By working closely with our clients, we’ve identified a real need for companies to set, manage & measure customer service KPIs. All too often we’ve found that customer service teams could be doing far better than they expected or, they’re just not getting the credit they deserve.Customer service is a very broad subject, and the type of service these teams provide will vary depending on the size and scope of your organization, and the type of product / service you provide. Due to this, I will try to be as generic as possible.
If you’re new to KPIs, I recommend taking a quick read of some of my previous blogs on KPIs:
Here is a list of 5 customer service KPIs that we commonly advise our clients to use, and a brief explanation of each:
1. Reported Issues
This is a simple count of the total number of issues / complaints / support tickets that are received over a given time period. If you see this number spike upwards, it signals an urgent need to investigate and address the cause.
2. Average Time to Resolution
You want to ensure that you resource your customer support function with sufficient staff to meet the response time expectations of your customers. I’m sure we’ve all spent hours on hold waiting to speak to a customer service agent from our telecoms provider, only to be transferred to other departments, where we needed to repeat our personal details and the nature of our issue several times over. It’s a universally loathed experience and a major cause of customer dissatisfaction and resentment.
On average, how long do your customers have to wait from the time of their initial phone call (or email support ticket), to when their issue is marked as “resolved”? Likewise, if you see this number spike up, you need to investigate the cause.
3. First Contact Resolution (FCR)
What percentage of customer issues are resolved on first contact? For a service desk, first contact resolution (FCR) is the percent of contacts that are resolved by the service desk on the first interaction with the customer. For live calls or web chats, this means that the customer’s issue is resolved before they hang up the phone or end the chat session
FCR is calculated as the number of customer issues solved in the first contact, divided by the total number of customer contacts.
The issue is not “resolved” until the customer says it is. Many companies who offer phone service, have their customer service staff ask questions like, “Have I resolved your issue today?”as a part of the close on the call.
Likewise, your email support process needs to have a customer resolution feedback mechanism built in e.g.
“We would like to know if you consider this issue to be resolved? Please note that if we have not heard back from you within XX hours this ticket will be automatically marked as resolved and closed. If you have any further questions, simply respond to this email.”
Once you have a good idea of your FCR performance, you can drill down to identify the types of issues that are not being resolved in the first contact to identify and address the cause.
4. Customer Callbacks
One of the criticisms of the FCR metric is that it only focuses on dealing with the customer’s stated issue at the time: e.g. the customer makes contact, the issue is resolved as quickly as possible, and the customer service rep moves on to the next caller / support ticket.
A worthwhile supplementary KPI is to also measure the number of repeat phone calls / repeat support tickets from any customer within a 7 day period from their first contact.
This KPI encourages customer service staff to not just solve the customer’s current issue but to proactively address any future issues that could be reasonably anticipated based on the customer’s current needs.
In essence, don‘t just react to the issue that the customer is having right now; be proactive and resolve any issues that the customer didn’t articulate but might encounter next. Ask yourself, “How can I make sure this customer doesn’t have to call us back?”
5. Customer Effort Score (CES)
Whilst the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a common measure of customer loyalty in terms of the customer’s relationship with your company as a whole, it may not be the best metric for tracking their experience when dealing with individual customer service issues at a transactional level. For example, the customer might think your company is great, but your customer service experience is awful.
Research shows that customers want their problems solved quickly and easily, and the best way of describing what customers really want is “an effortless experience”. It’s a surprising finding, and one that stands in stark contrast to what is commonly published in the business media or presented by self-proclaimed customer experience gurus. Instead of getting your customers to say, “You exceeded my expectations,” you should strive to get your customers to say, “You made it easy for me.”
The Customer Effort Score (CES) is typically structured using a Likert Scale as follows:
To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement:
“(Your company name) made it easy for me to solve my issue”
3. Somewhat Disagree
4. Neither Agree nor Disagree
5. Somewhat Agree
6. Agree
7. Strongly Agree
From there you can take an average of all the CES scores obtained over the period. Effort reduction is the key. Customers just want to solve their problems and get on with their lives, so your job is to make it as easy as possible for them to do just that.
Of course, there are many other customer service KPIs that you could consider, but these five common ones should give you a good starting point for discussion. Regardless of what KPIs you choose to measure, it is vital that your team meets every week to discuss performance.
How do you think you can make things easier for your customers?
What KPIs do you find work best for your customer service team?
This article is republished with permission from Results.com and its author, Stephen Lynch.
