The 19 Customer Support Metrics You Should Measure

All you have to do is multiply your total number of customers by the average earning you make off every customer each time. Mobile marketing and retention firm CleverTap, breaks it down in the following infographic. If it were for a single customer, asking if they’d met what they wished to achieve with our product would be easy. But since it’s a large group of customers, we’d have to measure the success collectively. This metric looks at the average time from when a customer contacts customer support to when they first get a response from an agent (And no, auto-replies do not count as a response!). Self-Serve Rate, also known as Self-Service Completion Rate, is a KPI that analyzes the effectiveness of a company’s self-serve options.

This metric is most common among SaaS companies and subscription-based ecommerce companies, but it can absolutely apply to all types of ecommerce brands and even other industries. You can drive down customer contact rate with clearer self-service resources, like an FAQ page and shipping and returns policies. First contact resolution eliminates the chances of this happening because only one agent is needed to resolve the issue. While we recommend a general target occupancy rate of 75-85%, the ideal percentage for your team will differ depending on employee bandwidth and budget.

Customer support service quality KPIs

Freemium options are a staple in the SaaS industry as they drive user adoption quickly, but how can you measure their success? Free trial conversion rate is a must-have measurement for any SaaS company. This metric reveals how well customers are switching from the free version of your product to the version that generates revenue for the business. If your company is focused on growth, this SaaS customer success metric will be critical to your growth strategy. You can measure active users by adding the number of customers who use the product at a particular frequency — daily, weekly, and monthly are some of the most common. If you’re a SaaS business, this may be one of your most important metrics.

It can be a pop-up form on your website or part of a survey distributed during certain periods. It generally consists of two questions – how likely the customer is to recommend or promote (scored from 0 to 10), and why. By NPS yardstick, 0 to 6 are detractors, 7 to 8 passives, and 9 to 10 promoters.

Customer retention rate (CRR)

Support volume will vary depending on the support channels you provide your customers. It’s important for your teams to track all tickets in your support queue over a given period of time. One metric you’ll want to measure in conjunction with your Customer Retention Rate is Customer Churn Rate, which is simply the inverse of your customer retention rate. When customers are satisfied with a product, service, or customer support interaction you can expect to see high customer satisfaction, or CSAT. By measuring consistent resolutions over time, you can ensure consistent agent performance. Customer Effort Score tells you how much effort customers feel they must put in to meet their needs.

To fully gauge how your team is impacting the customer journey, you need reliable metrics — you can’t rely on your gut alone. You can develop a customer health score by compiling all of these factors and using an index as the actual score metric to keep things consistent and easy to track. It simply needs to be regular enough so that agents can expect those reviews and see their own progress over time. It’s important that the reviewer has enough to spot patterns instead of basing an entire evaluation on a single case. These methods are all part of proactive support, in which companies often rely heavily on automation and AI to relieve the workload of their agents. Replies Per Conversation (RPC) is the average number of answers that it takes to resolve an issue for your customer.

You don’t need to drive your tickets per agent down to a minimum, but it’s important to keep this metric in check to ensure your agents aren’t getting overwhelmed. While this number can vary drastically by team and industry, the average customer service agent handles 17 interactions every day. Keep in mind that seasoned agents can often handle more tickets, while newer reps should oversee a lower volume at first. Your customer support team might already measure how quickly you respond to support tickets, which is a great start. The list of metrics we share below paint a fuller picture of the larger impact customer support has on business growth.

• Escalation rate is the percentage of tickets escalated to someone else like a senior manager or another support tier.
• They can also keep a pulse on the support queue and jump in when needed.
• No matter the source, totaling the number of tickets completed by channel tells you where your agents spend their time and customers’ preferred way of contacting you.
• Going through the LiveAgent details, we found it to be a powerful help desk platform suitable for every type of business.

This metric is incredibly popular among the industry due to its simplicity and efficiency. However, in general terms, you’d want Pending Issues to be low and Closed Issues to be high. A large number of Pending Issues might indicate performance issues or the need for additional hiring.

Customer Success Career Paths: How to Scale From Rep to Manager

You can take advantage of the LiveAgent free trial and get to know the features firsthand at no cost and without commitment. Salesforce Service Cloud is a leading customer support software that helps you provide outstanding customer service from anywhere you are. With Service Cloud, agents get a 360-degree view of the customer, which enables them to personalize their interactions. FCCR involves resolving customer’s issues in one interaction, such as in a single chat session, a single phone call, or a single email or social media response. In other words, a customer need not contact you again since the issue was resolved in the first instance. Your average first response time (FRT) tells you the average amount of time between customer contact and agent responses.

A Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a metric to determine how happy customers are with a business’s brand, offerings, and interactions. It is defined as a percentage, where 100% is a “perfect score,” and 0% means none of your customers (or those surveyed) are happy with your business. To track average resolution time, you need systems to log the start and end times of customer interactions. This can be done through digital timestamps attached to each interaction or phone call, or through CRM software. But while average resolution time is a good indicator of the overall health of your customer support, that makes it tricky as a KPI to optimize.

They may have managed this via consulting a Knowledge Base, searching FAQs, or through a chatbot. The data-driven nature of success metrics empowers teams to make informed decisions, remove gut fell, and have a clear understanding of the impact of their work. With success metrics and KPIs in place, support teams can continuously strive for excellence, delivering exceptional service and exceeding customer expectations. You get different types of KPIs, including financial ratios (e.g., net profit), process metrics (e.g., % of defective products), and customer support KPIs (e.g., average first response 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. We count a ticket as converted whenever a customer places an order within five days of contacting customer support.

At Intercom we strive to have support team who do whatever they can to help our customers and foster customer loyalty. In order to ensure this high standard across a global team, KPIs help us to identify areas for improvement and to celebrate successes. Getting these numbers may sound daunting, but when you can track your customer service KPIs in real-time with little effort, you can focus on more important things. That’s why we built Kaizo Scorecards to help you track progress, pinpoint outliers, and streamline capacity planning to get actionable team insights.

This is a critical metric that displays how effective an automation tool is by showing how many questions it’s removing from your ticket queue. Customer service software can track the specific dollar amounts of each converted ticket and show how many sales support agents — or a chatbot — have made. This can even be done on a per-agent basis, so each rep can grasp how much revenue they’ve helped their business secure. Instead of making calls for the sake of making calls, customer support reps are instead turning their attention to relationships and what happens after they make a sale.

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. 90% of American consumers say that customer service is a deciding factor in whether or not they will do business with a company. Potential customers might ask a question about delivery or the product before making a purchase. And shoppers depend on quality support experiences after the purchase for a great end-to-end experience. Customer churn rate measures the amount of customers your business loses over a given time period. Templated responses save your agents a lot of time and, by extension, mean customers get answers faster.

Average resolution time is simply the average time it takes to solve all tickets over a specified time range. For example, let’s say you’re calculating average resolution time for an eight-hour shift. Simply divide total resolution time over eight hours by the number of tickets solved in those eight hours. When I first started to work at Intercom as a Customer Support Representative (CSR), KPIs were completely foreign to me. I had previously worked in the television and film industry, where there was an entirely different metric – either I delivered high quality work on time or I didn’t, and I was out. Now, as one of the managers of a global support team that is quickly scaling, I can completely understand not only the necessity but the benefits of tracking KPIs.

Customer satisfaction score, or CSAT, is similar to NPS, but it has one major difference. Instead of asking participants to rate their likelihood of recommending the brand to others, CSAT asks them to simply rate their experience with the company. This gives businesses a snapshot idea of how customers feel after completing an interaction with the support or success team.

Read more about The Golden KPIs Every Customer Support Leader Should Keep an Eye On here.