The Top Customer Support KPIs Every Leader Should Track

In today's customer-centric business landscape, delivering exceptional customer support is key for every support leader. To ensure your organization excels in this area, it's crucial to track and analyze key customer support KPIs (key performance indicators).

This article will explore the essential customer service KPIs, customer experience KPIs, and success metrics that every executive should monitor. Diving deeper we break this down by category of customer service functions. Starting from knowing details of voice of customer and overall satisfaction. Then looking into ticket response and resolution details for support queues. Ways of measuring agent productivity for operational cost and efficiency. Late we cover leadership and organizational metrics.
Lastly there're some not so common support metrics for unique cases and situations.

Checkout a teaser of AI's impact on support KPIs as you scroll down!

Support 101 metrics

Let's begin with some basic indicators for measure every support operation. These KPIs cover at executive level giving an overview of overall customer support operation. It's easier for sharing among CXO and other orgs with easy interpretation with no much calculation. These include

• First Contact Resolution (FCR)
• Average Number of Customer Interactions
• Self-Service Adoption Rate
• Total Number of Tickets
  • Ticket Volume by Category/Customer Age
  • Ticket Volume of Top 25 Customers
• Cost per Contact
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
• Initial Response Time
• Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)

How to measure, analyze and compare KPIs often depend on customer service context and organizational needs. Nature of support provided (self-serve, agent-assist), type of product or solution being used and customer channels (call, chat, email) and few other areas.

We'll examine metrics spanning from customer satisfaction, response and resolution times, productivity, costs, and overall support performance. Understanding and optimizing these KPIs can help reduce support costs, enhance customer loyalty, and drive business growth.

Customer Voice and Satisfaction Metrics

The most crucial customer satisfaction and experience metrics to track include:

1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score: This survey-based metric measures your customer's believability in the service your team offers, typically on a scale of 1-5. It helps identify areas for improvement based on negative feedback. A high CSAT score indicates that a company's products, services, and overall customer experience are meeting customer expectations.
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures customer loyalty and the likelihood of customers recommending a product, service, or business to others. It provides insights into overall brand loyalty and growth potential.
3. Customer Effort Score (CES):   It's a way to gauge the effort a customer has to expend to get what they want from the business, such as resolving an issue or completing a transaction. A low CES indicates a frictionless customer experience, while a high score suggests areas for improvement.
4. First Response Time (FRT): FRT measures how quickly customers receive an initial response to their inquiries or support tickets. Prompt response times are crucial as customers expect fast service.
   Many organizations have started excluding automatic response when calculating FRT. As a mere acknowledgement of received request does not count as contextual response to end user.

Other important metrics in this category include:

• Customer Retention Rate: The number of customers that remain loyal to a business over time.
• Customer Health Score (CHS): Identifies at-risk customers and helps retain them. They're different approaches to arrive at customer health score which is outlined in this playbook.
• Customer Service Satisfaction (CSS): Measures customer satisfaction with post-sales support. Usually with survey score sent during onboarding.
• Customer Reviews: Measures sentiment and feedback from customers. This could be an open text writing or form based reviews sent to users.
• Customer Churn Rate (CCR): Measures the percentage of customers who stop doing business with the company. Customer Success folks highly refer to this metrics to get a sense of overall product usage and business.
• First Contact Resolution (FCR): Measures the percentage of issues resolved on the first customer interaction. Resolution rate is usually slower for technical solutions or complex products which usually fall in tiered support.

Regularly monitoring and optimizing these customer satisfaction and experience KPIs can help reduce support costs, enhance customer loyalty, and drive business growth.
Mapping touch-points in customer journey to support KPIs in one interesting way to look at

Response and Resolution Time Metrics

Response and resolution time metrics are critical for measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of a customer support team. These metrics provide valuable insights into how promptly customers receive assistance and how quickly their issues are resolved. Here are some key response and resolution time KPIs:

• First Response Time (FRT): This measures the time between a customer submitting a support ticket and an agent's initial response. Prompt responses are crucial as customers expect fast service.
• Average Resolution Time: This tracks the average time it takes to fully resolve a support ticket from start to finish. Lower resolution times indicate better customer service performance.
• Average Handle Time (AHT): AHT measures the average time an agent spends actively working on a ticket, including communicating with the customer. It differs slightly from resolution time.
• First Contact Resolution Rate: This metric measures the percentage of tickets that are resolved during the initial customer interaction, without requiring follow-ups. A higher rate indicates more efficient issue resolution.
• Agent Touches Per Ticket: It's the number of times an agent communicates with a customer before resolving an issue. A high number of touches per ticket can negatively affect the customer satisfaction rate. Customers look to have their problems solved quickly, so they typically dislike the constant back and forth to solve a problem.
• Abandonment Rate: Measures the percentage of customers who terminate an interaction before completion. Usually it's a bit hard to categorize customer was satisfied, if the issue got resolved or still open.

Tracking and optimizing these KPIs can help companies deliver prompt and efficient customer service, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Technologies like conversation analytics, AI-assist, and agent coaching tools can further improve these critical metrics.

Productivity and Efficiency Metrics

Productivity and efficiency metrics provide valuable insights into the operational performance of a customer support team. These KPIs help measure workload, resource utilization, and overall team effectiveness. Here are some key productivity and efficiency metrics:

• Handover Rate: This measures the percentage of tickets that are transferred from one agent to another before resolution. A high handover rate can indicate inefficiencies or knowledge gaps within the support team.
• Average Call Duration: This tracks the average length of customer calls, helping to identify opportunities for improving call handling efficiency.
• Abandoned Calls: This metric measures the percentage of callers who hang up before their call is answered. High abandonment rates can signify long wait times and poor customer experience.
• Agent Touches Per Ticket: This is the number of times an agent communicates with a customer before resolving an issue. Fewer touches indicate more efficient resolution.
• Cost Per Resolution: This KPI calculates the total cost of customer support divided by the total number of issues resolved. It helps assess the cost-effectiveness of support operations.‍
• Contact deflection rate - % of support contacts or issues deflected to lower cost channels like self-service, chatbots or online forums. Higher deflection means lesser ticket being raised and in-turn lesser cost of operation.
• Volume by Channel - COVID permanently changed the customer service landscape. Now 67% of consumers say they regularly use three or more channels to engage with a single company. Understanding how your customers are contacting your company can help drive staffing decisions to ensure the adequate coverage where most customers are initiating support requests. It can also help you avoid the pitfall of de-staffing channels based on intuition, which can result in poor resolution times and low satisfaction-related scores.

Cost and Revenue Metrics

Cost and revenue metrics provide valuable insights into the financial impact and efficiency of customer support operations. These KPIs help measure the costs associated with delivering support services and the potential revenue implications. Here are some key cost and revenue metrics:

• Cost Per Resolution: This metric calculates the total cost of providing customer support divided by the number of issues resolved. It helps determine the cost-effectiveness of support operations and identify opportunities for cost optimization while maintaining quality service.

• Customer Retention Rate: This measures a company's ability to retain customers over time. High retention rates indicate customer satisfaction and loyalty, contributing to revenue stability and growth.
• Abandonment Rate: The percentage of callers who hang up before speaking to an agent. High abandonment rates can signify long wait times, leading to customer frustration and potential revenue loss.
• Customer Churn: The percentage of customers who stop doing business with the company over time. Minimizing churn is crucial for maintaining a stable customer base and revenue stream.

Executive and Leadership Metrics

For executive and leadership teams, tracking the right customer service KPIs is crucial to gain an objective view of team performance and identify areas for optimization. Here are some key metrics to consider:

• Top Topics: This analyzes the most common reasons why customers contact support, helping identify gaps in agent training or knowledge base content. Addressing top topics can improve first response time and first contact resolution.
• Consistent Resolutions: This KPI ensures agents provide consistent answers to customers reporting the same issue across different channels. Inconsistent resolutions can lead to customer frustration and decreased customer experience.
• Top Performing Reps: By identifying the highest-performing support agents, leaders can analyze their techniques and use them for training and coaching. This can help improve overall team performance and customer satisfaction.‍
• Agent utilization rate - It's the % of logged time agents are actively handling contacts vs idle time. Typically 85-90% utilization is optimal for efficiency in contact centers.‍
• Escalation Rate - Is a percentage that represents the number of support tickets that escalate to a person with more experience or specialized knowledge. The person receiving the escalated ticket is typically a supervisor or manager.
• Employee Turnover Rate (ETR) - Customer service reps are as important as the customers they serve. This is a notoriously high-turnover business and the cost of recruiting, training, and onboarding new employees can be staggering—especially in large teams. Keeping an eye on this metric will help identify negative trends so you can take a closer look at what’s driving the attrition and make the necessary adjustments.
• Training expense per agent - The overall cost of training each support agent including programs, materials and time. Lower training costs can improve efficiency but shouldn't compromise skills.

Sneak Peek: AI's impact on ticket handling KPIs

As you know cost per ticket raises as tiered level of support increases. Each escalation brings more effort and time to analyze, root-cause and resolve issues involving support agents and operation engineers.
AI co-pilot has a way to impact cost-per-ticket by eliminating manual referencing of resolved issues, help articles and support channels.

Curious to see AI use case of showing clear outcome on ticket costs? a before vs. after scenario of changing bottom-line of customer service operation.

Take a peak --> Customer Support AI - Insights

Not so common Support metrics

Which are sometimes specific to your business vertical, type of product and nature of service provided. Below are KPIs shared by Customer Support expert Tom Sweeny, CEO and Founder @ServiceXRG.

BACKLOG – This metric represents the percentage of cases that remain unresolved after the initial customer contact, or within a specified timeframe like 24 hours.

BACKLOG, PENDING CUSTOMER RESPONSE – This indicates the percentage of backlog cases that are currently open but are awaiting action from the customer.

BACKLOG, PENDING DEV ACTION – This metric shows the percentage of backlog cases that are open and awaiting action from the Development team.

CASE SUBMISSION COMPLETION RATE – This measures the percentage of cases that are fully complete at the time of submission. A completed case allows the Support team to begin resolving the issue immediately without requesting further details.

DEFLECTION GAP – The Deflection Gap measures the difference between the usage rate of self-service resources and the resolution rate of issues without direct assistance from support.

INTERACTIONS PER CASE – This metric represents the number of interactions between customers and the Support team required to resolve an issue.

KNOWLEDGE CONTRIBUTION RATE – This is the percentage of closed cases that result in the creation or update of knowledge articles.

LEVEL OF EFFORT TO RESOLVE CASE – This metric measures the cumulative effort invested by all Support resources required to resolve a case, including elapsed time and other resources.

QUALITY OF ESCALATIONS TO DEVELOPMENT – This metric measures the percentage of cases escalated to Development that are complete and include all necessary information for the Development team to work on the issue.

RATE OF ESCALATION TO DEVELOPMENT, ACTIVE – This indicates the percentage of support cases escalated to Development that are currently being actively worked on.

RATE OF ESCALATION TO DEVELOPMENT, NPTF – This represents the percentage of support cases escalated to Development that have been determined to have No Plans To Fix (NPTF) the issue.

SUPPORT CONTRIBUTION INDEX – This metric quantifies the value of Support efforts in contributing to tangible business outcomes.

Conclusion

The conclusion paragraphs for the article are as follows:

In today's customer-centric landscape, tracking and optimizing key customer support KPIs is essential for delivering exceptional service experiences. By monitoring metrics spanning customer satisfaction, response and resolution times, productivity, costs, and overall performance, leaders can gain valuable insights into their support operations. Addressing areas of improvement identified through these KPIs can lead to reduced costs, enhanced customer loyalty, and increased revenue growth. Improve your bottomline CS metrics with AI.

Ultimately, the foundation of a successful customer service strategy lies in leveraging data-driven insights from KPIs to continually refine and enhance processes. By adopting a customer-centric mindset and prioritizing these critical metrics, organizations can drive customer satisfaction, foster loyalty, and ultimately achieve sustainable business growth.

FAQs

1. What are the three most important KPIs for tracking customer support effectiveness?
While there isn't a definitive best KPI for customer success, the three critical metrics to monitor are customer satisfaction scores, first response time, and customer churn rate. These provide a comprehensive view of customer support performance.

2. What KPIs should a customer support manager pay attention to?
Customer support managers should focus on KPIs that evaluate the efficiency, quality, and speed of support interactions. These include metrics related to contact channels, agent performance, resolution of queries and complaints, customer satisfaction levels, types of issues encountered, and the timeframes within which issues are resolved.

3. What key performance indicators are essential for a customer support representative?
Customer service KPIs are vital for tracking and optimizing the performance of customer support representatives. These metrics help in enhancing agent productivity, refining operations, and gaining deeper insights into customer interactions.

4. Which four KPIs are essential for every manager to utilize?
Managers should prioritize the following four KPIs: customer satisfaction, internal process quality, employee satisfaction, and financial performance. These indicators are crucial for assessing the overall health and efficiency of operations within a team or organization.

References

[1] - https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-service-kpi
[2] - https://www.zendesk.com/blog/customer-support-kpis-need-track/
[3] - https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/customer/customer-service-kpi/
[4] - https://www.netomi.com/customer-service-kpi
[5] - https://www.plecto.com/blog/customer-service/15-customer-service-kpis-you-need-be-tracking/
[6] - https://helpy.io/blog/top-12-kpis-customer-service-managers-need-to-track/
[7] - https://www.proprofsdesk.com/blog/customer-satisfaction-metrics/
[8] - https://www.questionpro.com/blog/customer-satisfaction-kpi/