We're sharing the essential metrics your customer service team should be measuring as they evaluate business KPIs, hire new team members, and train agents.
Your Company Goals
If you are looking to decrease the weight of your workload, then average number of replies per request may be a good metric to measure. A metric that is less important than this goal is resolution rate, believe it or not!
Although your resolution rate should be high (100%, ideally), in terms of workload weight, it's not as important as the amount of time that your reps pick up the phone to handle a single issue. Reducing the average number of replies per request probably means training program improvements or an investment in generalized resources like an online FAQ.
Quality of Response
Many resources will tell you to focus on first response time and average time to resolution as tell-all metrics that will give you an inside perspective to your customer service issues. Breaking each of these components down into a quantifiable standard will certainly help. However, you must also assess customer service quality in a holistic way. After all, your customers will not be able to tell if you improve in one way and not another. They will simply experience a different kind of negative emotion.
Quality of response is also a metric that will differ for every company. It is meant to be internal and scaled to previous performance. There is no "final marker" when it comes to quality of response; there will always be room to improve, which is what the modern consumer demands.
Listening to the Silence
Some unhappy customers won't let you know why they are unhappy. They may lash out on a review site, but the majority of them will just leave, never to return again. Make it a point to pick up as many responses as you can with a post-service satisfaction survey.
However, the true insight here comes from people who do not complete the survey. How many of those people converted? Did they return to the site? How much demographic information can you glean from them? This silent contingent of prospects is always the majority. Whether they are filling out your surveys or not, they are always speaking loud and clear.
High Standards
You will know that your customer service efforts are succeeding when more of this silent majority engage with you on speaking terms. Cross reference the conversations you have with your customers and prospects on social media with your customer service efforts. Are you seeing an improvement in engagement on Facebook in the same week that you implement a change in customer service? The two actions may be connected... find out!
The right customer service adds to your brand in a very quantifiable way. 45% of customers report they will pay more for a product if its' customer service meets a high standard. Keep the above tips in mind as you measure your performance - the right metrics lead to the right improvements. Read more customer service metrics here.
