-app knowledge base to reduce customer support costs and give users all resources they might need
Userpilot allows you to create an in-app help center and arrange all self-service resources in one place to provide on-demand support.
You can add several resources like a live chat widget, bug reporting, micro videos, tutorials, etc. The all-in-one solution reduces your support costs because you won’t need as many support staff to handle issues that users can resolve themselves.
Conclusion
Your customer service quality can make all the difference when users consider investing their money in your business. Therefore, you shouldn’t miss out on any vital customer service KPIs and try to make improvements to consistently provide great customer service across all channels.
Want to collect customer feedback and get invaluable insights into customer service KPIs? Get a Userpilot demo and see how you can boost your customer service performance.
