10 Customer Service Metrics & KPIs You Should Be Measuring (And How to Improve Them)

Most support platforms provide all the essential reports and customer service metrics to guide your support team in the right direction. But they don’t necessarily tell you what to do with the information.

Whether you’re new to customer service or a seasoned support veteran, it’s always worth getting a fresh perspective on your business’ stats, data, and metrics.

Why? Because even though support is a high-touch discipline that thrives on human connection, taking satisfactory customer service to the next level can only happen when you know where you need to improve.

Tracking Metrics in a Help Desk

Below, you’ll get a glimpse of essential KPIs in the wild through our Reporting dashboard. And then, we’ll tackle tangible ways to improve them. With that being said, not everyone may be familiar with a help desk or how it differs from traditional email support.

We’ve written about the benefits of a help desk for omnichannel support in quite a few places. but the major takeaway here is that they have much more advanced reporting features than Gmail or Outlook.

You won’t be able to look at your team performance or assess for things like “average response time” or “customer satisfaction” in a standard email platform. We’re using Groove (our help desk solution) for the purposes of this article, but most help desks will offer similar reports.

With an actionable approach at the forefront of your mind…

Let’s jump into the 10 customer service KPI metrics that matter most.

1. Ticket Volume

Perhaps the most obvious starting point in tracking support metrics is ticket volume.

How many inquiries is your business getting across a specific period of time?

Start tracking this metric to get a general understanding of how many of your customers need help. Track trends over time to see how product, service, or support changes increase or decrease this number.

For example, let’s say you’ve recently hired a new customer service agent. They have years of experience, so you expect them to succeed. You might want to track not only their individual performance, but the overall ticket volume to see if they’re bringing the number down.

Let’s walk through an example report from Groove’s dashboard on customer conversations.

Using this chart, we immediately see two prominent spikes. Correlate those dates with technical issues or service changes to understand what happened. Brainstorm ways to get ahead of issues in order to keep volume more steady in the future. This metric won’t tell you what to do, it merely signals when there is an obvious problem.

Offer Self-Service as Frontline Resolution

One sure-fire way to improve this metric is with a self-service knowledge base.

The number of conversations is likely to be directly correlated to the visibility and clarity of your knowledge base. If you make tutorials, educational articles, and FAQs readily accessible on your website, you’re unlikely to get the same volume of requests for help.

When customers can find answers on their own, they don’t need to reach out to customer support. And customers generally seem to like self-service options that don’t require them to depend on another person (provided the problem is easily resolved).

With Groove’s knowledge base feature, you can optimize self-service, and track articles via feedback and metrics to see what’s working.

Looking at the “most searched terms” and “most viewed articles” can help you assess where you need to concentrate support or CX, while evaluating for blind spots.

2. Ticket Backlog

These tickets remain unresolved due to the performance of your customer support team, abnormally high support ticket volume, or business/product related dependencies that require additional time to solve.

Note: Resolution and reply mean very different things in customer service.

• Replying to a customer simply implies you’ve responded to their inquiry.
• Resolving an issue indicates their problem is solved and they (or you) need no further correspondence.

Looking at the Reports dashboard again, we see bars for conversations, customers, and resolutions.

The goal is to get the number of resolutions at or above the number of conversations. This means you’re resolving every inquiry (if you’re above, it means you’re resolving conversations from the prior day or week).

Set Reminders for Lingering Support Tickets 

Stay on top of unresolved requests in your helpdesk software by snoozing a conversation for the exact amount of time you need.

Let’s say you need some time to hear back from an internal department as to the source of a website issue, reported by your customers. You can snooze all those replies until a specific date/time by clicking on the alarm clock icon.

When the time is up, check back on the customer or follow up with your IT department and web development team.

Customer support often can’t resolve everyone’s problems immediately (shocking, I know). They often rely on other internal departments, especially in SaaS. We can keep open lines of communication, though, and try to facilitate resolutions as seamlessly as possible.

3. Average Resolution Time

An efficient support team works to impact resolution time, rather than reply time.

A short resolution time typically indicates actual effective support responses. Reply time simply indicates the speediness of response, which can often be automated. It doesn’t necessarily mean the concerns have been resolved.

Taking a look at our screenshot, resolution time holds steady in this chart, and even seems to be dramatically lower compared to last week. But that sharp spike requires investigation.

Correlate Ticket Resolution to Customer Pain Points

How can you determine the cause to resolve it, or prevent recurrence?

Correlate it to internal happenings or customer touchpoints.

Maybe it’s something as simple as a support team member being out of office. Or, perhaps there is a more complicated issue lurking beneath the surface. For example, a website bug cropped up without a quick fix and left hundreds of customers without access to your cloud-based product.

You can explore website user tracking tools like Hotjar, LogRocket, Fullstory, and WEVO Pulse — or plumb Google Analytics 4 as a free option. An obvious example is the timeline of events triggered by a user on your site or app. If you notice something awry (or a high bounce rate) it might be time to conduct further investigation with your developers.

Prevent Follow-Ups with Related Articles

Link to knowledge base articles within replies to give customers even more relevant information and prevent further questions. For example, let’s say you respond to a customer that is having some difficulties setting up your shipping solution.

You know your team has built an in-depth self-service tutorial with some assistance from the IT department. So, you link to that knowledge base article in your email reply, providing the customer with more context than they’re likely to want to read in an email response.

Easily Embed Knowledge Base Articles Into a Reply With Groove

Think of it like offering “related articles” at the end of a blog post. It provides additional education or guidance on the topic in question, but it’s there if the customer wants more help. And without them needing to prompt you again via email.

If you’ve got a keen observational eye and some insight, you can also predict what else may be confusing your customers and address it before shooting out your reply. For example, if they’re stuck in the onboarding stage, you can provide them with a couple of different beginner tutorials versus a single generalized onboarding article.

4. Average Reply Time

Customers have very high expectations for reply time. They want service quickly. Some demand it immediately. With live chat and auto-replies producing an immediate response, customers often anticipate some sort of follow up as soon as they send a support ticket.

The Groove Reports dashboard shows median response time at just over three hours in our screenshot. In this example, we can see the average number went down by over 30% since the previous window of time.

The decrease is definitely a good sign. We always want to shorten the time between replies. The actual number (three hours) tells us far less. Canned responses and auto-replies definitely help.

Now, three hours might be perfectly within reason (the time frame your customers expect), or it might not. If you’re a business with thousands of customers — sure, it makes a lot more sense. If you’re a start-up with a couple dozen clients, no one should be waiting 3 hours to hear back.

Set baselines and benchmarks for your customer service team to interpret this number.

Track Support Ticket Volume for Proper Staffing or Automation

Groove lets you view the busiest times for incoming messages across the week.

Staff up for the peak service periods to reduce reply time. In retail, this may include a major holiday like Christmas, while elevated service demands in SaaS may be contingent on feature updates or service changes. Plan accordingly.

With more hands on deck, customers will get the attention they need as soon as possible. And if your team can’t afford to hire more human agents, you can deploy AI to resolve basic inquiries across service channels.

5. Average First Response Time

First impressions mean everything. Good customer service teams excel at responding to customers as quickly as possible.

Even if you can’t resolve an issue, send a quick note that you received their message to alleviate the anxiety of an unknown wait time.

We track median first response time using the graph below.

If our goal is to stay under eight hours, then we’re mostly on track. Again, it depends on the expectations you set for your company and your support team. Dive into the spikes to see what’s causing them and to work on preventing it in the future.

Automate Your First Response with ‘Instant Replies’

Automate an initial response to reduce this data point to nearly non existent.

Let customers know you received their inquiry and will be in touch shortly. Include some common questions or a link to your knowledge base to try to solve the problem immediately. When there’s a known issue, update this reply with as many details as possible to get ahead of customer inquiries.

6. Customer Satisfaction Score

A customer satisfaction survey is typically presented after support ticket resolution to gather customer sentiment. It asks the customer to rate their support experience on a scale ranging from good to bad.

In the dashboard, we track both CSAT score and the percent of customers who participated in the survey.

An 80% CSAT is considered excellent in the customer service world. If we’re using general benchmarks, we can be very satisfied with this number. If we’re comparing against the last month, though, the report shows that we’re 13% lower. We’ll want to research why it went down to prevent churn.

Get More Survey Participants

The second piece of data in the CSAT score report gives us a great starting point for improving customer service metrics. If you can get more people to complete the survey, you might be able to raise CSAT without putting in too much more effort. Most often, angry customers are the most vocal. Encourage happy customers to complete the survey to get a more balanced metric.

7. Average Handle Time

This measures from the time an agent opens a support email to the time they click send (or from the moment they answer a phone call until the moment they hang up).

Customer service lives in the details. Shaving a few seconds off handle time adds up to big savings. Managers should constantly be looking to improve the average time by optimizing and streamlining workflow processes for their team members.

The goal is to reduce this number overtime, but the actual number to reach for will vary depending on your organization. Managers should be watching this number more than agents. If the number rises, try out a new process or shadow your team member to see what’s slowing them down.

Provide an Internal Self-Service Resource

Turn your knowledge base into an internal hub for support reps. Especially when your knowledge base is connected to your inbox, this will be the easiest and quickest place for your support team to find answers.

Your customers love self-service because it helps them resolve their own issues quicker. Take this same philosophy into the workplace. Arm your support reps with a hefty internal knowledge base to answer any questions they may have during their time in the inbox.

8. First Contact Resolution Rate

In theory, customer service questions can be solved with a single answer. In practice, this rarely occurs. Support agents often need more information to fully understand the question, prompting a second email.

Customers have follow up questions. But this metric should always be top of mind. Working to improve first contact resolution will improve both customer happiness and support team productivity.

Groove Reporting shows first reply resolved as a percentage of total conversations. We can also see the percent change from the previous month.

We resolve over 50% of issues on the first reply. This cuts the number of support tickets needing multiple responses in half. Agents can focus more of their time on challenging support tickets.

Insights from this metric are two-fold. You want to keep it high to make sure your responses are clear and effective right out the gate. However, if it gets too high, consider optimizing (or creating) your knowledge base. The inbox should be the last line of defense, not the place to go for easy answers.

Create a Database of Proven Replies 

Canned replies rule customer service metrics like this one. Build a database of replies for common questions and shoot them out as needed, allowing you to cut back on response time.

Test what customers respond best to. Ideally, the majority of your canned replies will end in a support ticket resolution.

Of course, this isn’t always possible.

However, your canned replies should be tried and tested beforehand. For example, if you notice an influx of the same question and your team collaborates on a thoughtful canned reply, test it out first before automating it as a standard response.

9. Net Promoter Score

Send an NPS survey to solicit responses and generate the number associated with their recommendation.

After gathering all the data points, break it out into promoters, passives, and detractors.

• Promoters: Customers who selected 9 or 10 on their NPS survey.
• Passives: Customers who selected 7 or 8 on their NPS survey.
• Detractors: Customers who selected 0-6 on their NPS survey.

Subtract the percent of detractors from the percent of promoters for a given time period to reveal NPS.

Borrowing from our in depth article on analytics, we’ll briefly walk through an example of how to interpret NPS in the real world.

Let’s say surveys went out to 30,000 customers, and 3000 responded. Filter the responses by promoters, passives, and detractors to get the percent for each. Then plug it into the NPS formula.

Your NPS score may vary wildly. Again, set a baseline and work from there. Interpret the results using benchmarks.

Correlate all Customer Service Metrics with NPS 

Essentially, everything your customer support team and your organization-at-large does can affect NPS. There’s no direct line to shave time or boost numbers on this metric. But, if you put the work into creating a streamlined and personal support system using the metrics above, it will lead to increased NPS and heightened customer loyalty.

10. Replies per Resolution

We track median number of replies per resolution in the Reporting dashboard using a line graph. We can easily see baselines and observe any abnormalities over time.

Something happened on August 18 to really skew this metric. Correlate it with product issues or changes to understand why it jumped. Think about what could have been done to keep replies more encompassing.

Use Notes to Communicate Internally Before Responding 

Notes and @mentions ensure that agents get the full picture before replying to a customer. They can correspond internally with another team member or manager if they need help with a ticket, rather than reaching out to a customer unprepared.

Team members can also use notes as reminders or info cards. Attach certain data or reference materials to a complex conversation so everyone has context when replying. Notes prevent agents from asking the same question twice and from replying without all the needed information.

Boost KPIs and Track Important Customer Service Metrics With Groove

Metrics alone won’t produce satisfied customers. They exist as hard data on the level of support your team is providing to customers.

It’s up to you to take these data points and build a customer service experience that puts the customer at the forefront of your business.

Set KPIs (key performance indicators) based on each customer support metric to guide your support staff in the right direction. You’ll need to lean on your help desk to track progress and optimize performance (using automation when appropriate).

If you’re ready to bolster those KPIs, Groove can help you easily resolve customer tickets with minimal effort.

Your free trial of Groove includes everything you need to track metrics, set goals, and satisfy customers. Start your free trial today! (No credit card information required)