Customer service addresses customer issues and concerns, ensuring your customers are satisfied with the product or service. Customer service has many forms: a phone call, live chat, in-person, etc.
It’s important for any organization to keep a track and measure their customer services to have an understanding of their progress. Without measuring customer service and satisfaction, a company cannot grow or improve its workflow. To see if your practices yield a positive effect on the customer’s mind regarding their experience with your business – you need to measure performance. There are many ways to gather information on this experience in order to evaluate your customer service – choosing the right metrics can help you improve your understanding of your team’s efficiency:
1. Ticket Count
The total amount of tickets is the number of new requests in a specific time frame. This metric records all kinds of conversations with customers through all means. The ticket count assists you in understanding support as a whole and should be measured by day, month, and year. By monitoring the ticket count overtime, you can better manage resources to meet the customer support needs. When there is a spike in ticket count, it may indicate a systematic issue impacting multiple customers and need to be addressed immediately.
2. First Response Time
This is the time taken for an agent to respond to a customer after they raise a support ticket. This is important as quick responses mean that you have started to work on a resolution. Your customer may tolerate a fault in the product or service you provide but not waiting too long to get a response. An ideal time for a first response ranges from a few minutes to an hour, time taken more than this is either average or bad. If you see a trend in increasing first response time, you should consider ways to reduce the first response time, either by hiring more staff or adopting new technology.
3. Time to Resolution
This refers to the time took on average to find a solution to a case that has been opened by the customer. The formula used to find out this mean time is – total time of all resolutions divided by the total number of solved cases. This is an important metric because time-to-resolution is highly correlated to customer satisfaction and need to be handled appropriately. If the average time-to-resolution is high for an extended period, the company can suffer long-term reputation damage.
4. Open Cases
This refers to the customer support cases that are opened and waiting to be responded. You should segment the open cases by the time since the last response, allowing your customer support to work on the cases that have been idle for the longest. Keeping a record of this gives insight into the productivity of everyone.
5. Open Cases by Created Date
Similar to open cases, these cases are displayed according to the date they were created on. You should manage the open cases by balancing the created date and the value of the customer account. This leads to better planning on what cases should be prioritized and where there can be leniency.
6. First Contact Resolution
This shows the number of tickets that are resolved in the first response by your customer support team. A high rate of the metric shows that your team is efficient and well-trained and that the customer issues are relatively minor and simple to resolve. Many research shows that high rates of first contact resolutions are synonymous with happier and more satisfied customers.
7. Number of Interactions per Resolution
The perfect number of interactions per resolution is 0 as you would want your product or service to have no problems. But this is not the case in most businesses. Setting a standard number of interactions to solve a problem will help you keep a check on your customer support performance. If the number goes above the benchmark that you have set, you need to diagnose whether there is a problem.
8. Ticket Density
Ticket density refers to the ratio of total ticket volume to the total number of customers. The total number of tickets you received is highly correlated to the number of customers you have. Therefore, ticket density is a better metric to get a grasp on the health of your product/service. This metrics offers you an insight into the average tickets raised on the per customer level.
Wrap Up
Your customer support is a vital function to keep your customers happy and need to be measured and managed properly. By evaluating the frequency and types of customer support requests, you can uncover the most direct and candid feedback from your customers. World-Class customer support can often be a strong competitive advantage for companies in a noisy and saturated market.
