Customer Service Winning KPIs
You can’t improve what you don’t measure.
The above quote effectively addresses the importance of measuring. And when it comes to customers, numbers say it all. Your numbers will let you know if you are keeping your customers happy or not. Customer service is the backbone of every successful business. If you take a look at the Forbes list of the 100 most customer-centric companies, one denominator that differentiates them from all other companies is their focus on customer service experience.
To provide a positive experience that will drastically impact your business, you must measure your customer service strategies. Measuring customer service KPIs offers you concrete data analytics to make informed decisions that can help you improve productivity and create efficient processes for your team.
Below you will get a glimpse of 10 customer service KPIs to help you bridge the gap and offer exceptional customer service and improve customer satisfaction.
1. First reply time:
The first reply time is the time elapsed between a customer creating a ticket and an agent's first response to that ticket, not automated replies or triggers from a business rule. This is an important customer service KPI as it’s a main factor of complaints for customers. When a customer has a problem or is experiencing challenges with your products they are frustrated and want someone to attend to them quickly. From Zendesk’s 2020 CX trends report, 58.9% of customers expect companies to respond to their tickets quickly.
According to an article by Zendesk, here are some customer expectations for first reply time from various channels.
Email: Customer expects a response from an agent in an hour or less.
Social Media: 15 minutes or less
Live chat: 1 minute or less
To achieve these customer expectations, it is important to train your agents to know your product in and out. Secondly, you need enough agents available to respond quickly to your customers. By responding quickly to your customers, you communicate respect for their time and give them a good impression of your brand.
2. Ticket resolution time:
Ticket resolution time is how long it takes to solve a support ticket from start to finish, the length of time may vary based on the complexity of the issue. Tickets such as refunds and password changes may take less time to resolve compared to tickets related to bugs within a software product. However, it is worth knowing that 72.5% of customers expect their issues to be resolved quickly. Ticket resolution time shows how efficient your agents are, how knowledgeable they are of your product and company policies, and how good they are at understanding customer issues and addressing those problems with minimum transfers or escalation. The best practice for ticket resolution time is to set expectations with your customers. Set minimum expectations and over-deliver on your promise for customer satisfaction.
3. Type of request:
The type of incoming requests by customers helps you know how your business is doing. Request types help you define and categorize incoming requests and allow you to collect the right information for each request. This way you can make smart business decisions such as creating an FAQs page or a knowledge base. Categorizing requests can also help you choose between automating certain repetitive questions using Artificial intelligence while freeing your agents to resolve more complex issues.
4. One-touch tickets:
When it comes to the quality of customer support, one-touch ticket resolution makes a difference. Nothing makes a customer more thankful than having their issue resolved the first time they reach out to support. Although this cannot be the case for all tickets, as some tickets are harder to resolve than others, aiming for a one-touch ticket resolution is something that will give your customers a great experience.
Having a high one-touch ticket resolution score means your agents are knowledgeable about your product or service and are resolving customers’ issues quickly.
However, if your scores aren’t so high for one-touch ticket resolution, you can make use of your knowledge base to deflect tickets for customers to self-serve. By tracking top issues your team will be able to write articles that customers can self-serve. This way you can free up your agents for more complex issues. Also, categorizing tickets and routing them to the right agents who are experts on the subject matter and are most likely to answer it right the first time will boost your customers’ confidence in your team and brand.
Last but not the least, aim to resolve complex issues as soon as possible, and do not neglect the customers’ issues no matter how small or huge they are. Also, avoid customers reaching out about the same issue several times, this leaves them dissatisfied.
5. Assignee activity:
Assignee activity will help you know how well your agents are doing. This gives you an overview of tickets assigned to an agent, the number of tickets they were able to resolve within a specific time, and which agents are struggling and may need more training to be as productive as everyone else.
It also lets you know if some agents are cherry-picking tickets and leaving difficult tickets for their peers to handle. Assessing the progress of your agents is an important customer service metric to evaluate agent productivity and success. Also reviewing CSAT surveys will let you know the quality of support they are providing to customers.
6. Tickets by channel:
The number of tickets by channel KPI gives an overview of which channels your customers are using to reach out to you. For example, the total number of individual tickets opened over the phone, via email, live chat, or social media. This way you can meet your customers where they are.
7. SLA breaches:
Service Level Agreement (SLA breach) in other words violation of your promise to your customers. SLA is an agreed-upon time period within which a response and/or resolution should be provided for a ticket. SLA is breached when agents don’t resolve customers’ cases on time. Essentially you have broken the promise you made to your customers that you will help them within a certain period. These metrics help you prioritize tickets, so your agents can solve them in a timely manner. It also helps you know your staffing needs if you need to hire more agents or implement automated services to help you meet your SLA target.
8. CSAT:
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), the aim of every business is to satisfy their customers’ needs. Constantly inquiring from your customers how satisfied they are with your brand makes you know your customers’ pain points and the impression they have of your brand. You can do this by sending customers surveys after their tickets have been resolved. It is important to track CSAT KPI because happy customers recommend your business to friends and family, whereas unhappy customers tell the whole world (the internet/Google) about your brand. Know the health of your brand by measuring customer satisfaction scores regularly.
9. Flowbuilder overview/Chatbot Performance:
As we embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is important to know if this automation is actually helping our businesses. Setting up chatbots can be useful, however, if they are irritating to customers and not serving the purpose for which they were set up then the business suffers. There’s nothing more annoying than interacting with a bot that can’t help you. Setting up chatbots to answer repetitive questions such as password changes can free up agents’ time for more complex issues. This way you can improve your overall resolution time and CSAT.
10. Search queries in the Guide:
A good knowledge base helps your customers solve issues on their own. Having a knowledge base with high-quality content that addresses most of your customers’ issues is great. However, if these articles are not accessible and discoverable by your customers then the knowledge base becomes useless. Constantly checking which keywords your customers are using as search queries can guide you in tweaking your articles to make them more accessible to customers. Having the right keywords and key phrases in your articles will help your customers easily navigate through your high-volume content to find what they are looking for. You want your customers’ efforts to be as minimum as possible. By measuring customer effort score you will know how easy it was for customers to find what they were looking for in your knowledge base and also provide an overall indicator of their experience with your company.
In conclusion customer service KPIs are good indicators of what is actually right in your company and what needs improvement. While measuring all these KPIs can be overwhelming, always remember that measuring sets your company and team up for success. A satisfied customer equals a successful business.
If you’d like a personalized offer for onboarding Zendesk and setting up these metrics in Zendesk, book a call today!