Best Customer Service KPI To Follow

As we all know, Key Performance Indicators or KPI’s are metrics and data which allows us to measure the performance of various staff members and departments. It’s a measurable value that allows entrepreneurs and heads of departments and companies to objectively measure the success of someone or something. But what about customer service? Which indications can be used to improve overall customer service and which indicators prove to hold the most value for your business? Let’s find out!

Let’s get the less fun stuff out of the way first. CCR shows the rate at which your customers stop using your service. It’s only applicable to subscription-based services, but CCR is a great indication of how effective your business is at retaining its clientele.

The average for your customer churn rate varies, according to your niche, competition and pricing strategy. You have to constantly monitor CCR in order to best-adapt your pricing strategy. You don’t want sporadic increases of CCR during any given time. Try to keep it at a stable rate and make sure that the number of new clients that you acquire, exceeds the customer churn rate to keep your platform growing.

Now, let’s move over to the most basic of KPIs for customer support teams. Customer satisfaction ratings are the best measure for individual support agents and the overall service quality for your business. It’s usually measured by allowing your customers to rate their support chat or other experiences on a scale of 1 through 5 stars, where 5 is the highest evaluation and 1 is the lowest.

In addition, you can add text boxes to allow your clients to express what they genuinely feel about their experiences. They could give you amazing suggestions or correct and constructive criticism that you can use as a foundation for future growth.

It shows what your customers really think about you. Since there are many different methods and ways for customer service quality improvement, we recommend dividing the reviews into different categories (e.g. very positive, positive, neutral, poor, very poor). Strive to have as much positive and very positive reviews, as possible. There should be as little dissatisfaction with your customer service, as possible. Otherwise, it all plays a role in increasing CCR which is a bad, bad thing. As we’ve listed in one of our blogs, the leading reason why customers leave and stop using your service is that they don’t think that you care about them. Don’t let them think so!

This metric can make or break your customer support, from the of the customer, of course. If you’re able to make a live support agent appear in the chat quickly, or respond to messages on social media swiftly, your customer satisfaction will improve dramatically, as a result.

The chart above shows what should be your benchmarks. Don’t make your clients wait longer than necessary because waiting reduces their enthusiasm and could ruin a potential upsell or damage your reputation in the eyes of that particular client. Make a policy to eliminate long waiting times without an answer or turn off the live chat feature when it gets too busy and you can’t guarantee short waiting times.

Even though we understand that it’s hard to deal with every single request and respond to every single message quickly, you can use automated responses to make the web visitor feel acknowledged and improve their experience whilst winning more time for your support agents.

This could be narrowed down to first-contact resolution rates or first-call resolution rates (FCR). It’s a crucial metric to track because it shows how efficiently your support staff is able to understand and resolve particular issues for customers.

Your job, as an entrepreneur or a team lead, should be to provide your agents with the script for as many solutions, as possible. Training them to communicate and getting to the bottom of a particular issue is also very important. A glossary, knowledge base, manuals and other documents can also help with the BTS (behind the scenes) work for your staff.

As a result – customer satisfaction will improve!

The KPI's of individual agents are just customer satisfaction, FCR and other metrics, related to their performance whilst solving issues. The best agents should be encouraged and motivated (perks, acknowledgement, bonuses) whilst your least efficient performers need to understand and see the areas on which they can improve on.

This is a metric that’s more useful to businesses and e-shops that have at least a dedicated staff for support and not just one or two agents. Whilst it’s also somewhat beneficial in the latter circumstances, the average costs of support, compared to the revenue is super important when you’re trying to optimize the work of your staff and reduce needless expenses or tailor some related solutions to the needs of your customers.

Divide the total number of support expenses by the total number of tickets that have been opened during the same period. This will show you the average cost of one single support issue (solved or unsolved). Your goal should be to retain support costs below 10% of total revenue. That’s the average across the board.

To sum up, you have a wide array of tools to monitor the KPI's of your customer service staff. What you choose to monitor is entirely up to you, but we, at Atlasmic reckon that CCR, customer satisfaction, average response time, resolution rates, individual agent performance as well as support costs against your revenue are the most important data points to keep track of. By gathering information about it, you can boost the reputation of your brand and optimize the work of your customer support staff!