Customer support KPIs

What is customer support KPI?

Customer support KPIs are measurable values to assess the effectiveness of your customer support team. By measuring customer satisfaction and support metrics, you can understand how good your customer support team is, what improvements can be made, and what kind of progress the team is making.

Important customer support KPIs to measure

Ten customer support KPIs every customer support team must track.

1. First response time

First response time is a crucial customer support metric, denoting the time required by the team to address a customer query. It’s a time-based metric, written in minutes, seconds, or hours. First response time shows the promptness of your team in addressing and resolving customer issues and is directly related to customer satisfaction. You could adjust your staffing and availability to keep FRR in ideal values. 

2. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction is another key customer support metric, showing how satisfied customers feel about the support experience. It shows you the areas of improvement with respect to customer service, like empathy, understanding, fast resolution of issues, etc. A decent customer satisfaction score lies anywhere from 75 to 90%, and anything below 50% can tell that your team needs work.

3. Net promoter score (NPS)

NPS shows how likely your customer is to recommend your products or services depending on your service quality. While NPS can mean beyond customer service, customer support teams prefer measuring this along with customer satisfaction rates. Measured as a numeric score between 1 to 10, a high NPS means high loyalty and unwavering support from your customers.

4. Ticket backlogs

Ticket backlogs show the number of customer enquiries pending to be resolved. It’s important to track ticket backlogs to address customer issues on time and not leave them beyond minimum resolution time. Tracking ticket backlogs, you could assign them to available agents on time and reduce chances of customers contacting again.

5. Agent performance

Tracking individual performance like average time for resolution, pending tickets, customer feedback, escalations, etc., is another metric that customer support teams track every day. Tracking these individual metrics will tell you how to improve agent-level productivity and efficiency. 

6. Occupancy

Tracking occupancy in customer support teams is needed to see if the workload is balanced across all agents. It also shows the maximum workload agents can handle without coming down with frustration. Customer support managers must use occupancy to measure agent utilization and how well they manage all required tasks within a day.

7. Top questions

Top questions in customer service are the query that your customers are searching or asking maximum times. Identifying these questions will help you address them somewhere on your website or customer support portal, minimizing the call volumes and resolution times. It also could give the product or dev team inputs on what needs to be fixed on a priority basis.

8. First contact resolution

FCR or first contact resolution is the % of tickets or customer queries that are resolved in the first attempt of their contact. It means that the ticket gets closed right after the first reach out, eliminating the need for follow-ups. FCR is an indicator of efficiency of the customer support team and its performance.

9. Average response time

Average response time is the time taken to revert to a customer’s ticket or attend a customer’s call. It’s measured in time and it denotes how satisfied a customer will be, as they get an instant solution to their pressing issues. Anywhere between 24 hours for a ticket and 5 to 10 minutes for a call is a good average response time.

10. SLA

SLA is service level agreement compliance, regarding the resolution time, response time, handling time, and satisfaction levels. SLA is the ratio of the number of tickets resolved on time to the total number of tickets. This is a commitment that customer service managers give to their management, clients, or customers itself.

Monitor customer support metrics with real-time dashboards

It is the responsibility of customer support heads and managers to track the above metrics and a few others every day and every hour. Using spreadsheets and too many applications for tracking purposes can be complex. Rather, a centralized customer support KPI dashboard with up-to-date values can make the monitoring job much easier. Integrating data from customer support systems, these dashboards come with visual charts and graphs that automatically update based on real-time data.