Customer Support Academy

Customer Service Success Metrics

Find out how to measure good customer service, what KPIs you should be tracking, and how automation can enable success.
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Customer Support Academy: Module 5

By the end of this module you’ll:

  • Understand how to measure customer service metrics
  • Know which metrics are most important for measuring good customer experiences
  • Be able to set KPIs for scaling your customer support with automation
  • Recognize what successful customer service automation metrics look like
15 min. Clock

How to measure customer service success

Tracking your customer service metrics is essential nowadays. Insights from the way your customer support team functions can inform everything from your bottom line to customer retention. And this is no exaggeration: 32% of customers are more likely to switch to another brand after just one bad experience according to PwC.

But how do you measure something as intangible as customer service? Of course there are metrics to track productivity, but what about customer service quality? We’re here to help take the guesswork out of measuring customer service success. There are countless metrics at play here, but they generally boil down to two categories: measuring quality and measuring speed. 

Quality relates to how happy your customers are with the service they are provided with. 

Two of the most important KPIs to measure quality are customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS). We’ll go into more detail on each of these later in the module. 

Speed is a measure of how quickly and efficiently customer support teams are able to resolve customer queries.

There are a number of metrics that can be used to measure speed, but the ones we’ll focus on are Average Handle Time (AHT), First Contact Resolution Rate (FCR), and First Response Time (FRT).  

No matter how you measure it, both speed and quality are needed to provide an exceptional CX. And automation can help boost all these metrics when done correctly. Let’s look at how to measure customer service efficiently and how automation can supercharge your customer support

 

Customer service metrics that matter most

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AHT (Average Handle Time)

AHT refers to how long it takes to resolve a customer query. This metric shows your customer support team’s efficiency.

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FCR (First Contact Resolution rate)

FCR measures the proportion of issues that are resolved during the initial interaction with a customer.

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FRT (First Response Time)

FRT is the amount of time between when a customer submits a support request and when they receive a response.

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CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)

CSAT is measured through customer feedback surveys, and assesses how a product or service fares in comparison to their expectations.

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NPS (Net Promoter Score)

NPS rates how likely a customer is to recommend a company’s product or service. It is also measured through customer surveys.

Customer support statistics you should know

Organizations with higher CSAT after adding a virtual agent 75%
According to IBM
Customers that think solving a problem in one go is important 33%
According to Statista
Buyers that would pay more for better CX 86%
According to PwC

4 use cases for scaling successfully with automation

The goals you want to achieve will vary immensely depending on your business size, the product or service on offer, and your existing workflows. Nonetheless, there are a few common ways that automation helps businesses to improve their customer service.

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1. Reducing manual triage to route support requests and capture leads 

The future of CX is proactive. That means anticipating your customers’ needs and actively encouraging more communication with your brand at all points of the customer journey. More communication could lead to more messages to sort and respond to. But you can embrace that shift: Intelligent automated routing lets you easily tag, label, and route increasing ticket volumes to the right agent or sales rep.

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2. Increasing efficiency and improving CX with unified omnichannel support

Customers hate repeating themselves: It drives down CSAT, and increases frustration, while support agents waste time on administrative tasks and manually updating tickets. When you automate communication across your asynchronous messaging channels, you can improve resolution times and customer satisfaction by managing all customer interactions in one central hub.

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3. Increasing customers served through 24/7 support

Instant information is crucial for customers on the brink of a purchase, and 24/7 chat support is the best way to reduce friction in their buying journey. Measurable knock-on effects of 24/7 support may include lower cart abandonment rates, serving customers in different time zones to where your support team is based, or reducing email backlog outside office hours.

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4. Expanding your market with multilingual capabilities

Reducing the need to hire in the languages you expand to is a way to reduce overhead costs. With multilingual AI capabilities, you’ll not only save on human resources, but be able to serve customers in their native. Some automation providers are even able to train a bot in one language, and to understand all the other languages you operate in. Look for providers that allow you to manage, train, and track results for multiple languages in one place.

Case studies: Customer service automation metrics

Successful customer service automation metrics don’t necessarily equal high automation rates or deflection rates. Success is more about tailoring a strategy for how to improve customer service to your company goals.  Let’s take a look at a few case studies of companies who are happy with different levels of automation for different use cases.

Keep learning

Browse the Customer Support Academy for more courses on how to improve customer service

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