15 Top Customer Service Metrics That You Should Be Using

Customer service metrics are the key to understanding if your company is truly excelling at customer service.

Imagine you’re the owner of a small, new coffee shop on a busy street in a major city. You’re not sure exactly how well the business is going, but you don’t think it’s doing as well as it could be. You want to know what your customers think about the quality of their experience at your store, and how that might be affecting your sales and reputation.

What do you do? How can you get this information so you can use it to improve the quality of your customer experience?

The answer is customer service metrics. Customer service metrics provide a glimpse into the overall mood of your customers and where they think you need improvement — or where they are already happy with what they’re getting. Collecting these metrics is easier than ever before, and will help you create an excellent customer experience for all of your customers. The key to achieving these things is to understand how well your service is performing, and which areas need the most improvement. RisePath is working excellently to provide a better customer experience. 

In this post, we’re going to look at 15 top customer service metrics that you should be using to gain insight into how well your company is serving its customers. 

What Do These Metrics Tell You?

These customer service metrics (sometimes referred to as KPIs), will help you understand how satisfied your customers are, how loyal they feel toward your company, and whether or not they will continue to do business with you in the future. This can also be used to determine if there are any areas that need improvement within your company.

How quickly does your team respond to customers who reach out for help? Can you call during normal business hours and get an answer right away? Or do you have to wait for an email response days later?

Response time is important for a few reasons: if a consumer has a problem, they want it solved ASAP.

15 Top Customer Service Metrics That You Should Be Using

There’s a lot of conflicting advice out there on the best metrics to measure customer service performance. The 15 customer service metrics below will help you determine how well your company is really doing and what areas need improvement.

1. First Contact Resolution (FCR)

First contact resolution (FCR) is a critical metric to measure overall customer satisfaction. It measures the percentage of customers that get their problems solved during the first interaction with your customer service team.

This metric is tricky to track, but it can provide valuable insight into your customer service operations. For example, if you have a high FCR rate, it may indicate that your support staff is not routing calls correctly or that your IVR options are not clear enough. If you have a low FCR rate, then perhaps you need more training for your support staff or additional IVR options for certain call types.

2. Abandonment Rate

Abandonment rate refers to the percentage of callers who hang up before speaking with an agent. Abandoned calls can be caused by long wait times or inefficient routing resulting in customers hanging up and calling back later or calling another department entirely instead of waiting to speak with someone who can help them.

3. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): 

A quantitative measure of customer satisfaction, where customers are asked to rate the quality of a company’s products or services on a scale from extremely satisfied to extremely dissatisfied.

4. Customer Effort Score (CES): 

A metric that measures the ease of doing business with a company, where customers are asked to rate the ease of completing their most recent experience with the company, on a scale from extremely easy to extremely difficult.

5. Net Promoter Score (NPS): 

A metric that measures customer satisfaction and loyalty by asking customers how likely they are to recommend a company’s product or service to a friend or colleague on a scale from 0-10.

6. First Contact Resolution (FCR): 

A metric that measures the percentage of customer issues resolved in a single interaction and without any additional follow-up required.

7. Average Handling Time (AHT): 

The average time spent per call, including talk time, hold time, after-call work time, and wrap-up time.

8. Average Speed of Answer (ASA): 

The average amount of time it takes for an agent to answer an incoming call or email request, measured in seconds.

9. Customer Health Score

The Customer Health Score is one of the most important customer service metrics which truly tells you how your relationship with customers is going on. This metric is a combination of other customer service metrics such as CSAT and NPS. With the help of this metric, you can easily determine whether the relationship with customers is good or bad. This score ranges between 0 to 100, and above 50 means customers are happy with your support, whereas below 50 means customers are not so contented with your support system.

10. Customer Churn Rate

The Customer Churn Rate is another significant customer service metric that helps in determining how likely a customer would recommend your brand to their friends and family members. The score ranges from -100 to 100, where a score above zero means you’re doing something right, whereas a score below zero means you need to up your game.

11. Qualitative Customer Feedback

Qualitative feedback can be collected using surveys, polls, post-chat forms and by analyzing user chat transcripts. This data can be used for market research as well as for training agents on common pain points and roadblocks that users face when interacting with your business.

12. Monthly Recurring Revenue

Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the amount of money your business receives every month from subscriptions. This metric helps you understand the stability and growth of your SaaS company. Customer success managers can look at the MRR growth and be able to identify if customers are staying with their product or leaving it for competitors.

13. Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) or lifetime value (LTV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. In other words, it’s an estimate of how much revenue a single customer will bring to your company over time. This metric is essential for customer success managers because it allows them to understand how much they should spend on acquiring and retaining customers to keep them profitable.

14. First Contact Resolution Rate

First contact resolution rate is the percentage of times a customer’s service request is resolved during their first interaction with the company’s support team.

15. Customer Satisfaction Score

If your renewal rate is high, it suggests your team or product is doing a good job of ensuring client satisfaction. Customers are willing to commit to your firm for another year/contract so that they can continue to profit from your services.