How do KPIs optimize your customer service efforts?

Customer service is an experiential activity. Thus it's tough to quantify from the customer's perspective. It can be beneficial or harmful, rapid or sluggish, useful or unhelpful, and so forth.

Organizations, at the other hand, are in a league of their own. Contact Centers may track and measure just about every variable that affects the quality of their customer service now that sophisticated customer service analytics and reporting solutions are available. Contact centers can improve their overall customer experience (CX), reduce customer churn, and increase brand loyalty by measuring key performance indicators (KPIs). The quantity of consumer data, on the other hand, can tempt CX executives to track everything, resulting in information overload and analysis paralysis.

Importance of KPIs for the customer service

Customer service representatives have their work cut out for them: they must optimize margins and decrease expenses while still providing a better degree of care that matches current customers' expectations for rapid, personal, and effortless assistance.

It's now well recognized that the stakes for support teams have never been higher. People are increasingly basing their purchasing decisions on the level of customer service they receive. After one bad customer service encounter, customers will cease doing business with a company.

Because support has such a significant impact on a company's bottom and top lines, it's vital that support leaders keep track of their support agents' performance, identify areas for improvement and what's working, and recognize and reward great performance. To accomplish so, certain customer service key performance indicators must be tracked on a regular basis in order to change processes or improve agent training.

When you track the right KPIs, you get an unadulterated, objective picture of your team's performance, which increasingly has an impact on the bottom line.

You may utilize concrete data analytics to make better decisions and reduce gaps in the three critical categories outlined below when you use customer service metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).

• Team performance should be measured − Customer service metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) quantify how well your staff handles service inquiries. It provides you with the necessary information about your team's gray areas, as well as upgrade plans and training sessions in order to meet customer service benchmarks.

• Enhance consumer loyalty − Customer satisfaction is one of the most important customer service metrics since it determines how satisfied your customers are with your service. The greater the client's lifetime value, the higher the satisfaction score (CLTV).

• Customer retention should be improved − Customer satisfaction scores can be determined by measuring customer service. When you make an effort to align your products and services with your customers' needs, they will not only choose to stay with your company but will also become brand advocates.

Performance indicators: Leading vs. Lagging

Using performance indicators will help you figure out what to measure, how to assess it, and when to measure it, as well as provide guidance to your team. You can't comprehend why a customer is upset, where your agents are falling behind, or how to remedy it unless you know your KPIs.

There are two types of indicators to consider when deciding which to use in your data: leading and lagging.

• Leading indicators are measurements that provide an early indication of performance, allowing you to direct your team's performance in a proactive manner. Tracking your agents' first contact resolution rates is one example.

• The measures used to quantify the entire business impact of your customer service quality are known as lagging indicators. Results take longer to assess, but these indications can help you determine how effectively you've met your overall objectives. CSAT scores are an example of a lagging metric.

The idea is to combine leading and trailing indicators in your calculations. To see if customer service quality is harming the company's overall goals, you can look at overall CSAT scores (lagging) and first contact resolution rates (leading).

Metrics for Measuring Customer Service Quality

The main customer service KPIs that firms can track are listed below. These KPIs, when utilized in conjunction with one another, can provide a comprehensive picture of your performance and achievement.

Average Time to Resolve − When a customer's problem can be resolved quickly, they are usually the happiest. This metric will show you how your performance compares to others. To get your average resolution time, add all case resolution times together and divide by the total number of customer cases.

Rates of Customer Service Abandonment − We discovered that roughly seven out of ten customers would hang up on a call or leave a chat if they had to wait an excruciating amount of time for customer service. Your call or chat abandonment rate should ideally be zero. To get this number, divide the total number of customer service questions by the number of abandoned customer service inquiries.

The score for Customer Effort (CES) − CES is a relatively new customer service measurement metric to keep an eye on. It essentially measures how much effort your clients believe they must put in to resolve an issue. The more effort that is necessary, the more aggravating the encounter becomes. A Likert scale question can be used to collect these feelings after a customer service interaction.

Rate of Customer Retention − This indicator is the polar opposite of customer churn rate, but both indicate how likely your customers are to stay with you. To calculate the retention rate, subtract the total number of new customers from the total at the conclusion of a given time period. Then divide the total number of clients you had at the beginning of the time period by the number of clients you kept.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) − Customer Satisfaction Score is a five-point scale that measures how satisfied customers are with (CSAT)

CSAT is a metric that gauges how happy your customers are after interacting with a customer care representative. You can use a Likert scale survey question to record your customer's satisfaction level on a scale of one to five, just like you can with CES.

Time to First Reaction − Customers want immediate assistance, and you can calculate the first response time to see how quickly they're getting it. Calculate how long it takes for a customer to contact you and for a customer care professional to respond.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) − The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a widely used metric for assessing customer service performance and satisfaction. This form of the survey question, like CSAT and CES, can be used to gather consumer feedback: "How likely are you to suggest our brand to a friend?" High response rates suggest that your customers are happy with your company and the service they received.

Rate of Resolution − Subtract the number of unsolved instances from the total number of client inquiries, then divide by the total number of inquiries to get the overall resolution rate. The fewer issues that remain unresolved, the better your customer service is. This statistic can be tweaked by calculating the first contact resolution (FCR) rate, which identifies only situations that are resolved within the first interaction.

Sentiment Analysis − Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, involves reading a customer's language to identify if it skews positive, negative, or neutral. This is a terrific way for agents to get a quick read on consumers' emotions and change their approach accordingly, thanks to natural language processing technology.