8 service desk KPIs and performance metrics for IT support

CSAT is an excellent KPI to track in tandem with operational metrics, as it can reassure you that your efforts are working, or advise you on how to change course. In addition, since CSAT is such a complicated metric, with many variables factoring into its final result, it’s important to have a holistic approach as you work to track and improve this metric. This creates an overall better customer experience by providing transparency and reducing stress or frustration — customers see exactly where their orders are at any point in time. The Effortless Experience found that 96% of customers who have high-effort experiences feel disloyal to those companies afterward. And forcing customers to dig or compose an email just to know the status of their order is a high-effort experience. Once customers place an online order, waiting for it to arrive can be both exciting and stressful.

However, some organizations use it more broadly to refer to a customer service, customer support, or customer advocacy team. Let’s begin by defining what we mean by key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer service. KPIs are quantifiable metrics used to evaluate and track the performance of a particular business activity or department over time.

Average resolution time is the time it takes an agent to resolve a customer issue from when a ticket is opened. Volume by channel refers to the amount of support tickets that come in by call, email, chat, and any other support mediums you engage in. Businesses today opt for omnichannel experiences, and volume by channel can help you keep track of where your customers are contacting you. Abandon rate, often referred to as call abandonment rate, is a call center KPI that reflects the number of customers that hang up while on hold with customer support. You can calculate this percentage by finding the difference between calls received and handled calls, then dividing that by the number of calls received.

The NPS, or Net Promoter Score, can be called the simplest measure of customer loyalty. This is a great measure of the quality of the service the team gave, which has an impact on the customer’s desire to continue to do business with your company. Ultimately, the combination of metrics you evaluate will help give your team direction.

Our Chief Product Officer Paul Adams talks about how AI has raised the bar for great customer service and what support teams can do to adapt to this new reality. This way, every chat conversation will end with customer satisfaction surveys. For users, it takes just one click to choose one of the three options — poor, average, or great.

Customers typically don’t like to keep waiting in lines, so this metric should be as low as possible. Analysis of the customer satisfaction scores will allow you to align your product and customer service to your users’ needs and boost user retention. Ultimately, customer service metrics are not useful unless you action them! However, using your customer service KPIs to improve the customer experience is easier said than done.

The Objective and Key Results (OKRs) framework is a great way to align your team behind a clear set of goals for the quarter. Add the pressure of hitting targets and presenting the company’s values in the right way for eight hours a day, and … well, as we said, it’s a tough job. There is no greater tool on the market for this than a CRM (customer relationship management software). This calculation takes into account employee hours and the cost of tools and resources. Tracking employee churn by department can be helpful for identifying areas of focus when trying to improve the employee experience. It makes inherent sense, if you see a fast response, you are likely to be more predisposed to having a good quality experience.

In customer support, however, this can be more challenging because the customer experience isn’t easily measured in dollars and cents. We use this score as it separates the support experience from the product experience. “I have a spreadsheet tool where I give everybody in the team a sample set of tickets from every other Tech Support Engineer. They’re anonymized, and the Tech Support Engineer who is reading them gives it a score based on a variety of dimensions. You have to maintain an 85% compliance rate in that QA process every month in order to stay in good standing.

There may be  cases where you can’t utilize scales, but don’t let that stop you from making the responding process as simple as possible. The CES KPI can depend on the time spent on answering, the number of required calls, and total back-and-forth interactions. We set numbers as a necessary bar to ensure quality, but acknowledge the importance of what can’t be measured, knowing that a more accurate, more human measurement of performance relies on both. These measurements can live in harmony – you just have to find the balance and make a call on what you value. While objective, measurable numbers are great for evaluating aspects of performance, they should not be relied on as the sole motivator.

A CES survey asks users how a recent experience was on a scale from “Very Easy” to “Very Difficult”. In-app CES surveys let you easily automate responses based on users’ answers. All you need to do to measure this metric is create a microsurvey, such as the one shown below. Or you can ask them how satisfied they were with a recent support interaction or purchase on a scale from 1 to 5.

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If a particular feature is underused, it’s either because users find it difficult to use or they don’t know it exists. A knowledge base usually consists of a wide range of educational material that different users can avail of to get self-service support. To calculate CES, divide the number of all “agree” responses by the total number of responses, and multiply the ratio by 100.

• They’re a set of standard measurements that allow you to compare your operation’s performance against others.
• You can leverage the Zendesk free trial to examine the solutions closely.
• In our example, we can see that October has brought a higher number of lost customers while December had quite a positive increase.
• If you want to improve your First Response Time, you might use benchmarks to determine expected response times in your industry and set specific goals based on your findings.
• By NPS yardstick, 0 to 6 are detractors, 7 to 8 passives, and 9 to 10 promoters.

It helps organizations understand the financial impact of their IT support processes and can inform decisions around resource allocation and efficiency. SLA Compliance is worth tracking because it can directly impact customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the organization’s overall reputation. Customers receiving the support promised in their SLA are more likely to be satisfied and loyal to the organization, leading to increased customer retention and revenue.

There’s no need for a live representative, and a quick response could prevent another ticket or message from piling up to deal with in the morning. Most software lets you automate responses and send them via email, chatbot, app notification, text and more. Customer support agents can provide helpful pre-sales answers to new customers asking about things like product sizing or your returns policy. Likewise, a helpful interaction after a purchase could make a customer feel confident and loyal enough to place a repeat purchase. Ticket quality isn’t a metric on its own, but it’s a metric you can create to score your agents’ tickets and work toward a consistent quality of response.

Moreover, it provides a useful benchmark for comparing your performance against other support organizations. As with First Contact Resolution, the answer here is all about empowering agents so that there’s no issue they can’t solve during that initial interaction. Often that means implementing robust training programs, building a comprehensive knowledge base, and using AI tools that can provide agents with insights and next steps during each support query.. Transfers and escalations measurements monitor the frequency with which customer service representatives need to send customer issues to other departments or higher-tier support. Alongside that, AI-powered contact center tools can help automate some of the more time-consuming post-call work, helping free up agents for calls. FCR is measured by dividing the number of issues resolved on the first call by the total number of customer issues, then multiplying by 100 to get the percentage.

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Serving as the lead content strategist, Snigdha helps the customer service teams to leverage the right technology along with AI to deliver exceptional and memorable customer experiences. You need to foster a culture within your organization that prioritizes KPI for customer satisfaction. You’ll have to ensure that every team member, from frontline staff to executives, understands the importance of customer service KPIs. Recognizing and rewarding their efforts that contribute to positive customer experience, can reinforce a commitment to excellence. To reduce your response time, you must either scale your support agents or implement a chatbot. Chatbots can handle basic queries 24×7 when your agents are busy or unavailable, which reduces the number of support tickets raised and human handovers.

Choosing the best tools to automate your customer order tracking can be overwhelming. The good thing about having so many options is that you’ll end up with an order tracking system that works exactly the way you need it to. Here are some of the best order tracking providers that you can use to create a successful project management pipeline when it comes to tracking customer purchases. On the left is a Macro (or template) sent by a customer service agent, which contains variables that auomtatically pull tracking information from the integration.

Focusing on how agents greet customers is a key part of how to evaluate customer service representative KPI performance. They should speak clearly, introduce the company and themselves, and make the caller feel valued. Define a flexible script that can adapt for various situations so your agents can make it their own.

More and more customers have come to expect near real-time access to companies across multiple channels. One Hubspot survey showed that 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a customer service question. No matter what product or service you happen to be selling, creating a positive customer experience is an essential ingredient in the recipe for long-term success. While there is a lot that goes into creating a great experience for your customers, prompt customer service goes a long way. To make a CSAT survey, you will need to create a list of questions about your customer’s satisfaction with your service or product.

All of this means that customer retention, loyalty and repeat purchases are at stake – something that can have a huge effect on your bottom line. Forrester, for example, points out that just a 5% in customer retention can increase profitability by around 25%. Attach certain data or reference materials to a complex conversation so everyone has context when replying. Notes prevent agents from asking the same question twice and from replying without all the needed information.

A summarizing metric indicating customer loyalty and potential ways to boost the overall income. Sometimes, CSAT can tell you more than statistical data from sales departments because it is intended to measure something that’s almost impossible to measure – human emotions. We touched on it briefly, but customer service automation can free up your customer support team significantly during business hours. It provides customers with immediate, automated responses that you can personalize to make sound as friendly as a manual response. These small measures free up your team to focus on more complicated and pressing tasks. Measure the number of social media support tickets that you get every day, week, month, and quarter.

Abandonment Rate

In our example, we have visualized the monthly customer churn rate over the course of almost a year and, in this case, calculations include cancellations and downgrades. You can instantaneously spot which months performed best and which ones encountered issues. We can see that October is showing particularly higher churn rates and this information enables us to dig deeper and discover why. The CSAT score relates to overall customer satisfaction with a customer support interaction, your product, company, or other aspect of your business, usually on a scale of one to five.

FCR measures the percentage of support issues resolved by the customer service department upon first contact with a customer. For web chats or live calls, this means your agent resolved the issue before the customer ended the chat session or hung up the phone. It’s important for customer service teams to measure the number of new issues/support tickets/complaints being generated every day, week, and month. It relies on the right mix of tools, training and processes to help your customer support team feel empowered enough to solve issues in the moment. Reducing Average Handle Time is crucial for enhancing operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Now, you’ll want to make sure your courier mapping, import settings, and tracking page settings are good to go. You can access these from your AfterShip account’s app page — here’s AfterShip’s help doc on to assist with setup. If you’re manually recording and sending out order tracking information in an excel document, you’re likely feeling very frustrated right now. A custom-built tracking page may require more data entry than necessary with other solutions. Not only do manual processes open your system up to human error, but they also eat up productivity.

• This is crucial – studies revealed that customers don’t mind waiting as long as their issues are resolved.
• One of the most important areas for a customer service department is monitoring and enhancing agent performance.
• For others, a dedicated tool like a helpdesk or survey automation tool will save tons of time.
• A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in customer service is a measurable metric used to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of a company’s customer support processes.
• You might also want to measure the number of tickets closed per agent for a certain time period.
• With our commitment to quality and integrity, you can be confident you’re getting the most reliable resources to enhance your customer support initiatives.

Customers leaving in large numbers is a definite warning that something is wrong. For example, you can look at overall CSAT scores (lagging) and the first contact resolution rates (leading) to determine if customer service quality is affecting the company’s overall goals. A metric is the data that helps you and your team understand where you are, where you want to go, and how you’ll get there and align with your company’s goals. Your customer service KPIs should provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making, and help focus attention on what matters most.

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With more hands on deck, customers will get the attention they need as soon as possible. Most support platforms provide all the essential reports to guide your team in the right direction. Compare your MRR over a course of a longer period of time in order to identify how sustainable is your current business model and how fast are you growing.

A high CRR not only generates happy customers but also gives a lot of other benefits to businesses. It streamlines support operations, reduces costs for labor, and brings to light brand reputation, making you a brand leader. The main rule of a successful sale is to always think about the customers, not the business. You should genuinely try to help and resolve the issue with your product or service. Think about how the user will benefit from upgrading their subscription or buying additional stuff. Calculate this customer service KPI by dividing the total time customers wait in call queues by the total number of customer calls answered.

You might have to update your self-service support, make product improvements, or provide special training to the support team. As one of the key experiential KPIs, it’s a good way to get an idea of how your customers are experiencing your service (and not just what it looks like from the inside). We break down the critical KPIs for customer support, giving you a roadmap to assess and improve your customer service. Customer service messaging across a wide range of message-based platforms can be a powerful addition to your customer service channels.

But manually sampling calls is a really inefficient way to check on quality and consistency. Again, AI can help here by listening in on calls and – in real time – perform script compliance and issue resolution monitoring. Hold time is measured by calculating the average time customers spend on hold during a specific period.

For your service level, you can track as many KPIs for customer service as you wish – but what you should aim for is to honor the services you agreed upon and even exceed the targets. Compare this KPI to others such as the agent utilization or the ticket handle time to extract deeper conclusions about costs and how to lower them. Part of a customer experience is how easy it is to work with your company — from browsing your website to making a purchase to reaching out for help.

Defining clear and measurable objectives to achieve and measuring them at different points in time is indispensable for a good customer support strategy. The ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a diverse group of professionals passionate about customer support and engagement. We update you on the latest trends, dive into technical topics, and offer insights to elevate your business. For instance, using Helpy autoresponder means you never have to let down your customers by making them wait a long time before acknowledging their issue.

If you’re not tracking customer service KPIs how do you know if your employees meet expectations? It makes it difficult (or impossible) to look at past performance and use it to indicate future expectations and growth. It typically comes with resources such as tutorials, a live chat option, FAQs, troubleshooting tips, support documentation, and a link to your knowledge base.

If one agent can’t solve a problem or knows a colleague is better qualified to do so, they’ll hand the customer over. However, if this happens multiple times or the caller has bounced around with no one knowing how to help, it’s not a good sign. In the following article, we’ll take a look at the 17 most effective customer service KPIs to evaluate your performance.

Once customers opt in to SMS communication, you can use this point of contact to launch quick surveys that provide valuable feedback. To prioritize building Macros that will have the highest impact, create Macro templates to respond to the most common questions that have come through your helpdesk. You can also ask your team which responses they end up writing out the most and add those templates too.

Moreover, organizations use it to compare the performance of different products or services and to evaluate the effectiveness of changes made to customer experience initiatives. Although their similarities, help desk metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have different purposes and goals. Help desk metrics are specific, measurable parameters that contribute to the overall KPIs and tend to remain static.

Lost business hours

A human agent is also much more likely than a chatbot to accurately interpret questions that are worded strangely. There are plenty of scenarios where responding to a customer query within a short time frame can lead to your business making more money. If a customer has a question about your product, for example, responding quickly before they move on to another product could lead to a sale you might not otherwise make. Furthermore, 60% of people who needed support defined “immediate” as 10 minutes or less.

The above quote effectively addresses the importance of keeping clients happy. Customer service is a vital element of business processes that can impact your bottom line and affect how your company is viewed in the public eye. This customer service KPI is an essential factor in your high-level customer service analysis. It allows you to track the number of repeated customers, estimating the overall brand loyalty. You can go even deeper and see how many customers who had an issue have purchased a product from you again.

The KPIs vital to you will also differ from other companies and industries. That being said, there are some common KPIs that many companies and specific departments track. For example, many support teams will track average resolution time to gauge whether customer problems are being resolved swiftly. This is just a sample of the common customer support KPIs you might choose from. For more information about these and other examples, check out this resource.Even when you track more custom metrics, these four KPIs can still help you notice problem areas.

What happens when your business doesn’t have a well-defined lead management process in place? Banking chatbots are increasingly gaining prominence as they offer an array of benefits to both banks and customers alike. It is calculated by taking the percentage of promoters (9-10) out of the total respondents and subtracting it from the detractors (0-6). With the help of the NPS score, you can know how likely your customers are to recommend you to their friends and relatives. NPS replies are less influenced by the customer’s mood, unlike CSAT which aims at emotion, not intention. Your KPIs adhere to the SMART criteria – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

For example, if you’re offering a 10% discount on their next bill after they experience a platform access problem, every customer who has the problem should receive the same resolution. This ensures consistency in customer resolutions and outcomes to avoid favoritism. Last but not least, send microsurveys after critical user interactions to collect customer feedback. You can now incorporate AI into your customer service and mix it with human elements. Every customer is different and has different expectations and levels of engagement with your product.

Providing high-quality customer support and resolving issues quickly leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. Customer service metrics are units that measure your customer’s satisfaction levels, as well as your customer service team’s performance. Some examples of customer service metrics include customer satisfaction (CSAT), first response time (FRT), net promoter score (NPS), and customer churn rate (CCR).

This allows for a wide range of strategic and proactive support interactions. As a rule of thumb, you need to be where most of your customers are, which varies across businesses and industries. But to reach the desired level of customer engagement, Chat GPT most businesses need to be reachable via most, if not all, the major applications and support channels. Once you create and launch these Macros, you can automatically add Tags to Macros for reporting to see which Macros are being used the most.

Companies are starting to bring AI into their workforce to automate and augment support. The companies that leverage AI-powered virtual assistants are seeing upticks in customer satisfaction and other KPIs. While this might sound very basic, you need to have the right systems in place to actually measure the business-critical KPIs before you can look to improve them. If you use multiple engagement platforms, make sure all of the data is analyzed together to provide a true picture of how your support engine is performing. For instance, if there is a high volume of troubleshooting questions for a particular product after three months, your company could proactively provide steps on how to keep a product working as expected. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. When you’re tracking the right KPIs, you get an undoctored, objective view of your team’s performance, which increasingly, has an impact on a company’s bottom line.

Think of your customer service operation like McDonald’s where customers get consistent service across the board. No matter what agent they speak with — whether via chat, email or phone – they are providing consistent answers to customers reporting the same issue. For example, Front measures crucial support KPIs including email volume, CSAT score, resolution time, and response time, as well as other email trends for each rep or across your entire team. This data is accessible via customizable analytics reports you can use to make crucial decisions like when to hire, whether training is needed, and how many staff to have on shift. This customer service KPI is the number of replies it takes for customer service agents to close a customer ticket. So, if your organization has fewer replies, that may indicate an effective and knowledgeable support team.

Unfortunately, this approach favors quantity over quality, resulting in wasted time and energy on a metrics bureaucracy that provides little insight and few tangible benefits. Essentially, everything your customer support team and your organization-at-large does can affect NPS. But, if you put the work into creating a streamlined and personal support system using the metrics above, it will lead to increased NPS and heightened customer loyalty.

The competition to provide customer satisfaction in ecommerce today is fierce. Now, shoppers demand free shipping on every order and expect lightning-fast order processing and fulfillment. What once were “nice to have” differentiators for small businesses have become necessary for growth and success. As we mentioned earlier, SMS marketing lets brands connect support kpis with consumers in a personalized and measurable way, just like with customer service. According to Attentive, average read rates of 97% within 15 minutes make SMS a prime channel for connecting with prospects and customers. But managing yet another communication channel — much less one that demands real-time responses — takes careful planning.

You may not be able to resolve it immediately, but the customer will know you’re working on it. These top-line items are important however, knowing the peak ticket time, day, or season can also greatly help you to run  your customer support department like https://chat.openai.com/ the manager winners. They minimize the effort your customer needs to put in addressing an issue with your product or even answering your surveys. Facilitating the response process is at the core of succeeding in getting proper and prompt feedback.

The resolution rate should be viewed within the context of the number of reopened tickets because, on its own, it can paint an incomplete picture. For example, you may find that someone with a high resolution rate has subsequently reopened many of the closed tickets. Customer analytics helps businesses deeply understand their audience to make smarter business decisions and improve CX.

Knowing what key results you need to achieve will tell you what KPIs to prioritize. For example, if your goal is to have customer support reps spend 30% less time resolving a ticket, then you would want to track Average Handle Time and Average Resolution Time. When you’re first getting started, consider using industry benchmark reports to get an idea of industry-appropriate goals for your team. If you want to improve your First Response Time, you might use benchmarks to determine expected response times in your industry and set specific goals based on your findings.