Customer retention is a key metric in business: a rise in your retention rate means your customer service team is delighting customers and retaining them, making it worthwhile to finally give in to your sister’s fashion whims.
Interactions per ticket provides a figure for how many times a customer engages your team via email, telephone or a chat session.
Customer Satisfaction
A key metric to track in customer support is the level of customer satisfaction: studies indicate that satisfied customers will recommend your business to others and go on to buy from you again. One metric for measuring customer satisfaction levels is first response time – measuring the time it takes your team to respond to a customer. This is a signal that your team is answering customer inquiries promptly. The other metric of concern is the average time to resolution, which measures how long your support reps take to solve a ticket. Of course, this is the ideal scenario – the lower the number, the better. If your average time to resolution creeps up every day, it’s a sign that you need to hire additional agents or fix flaws in your design.
Retention
Client retention is the main instrument of a business’s success, and a good customer retention rate will be a key to developing your activities. FCR, or First Contact Resolution, is a key metric for customer satisfaction that measures how often the support team of your company answers questions or queries completely in the first contact with a customer. A high FCR suggest you team of support operators is efficient and also that they are providing the right information so that the customer in question doesn’t need to contact back for the same query. Good average ticket healing time (ATH) is to have as small a figure as possible, without having a diminished level of service quality.
Revenue
One of the most important metrics for tracking customer support teams’ effectiveness is revenue, as it determines whether or not they’re helping the business reach their objectives. This KPI lets us know exactly how much revenue the business has generated thanks to their sales over a given period as time goes by. The first response time metric evaluates how quickly customer service representatives respond to someone’s initial inquiry; faster responses could lead customers to feel more satisfied and loyal. A good measure of productivity is the average ticket resolution time. An increase in escalation rate points toward the key causes of customers’ frustration – your agents being swamped and unable to solve issues, or your knowledge base failing to cover those issues effectively. This metric is another crucial one to track, and look out for any spikes to see if problems need to be addressed and systems of support improved.
Net Promoter Score
The customer effort score (CES) is, for better or worse, a key operational indicator of your business. It measures how easy it is for customers to solve their issues with you – and leads to a high level of customer loyalty. However, the real magic kicks in when you can track customer experience score over time. This will let you know if the experience you are creating is rich and delightful – and help you steadily drive CES up over time. Detailed measurement can alert you if there’s something arising that might create barriers within the experience to frustrate and disengage the customer, feedback that you can use to make changes to create customer-wowing experiences that simultaneously drive CES up over time. The NPS (Net Promoter Score) is best used at the conglomerate and business unit level so that the number of promoters and detractors can be monitored, and employee satisfaction measured.
Customer Effort
A great experience may help you retain a customer. If you build an experience that is reliable, low-effort and easy to use, as surveyed in an HBR article, consumers are more likely to purchase or recommend your product than those who were subject to a monumental effort. To measure CES, customers could be asked at the end of an action or interaction to rate their experience on a scale from 1 (most effort) to 10 (least effort). A good measure of the same directiveness is first contact resolution rates, in other words, how often customer-service reps were successful in solving a customer’s issue in the first instance. Review Customer Effort Score data to identify opportunities where you can make things easier for your customers. If you see customers expend too much effort on a process, dig into open-ended survey responses and use them to learn more by conducting usability testing or even interviewing users.