Customer Service KPIs to Boost Your Business Success

Today customer service is more important than ever. If you’re able to understand your customers on a deeper level while meeting their needs both swiftly and effectively, you will gain a significant advantage over the competition. 

By analyzing the right data and working with the right customer service metrics, you will be able to create a level of customer experience (CX) that will increase engagement, encourage loyalty, and drive more sales to your business. 

To help you on your quest for data-driven insight, we’ll consider the importance of customer service key performance indicators (KPIs) and look at the metrics that will boost your business success. 

Why you should use customer service KPIs to your advantage 

By meeting your customers’ pain points head-on while providing a seamless level of CX, you will generate more revenue—and customer service KPIs and metrics will give you the insight you need to do so. 

 Tracking the right customer service KPIs and metrics and you’ll be able to: 

• Identify existing strengths and weaknesses in your customer communications, content, and service. 
   
• Accurately benchmark your performance against market standards and create actionable goals that will accelerate your business’s growth. 
• Make faster, more informed strategic decisions that will make you more responsive to your customers.

• Gain the insights you need to make valuable improvements to your customer service operations, touchpoints, and messaging. 

Essential customer service KPIs & metrics 

Now that you know the importance of using data-driven insights to your advantage, let’s take a look at the customer service KPIs and metrics you need to track for sustainable business success. 

Service Level Agreement (SLA) 

A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract that outlines what your customers can or should expect from your service based on the customer service metrics or data you are tracking. Not only do SLAs establish data-centric boundaries and expectations from the get-go, they can also provide another layer of customer engagement. 

Developing an SLA is essential as it creates complete transparency between you and your customers and ensures that you don’t get in trouble with your customers later down the line.

 This guide from CIO will give you some insight into what you should include to ensure your SLA is water-tight. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) 

Next, we move onto the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Tracking and analysing your NPS is essential as it will tell you how likely a customer is to recommend your organisation (and your service) to others.

 By asking your customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service on a scale from 1 to 10, you will get an idea of how your brand is perceived in the public domain. Here’s how the NPS scoring system works:  

• People who score you between 9 and 10 are Promoters  
• People who score you 7 or 8 are Passives 
• Everyone who scores you 6 or below is a Detractor 

Once you have enough data, you can calculate the percentage of the customers that fall below the “promoter” category (9-10) and subtract that number from your “detractors” (0-6) to get your overall NPS score. You can then benchmark your NPS score against industry average etc. 

If your NPS score is lower than you would like, you’ll be able to make strategic decisions to improve it and, ultimately, boost your customer service efforts in the right areas. By tracking your NPS regularly, you’ll be able to see the impact of your strategic decisions overtime and further refine your approach. 

Average Resolution Time 

Average Resolution Time is a vital customer service metric that will tell you exactly how long it takes you to solve customer service queries or issues based on touchpoints such as phone, email, and live chat. 

Calculating your Average Resolution Time will allow you to make your customer service efforts more efficient. By driving down your Average Resolution Time, you will improve your overall service levels and, ultimately, increase your NPS. 

Speed and quality are both essential to customer service success and must be balanced carefully. With regular analysis, you’ll be able to understand which levers to pull and where to focus your attention to improve both. 

Active Cases Per User 

Active Cases Per User is a customer service KPI designed to quantify how many customer service issues have been raised by a customer over a specific period. 

By gaining an insight into how many issues your customers raise, you will be empowered to dig deeper into how and why these specific service issues are happening and create strategies to help you tackle them, head on. 

Accessing this metric frequently will increase your customer service performance while making every customer-centric communication as efficient, effective, and value-driven as possible.

Note: With both Average Resolution Time and Active Cases Per User, it’s possible to use a CRM to look at the history and frequency of specific issues that crop up surrounding your product or service—or take most time to resolve—and make essential improvements to eliminate them., In turn, this will enhance your customer service performance across the board and increase customer satisfaction. 

Resolved Cases 

By quantifying and benchmarking your resolved customer cases over a specific timeframe, you can gauge how efficiently various aspects of your service and CX efforts are performing.

 If your rate of resolved cases dwindles, you will be able to drill down into the data and get to the root of the problem. As a result, you can make vital changes to your customer service touchpoints while providing training to customer service agents and, ultimately, enhancing your customer service offerings.

“Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.”—Sally Gronow 

Invest in your customer service activities, work with the right metrics, and you will enjoy a healthy return on investment for your efforts. 

Great customer service doesn’t happen overnight, but by leveraging data to your advantage, you will give your customers exactly what they want and need on a sustainable basis.

Working with a robust CRM is essential for analysing your metrics effectively from one central location and significantly enhancing your customer service efforts. 

Our CRM-based customer service solution offers a wealth of data-driven insight designed to help ambitious businesses understand their customers on a deeper level and improve vital aspects of their CX strategy. 

If you would like to find out more about our solutions, please contact us. For more actionable business advice, read CRM for Customer Service.