Customer support is a extremely measurable exercise, and the help software program you employ inevitably offers you entry to a ton of customer support metrics.
Name quantity, chat occasions, decision charges, interplay counts, and myriad different numbers are extra simply recorded and measured at the moment than ever earlier than.
However gaining access to that information is barely step one. The larger problem is deciding what information issues, find out how to report that information to your management, and what context is required to assist the remainder of the corporate perceive the influence your work is having on the enterprise (and your prospects).
On this publish, we’ll simplify that problem by providing you with 11 significant customer support metrics, a course of for selecting the best metrics in your staff and firm, and a few instance customer support experiences shared with us by different help leaders.
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11 significant customer support metrics
Customer support metrics might be simply measured on the stage of the person help request after which aggregated to report on total staff and particular person customer support agent efficiency.
Many corporations use totally different metrics that report on the case stage, particular person agent stage, and staff stage to get a holistic understanding of the group’s efficiency. By correlating customer support metrics at totally different ranges, your administration staff can higher grasp main indicators for efficiency and make significant adjustments to your help technique.
Case-level metrics
Case-level metrics are a superb technique to generate customer support experiences that you need to use to handle your hiring, staffing, and even product methods. Use details about matter, time created, and placement to assist your staff perceive the place and why you might be most busy.
Quantity primarily based on matter, for example, reveals the place your prospects are having essentially the most bother. When you see that 25% of your instances by matter are account questions, it could imply that you should rework your documentation round that a part of your product or possibly even make product adjustments.
When correlated with different buyer help metrics, case-level metrics may also assist pinpoint vital areas of alternative. As an example, correlating instances by matter and buyer satisfaction can point out areas of your product or help expertise that delight your prospects lower than others.
If your whole conversations associated to your billing web page have a decrease CSAT, it could imply you should both enhance your technique of response or change the billing web page itself.
1. Circumstances by time created
Assessment the quantity of recent conversations created in any given time-frame. This metric might help you determine occasions when your prospects are most energetic and enable you higher set staffing ranges to match demand.
When you discover that you’ve got an growing variety of conversations coming in in a single day, it could be time to contemplate staffing further staff members throughout that point. In fact, corporations can finest use this metric when correlated with agent capability.
When you should not have sufficient quantity coming in in a single day to achieve agent capability, you might be able to wait a bit earlier than hiring new of us. In spite of everything, until you will have different work that must be carried out (resembling documentation or operational duties), you don’t wish to workers a task and never have sufficient to maintain them busy.
2. Circumstances by matter
When you use tags or customized fields to label conversations, you’ll be able to rapidly spot adjustments in quantity that may point out an issue in your product or the effectiveness of an enchancment you’ve already made. For instance, has that new redesign decreased questions on updating a password?
Customer support experiences by matter, particularly round case quantity, additionally give a superb view into how your staff’s quantity is trending. You may even see that conversations round a subject develop or lower over time.
Use that information and examine it with actions you will have taken inside your help technique to grasp the efficacy of your adjustments. If the quantity is rising, it could be that the work you’ve got carried out is not as impactful as you thought.
3. Circumstances by location
Perceive the place you will have essentially the most prospects needing assist so you’ll be able to help them appropriately, or maybe contemplate including choices like localization or help in different time zones.
Talking the identical language is important: 72.4% of customers mentioned they might be extra possible to purchase a product with data of their language. Language can also be a consolation — when you’ll be able to perceive which language most of your prospects are talking or the place they’re coming from, you’ll be able to present a good higher expertise.
Totally different nations may have cultural variations that have an effect on how they understand your help. By understanding which nations are reaching out most frequently, it’s possible you’ll cater higher to particular populations.
Particular person agent metrics
Customer support metrics on the agent stage are a good way to grasp how particular person performances contribute to the bigger staff’s productiveness. Understanding how every staff member contributes and benchmarking efficiency are vital steps for teaching towards progress.
Past that, particular person agent metrics usually correlate as much as staff stage metrics. Corporations may also attribute common deal with time and time to first response to particular person staff members.
Contemplate which forms of behaviors you are attempting to incentivize and encourage inside your staff, then use customer support reporting to get a deal with on it.
4. Resolved instances
What number of conversations did this individual shut in a given interval? Averages aren’t at all times illuminating, however traits over time can reveal high performers and those that may have some extra assist.
This metric may also assist inform how far alongside within the onboarding course of somebody has come. As you combine new staff members they usually be taught extra about your product and processes, you’ll be able to safely anticipate this quantity to go up. When you discover stagnation or the variety of resolved instances happening, it could point out that the person wants extra assist or coaching.
The identical might be mentioned for seasoned members of your staff. Whereas a drop in resolved instances is usually a signal of burnout or a staff member not being as well-informed on sure product performance, it could additionally point out different shifts in your help quantity.
As an example, tickets is perhaps changing into more and more advanced and require extra effort to resolve, thus taking on extra time and conserving your brokers from working by way of as many tickets.
5. Buyer interactions
A staff member might be doing a superb job whereas exhibiting fewer than common resolved instances. Measuring particular person interactions helps examine workload and dealing model.
You might have some staff members who can energy by way of a whole lot of tickets a day, whereas others max out at thirty. Contemplate the forms of conversations that every staff member handles and the depth they put into their troubleshooting or discovery earlier than responding.
As an example, if the staff member who responds to thirty tickets a day usually responds to tough technical points or has a particularly excessive first contact decision fee, it is smart that they might additionally deal with fewer tickets.
With data like this, as an alternative of shifting the quantity larger for the one who responds to fewer tickets, you’ll be able to assign every individual the forms of tickets they’re finest geared up to deal with. That will imply placing the lower-volume individual explicitly on technical tickets and the higher-volume particular person on low-hanging fruit.
Cater to your staff’s strengths, and your prospects might be happier for it.
6. Buyer satisfaction
When prospects fee their help expertise, they could even be ranking the services or products, so any particular person ranking is not essentially significant. longer-term ranking averages for people and throughout the staff is extra useful in recognizing champions or these needing to enhance.
You may as well monitor buyer satisfaction over time or because it correlates to product releases, bug enhancements, or thrilling bulletins. This metric is helpful when linked to the “instances by matter” customer support metric famous above. these two metrics collectively may give you details about if:
Brokers are well-informed sufficient to reply questions on particular product areas or new options.
Sure product areas are irritating your prospects or inflicting issues.
Documentation round options is missing.
New bulletins and adjustments aren’t sitting effectively with prospects or customers.
Your organization wants to enhance its product advertising or announcement methodology.
Assist brokers do not have the required vocabulary to clarify to prospects the “why” behind adjustments or options.
Use the reactions in your CSAT as they correlate to subjects to tell your technique and areas of enchancment transferring ahead.
7. Common deal with time
For people, having a low common deal with time can replicate their consolation and ability with the work, that means they get by way of instances rapidly. Watch out to evaluate it within the context of the sort and complexity of the tickets.
Equally, be cautious of incentivizing common deal with time too closely. If you’re inspired to reply rapidly to spice up this customer support metric, it’s possible you’ll discover that your brokers begin to slack on the standard of their responses. It is easy to be quick in case you aren’t apprehensive about whether or not your reply is 100% appropriate.
Common deal with time is finest when managers relate it to subjects quite than to particular person brokers. Doing so will assist inform your staff’s management if particular subjects or areas take longer to reply questions on.
As an example, you would possibly anticipate the topic of “bugs” to have a slower common deal with time than “getting began” forms of questions.
Crew-level metrics
To handle something effectively, you should have metrics round it. Whereas each agent- and contact-level metrics are helpful, team-level metrics are the inspiration of significant progress.
Use the extra granular metrics to grasp your alternatives, then use customer support experiences round your team-level metrics to see how the adjustments in your technique are working.
Crew-level metrics are Most worthy when seen over time. These metrics will finest swimsuit groups searching for a gradual enchancment or exploring how important outages or new bulletins have an effect on them. Nevertheless, you should not anticipate drastic adjustments week over week with all these metrics.
8. Time to first response
How quickly after a buyer requests your assist do they get an preliminary reply? Does it take longer for escalated tickets to get a response than run-of-the-mill product questions? Buyer expectations for response time will fluctuate from channel to channel, so it is price splitting your metrics out by channel, too.
This metric often serves as a number one indicator for buyer satisfaction. This implies in case you start to decrease this quantity, you’ll begin to discover your CSAT steadily rising. In spite of everything, prospects do not wish to wait lengthy for responses and are typically delighted when a reply arrives extra rapidly than anticipated.
For that cause, some corporations select to flip the technique of responding to the oldest tickets first. For particular questions or low-hanging fruit, your organization could contemplate responding to the most recent questions first, simply to see the way it impacts your relationship with prospects or your CSAT.
Nevertheless, watch out experimenting with all forms of inquiries when contemplating time to first response: Some forms of conversations, like bugs or account/billing points, require extra adherence to the normal technique to deal with each buyer pretty.
9. Interactions per decision
Typically, the less interactions it takes to resolve a dialog, the happier prospects might be. If that quantity is rising, it may be an indicator of services or products points or a shift in the kind of buyer you might be serving to.
As an alternative of this metric on a short-term foundation, perceive whether or not it has steadily elevated or decreased over time. Equally, contemplate segmenting out totally different subjects to see if the variety of interactions per decision is larger for some than others. It could make sense that technical conversations require extra interactions to resolve than primary product questions.
A number of methods you’ll be able to decrease this metric in case you discover it is beginning to climb:
Retrain staff on the subjects the place you discover this metric is the best.
Implement or enhance your saved replies.
Replace inside and exterior documentation to offer further assets for staff members.
Determine areas of the product that create further complexity throughout the context of customer support.
Ask prospects for extra data in your automated responder that acknowledges receipt of their dialog.
Set off automated routing primarily based on particular “key phrases” to make sure that the ticket will get to one of the best staff member as rapidly as attainable.
10. Common deal with time
Deal with time displays how lengthy a dialog is open earlier than your staff takes follow-up motion. Lengthy gaps would possibly imply alternatives to enhance processes, coaching, or tooling to get that reply again extra rapidly.
That is one other customer support metric that’s simplest when segmented. Whereas it is glorious to grasp how lengthy your staff is taking total, it is extra helpful to grasp if particular person subjects take longer than others.
Monitoring this at a person stage may also be useful for understanding the well being of your staff members. Whereas it may be regarding to see common deal with time beginning to rise for a particular staff member, use it as a jumping-off level for dialog quite than accusations.
Rising common deal with time can actually imply dwindling focus, nevertheless it’s simply as prone to be a number one indicator for burnout or job dissatisfaction.
11. Buyer contact fee
This measures the share of your energetic prospects who request assist in a given month. Improved self-service choices, bug fixes, clear product descriptions, and product design can all assist cut back that fee as you develop.
It’s best to search for that good “hockey stick” progress in the case of this metric — that means that it rises steadily earlier than leveling out. Whereas you do not need prospects to cease contacting you solely, at a sure level, the work you might be doing along with your ticket deflection ought to stage out the expansion.
Phase out your customer support experiences to grasp the place many of the contacts are occurring, and you will have a transparent map of what you’ll be able to enhance.
When you discover that conversations round your account web page develop extra quickly than different subjects, for instance, you might have a case along with your product staff to enhance the web page, or it’s possible you’ll simply want to jot down extra detailed documentation.
Use the metrics at your fingertips to create a street map round what you’ll be able to influence, and implement service methods to make significant adjustments.
measure and report on the suitable metrics
As a customer support chief, you will have entry to many of the numbers above — and possibly a ton extra. The problem is deciding which to report on, who to report it to, and the way it needs to be offered.
To determine a very powerful metrics in your staff, contemplate these three questions:
Why is measuring a particular metric necessary?
The purpose of your customer support staff is (I hope!) to not generate nice-looking graphs and experiences. It’s to offer nice service to your prospects. Metrics are only a extra measurable proxy for the actual consequence.
For instance, Kristin Aardsma is head of help for Basecamp, an organization that considers their nice service and quick response occasions to be product options. For Aardsma’s staff, the mix of first-response time and buyer satisfaction is a significant technique to inform if they’re staying on monitor.
One other instance: Through the excessive progress days of Mailchimp, Invoice Bounds’ single most necessary job was hiring sufficient new workers to take care of help high quality. In his phrases, “We have been so targeted on progress and getting sufficient folks in that my major concern was actually on, ‘Hey, we’re not carried out hiring but.’” So Bounds’ major metrics have been traits of quantity per agent and buyer satisfaction stage.
If you end up clear about why you might be reporting, you’ll be able to resolve extra simply what you need to measure and report on and — equally necessary — what not to measure and report on.
Who’re you reporting to?
Understanding your viewers is vital to communication in all types. What issues most to your frontline help staff won’t make any sense to your CEO who doesn’t have that ground-level perspective.
What you present and the way you clarify it’d differ significantly relying on who you might be reporting to. At Marketing campaign Monitor, customer support reporting is finished at three ranges, and the contents of these experiences are barely totally different every time:
Particular person brokers are emailed each day experiences on their private exercise and their staff’s exercise.
A month-to-month report is shared on the inner wiki with the entire firm. These experiences take away a number of the particular person agent particulars however add some long-term perspective.
The very best stage of reporting is offered on a few slides to the senior administration staff with some written feedback to clarify the traits on show.
As a world and distributed firm, that’s a good way to ensure everyone seems to be up-to-date.
Alternatively, SurveyGizmo’s staff is multi functional constructing. The director of customer support presents the weekly experiences in individual to the help staff, and there may be an open dialogue that senior managers are invited to attend. Bodily proximity signifies that their complete staff will get the complete context and may ask for readability simply.
Ensure to find out who you might be reporting to and what they care most about. That may assist direct you to the suitable measures.
What consequence do you wish to see?
“What will get measured will get managed,” mentioned Peter Drucker, America’s father of administration philosophy.
It’s an appealingly concise piece of knowledge: You’ll impact change on these belongings you take note of. However as unemployed phrenologists will attest, one thing that’s measurable just isn’t essentially significant.
“There might be an excessive amount of emphasis on fluff numbers in help,” says Assist Scout’s Justin Seymour. “The staff likes to know what our targets are, what forms of conversations we’re having, and the way we’re transferring the needle month to month.”
The customer support chief is in one of the best place to grasp the place the most important alternatives are for the corporate. For Bounds at Mailchimp, he wanted to quantify his want for extra help workers, so he targeted his experiences on telling that story clearly and precisely.
Marketing campaign Monitor, in the meantime, is a product firm at its core, and figuring out methods to enhance the buyer expertise by way of a greater product is an enormous focus of customer support reporting.
Your administration staff can’t have the angle you’ll be able to because the buyer lead, so you should lead them truthfully and effectively to a better understanding of what motion must be taken — and you are able to do that by way of constant, clear reporting.
The qualities of an ideal customer support metric
Finally, the metrics you select to report ought to meet all the following standards:
Significant — They need to tie again to one thing your organization desires to realize. For instance, when your objective is very responsive help, time to first response is a perfect metric. Decision time could not matter.
Moveable — It’s best to measure issues on which your staff can have influence. When you discover that one thing you’re measuring would not matter, you will have the liberty to drop that metric.
Genuine — Your experiences should inform a real story. It’s attainable to make use of actual numbers to ship a deceptive message. Be sincere even when it hurts.
Contextualized — Numbers in isolation might be stripped of that means, so present them in context.
Constant — The traits over time are often extra necessary than particular information, and searching again over 1 / 4 or a yr may give you some implausible insights and encouragement.
Constructing an impactful customer support report
When creating experiences, observe these pointers to ensure your experiences are actually impactful:
Concentrate on traits — The route of change often issues most. Having an 80% buyer satisfaction fee could not sound nice, however a month-on-month enhance from 70% to 80% is good news.
Direct restricted consideration to anomalies and adjustments — Your leaders are busy folks, they usually have a restricted quantity of consideration to provide you. Ensure it’s straightforward for them to grasp what your experiences imply. Contemplate offering an total abstract. For instance: “We acquired 20% fewer questions on exporting this month, so the remodeling we did within the app saved us 12 hours of help time already!”
Search for correlations that inform a much bigger story — particular person metrics is helpful, however understanding the connections between them is the place the actual perception can come.
Combining metrics may also enable you determine deeper points. For instance:
“When our electronic mail time to first response goes above 4 hours, we see constant dips in buyer satisfaction.”
“Answering billing questions takes us 3 times the typical ticket size.”
Beneath is an instance from my expertise at Marketing campaign Monitor. Our reporting software may inform us when tickets arrived and the way lengthy prospects have been ready for a primary reply, nevertheless it couldn’t present us what number of tickets have been ready for us to answer at any given time.
By exporting information from our assist desk and mixing it with every week’s price of handbook measurements, we may produce a single chart that confirmed the correlation between bigger queues and better ready occasions.
Our help staff reviewed this chart, which stimulated a dialogue concerning the stress and influence of a big queue of ready tickets. Davida, our Head of Assist, labored together with her staff to separate our major queue into smaller, extra manageable chunks. That change created a major lower in response occasions with out including any new assets or altering the quantity of tickets.
4 customer support report examples
Whether or not you’re constructing out your first customer support experiences otherwise you’ve been producing experiences for years, there may be at all times a chance to make these experiences simpler at driving enhancements in your corporation.
Contemplate the 4 instance customer support experiences beneath — every from an actual customer support staff — to brainstorm some new concepts in your personal experiences.
Notice: The format and construction of those experiences are actual, however we’ve obscured the precise numbers.
1. Assist Scout
The Clients staff at Assist Scout meets weekly to debate basic staff enterprise. We consider experiences are finest evaluated as a part of a dialog, not a easy checklist of metrics. Particular person targets are mentioned in weekly one-on-ones with a participant’s coach.
The top of help presents the staff’s targets as soon as a month in the course of the firm management assembly. In Assist Scout’s quarterly company-wide City Corridor conferences, the pinnacle of help presents a slide or two refreshing the corporate on staff targets, the progress we’ve made, and any upcoming adjustments and hiring plans.
When evaluating a reporting objective, we purpose to outline 4 issues for the staff:
Why can we care about this?
How are we at present doing?
What are the constraints of this metric?
A easy abstract of the principle takeaway we wish the staff to know
A number of notes:
Whereas we depend on our personal reporting instruments, our inside help reporting focuses on the narrative these metrics inform.
We use experiences to maintain a quantitative eye on our targets, however we by no means deal with these numbers as “hit in any respect prices.” A very inflexible give attention to quotas can usually backfire and decrease high quality and staff motivation.
Quantity of knowledge ought to at all times be taken into consideration, and totally different timeframes could also be helpful to look at totally different metrics. For instance, we could consider the staff happiness rating as soon as a month however particular person happiness scores wanting again six months.
2. Shinesty
“Right here at Shinesty, all stakeholders share experiences from their division in what we name our This autumn publish mortem,” says Antonio King, Director of Expertise. “We construct experiences and checklist findings throughout the data/information we’re sharing. Moreover, we share insights to achieve suggestions or to deploy one other set of eyes.”
King got here on as Assist Chief in 2016. Since then, Shinesty has begun self-service statistics to determine any service gaps, in addition to extra high-level metrics.
Shinesty appears on the following self-service metrics:
content material views
high articles
bounce fee (Google Analytics)
periods (Google Analytics)
searches (Google Analytics)
pages/session (Google Analytics)
lacking articles/content material gaps
suggestions scores
deflections
dealing with time per deflection
A number of notes:
Contextual explanations are included within the experiences instantly to border the report with an total story.
Knowledge comparisons to earlier intervals assist add that means to the graphs.
3. Celtra
“My major goal in reporting is to indicate that we’re doing a persistently good job — and that there are not any crimson flags to concentrate on,” says Vuk Lau, Director of Consumer Assist at Celtra. “I share my experiences month-to-month in a Google Doc with our Gross sales and Service executives — and with my staff.”
Lau makes these experiences out there for everybody within the firm to view, and he additionally produces extra detailed experiences, together with hourly and each day distribution, consumer feedback, and CSAT metrics, quarterly and yearly.
A number of notes:
The help quantity is damaged down by area, staff, and tier.
Particular person agent efficiency can also be tracked.
The label breakdown helps determine the key sources of incoming help requests.
4. Jayride
At Jayride, the staff stays on high of experiences by touching base each day, weekly, and month-to-month. Studies are posted in a Google Sheet so every staff can monitor their very own progress.
Aaron Lewin, Head of Buyer Service, says they maintain a each day 10-minute assembly with administration and division heads the place they discuss “what we did yesterday, what we’re doing at the moment, roadblocks, and wins. On the finish of standup we additionally evaluate the general firm targets (Passengers travelled, Reserving Unit Profitability). All staff members are inspired to attend and pay attention.”
Levin meets weekly with the pinnacle of operations to debate his private experiences. Then, every month, every staff showcases their progress to the complete firm. These experiences embrace conversions, decision time, and help unit prices.
A number of notes:
The help staff has conversion targets which can be tracked individually for pre-booking and post-booking interactions.
Particular person agent efficiency can also be tracked.
The label breakdown helps determine the key sources of incoming help requests.
What metrics will you report on subsequent month?
Customer support metrics matter. What you select to report on and the way you report it could make an actual distinction within the stage of service you present.
Don’t waste your helpful time compiling experiences that provoke no questions and generate no motion. Invoice Bounds mentioned it fantastically: “Metrics solely inform you the place to search for the story; they don’t inform you the story itself.”
Decide the suitable metrics and use them to inform a compelling story about how your customer support staff is contributing to your organization’s targets.