Delivering exceptional customer service is a top priority for today’s companies. These efforts can provide a competitive edge as 93% of people are likely to make repeat purchases with brands that offer great pre- and after-sales support.
Knowing whether or not your team is up to this task can be tracked through various metrics, including Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES). These data points help you deliver ever better customer experiences. But they’re far from being the only relevant benchmarks.
Adding social media, messaging apps, and other digital channels into your customer support mix allows you to track more metrics than before. And although every company has different customer service priorities, some metrics and indicators are relevant regardless of your industry or size.
Tracking ticket trends over longer periods
Measuring digital customer service channels starts with understanding the volume and content of incoming inquiries. For one, it’s recommended that you track the number of requests per support channel, whether it’s chat, phone, email, or social media. Knowing this ensures you can allocate enough agents to each channel. Also, you’ll be able to spot ticket volume spikes, which might suggest either a new problem or a regular spike happening during certain times of the day or week.
Besides volume, analyzing the types of issues customers face is of vital importance as well. A metric that measures the most common issues faced by new users can reveal flaws in your on-boarding process. Or, you can track frequent problems reported by experienced users. Solving these would help you reduce churn. Both the volume and types of inquiries should be monitored over longer periods to spot patterns and have a better understanding of your team performance.
And once customers open a ticket, they expect a prompt reply. In fact, around 90% of customers consider immediate response as very important. First response time, a metric that measures the time before your customers receive the first reply, can help you understand how quick your agents are. Customers have different expectations depending on their channel for contacting you, with those on social media and messaging apps having least tolerance for delays.
Furthermore, managers often believe that CSAT is useful for getting a holistic view of how well support channels perform. But it’s important to keep in mind that this metric is only concerned with the most recent interactions. To get a thorough understanding of how happy your customers really are, it’s vital to track and review CSAT over time and understand why spikes happen. This metric can be measured either by end-of-interaction surveys or text speech analytics, both of which are available in RingCentral’s customer engagement solutions.
Monitoring the behavior and quality of your team and agents
To make sure your customer service is of top quality, you’ll want to track the behavior and quality of your team and even individual agents. Several metrics can help in that regard. Average time to resolution, for instance, is a metric that tells you how long agents take to resolve customer issues. The faster, the better, of course. But some issues might take longer to resolve, so it’s recommended to look deeper into this data point before making conclusions.
An average backlog is another benchmark for tracking the efficiency of your team. The goal is to resolve all the open tickets. In case if there’s a spike in this metric, then it’s good to analyze whether that occurred because of inefficient agents or external problems.
And as customers demand a prompt resolution of their problems, tracking first call resolution (FCR) rate will indicate whether you deliver on this expectation.
FCR shows the efficiency of your agents in solving problems during the first contact, whether they’re offering support via email, social media, or other channels.
The productivity can also be tracked through the conversations-per-agent metric. Knowing how many inquiries a particular agent handles on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis can help you identify most and least productive employees. Then, you can provide additional training to those who need to brush up their skills.
Not every inquiry can be handled during the first contact, though. So it’s important to track the average number of replies per request metric as it reveals the quality of your support team. A high number shows that inquiries are not directed to the right person. Or, your reps might be giving incorrect responses and then having to go back and forth with customers.
If that happens, the escalation rate will increase as well. This metric is the percentage of customers who end up demanding to speak to a manager during interactions with a support team.
Improving self-service tools regularly
Despite the quality of your support team, some customers prefer to research and troubleshoot issues by themselves. In fact, 65% of consumers feel good about the company they’re dealing with if they can solve issues on their own. That’s why it’s critical to offer self-service options, such as a knowledge base. This can be a section of your website that provides answers to common product issues and simple service questions.
Improving self-service tools requires knowing what the customers think and how they navigate your resources. One way to go about that is simply asking for their feedback. FAQ content that was repeatedly rated as not helpful, for example, can be rewritten to provide more value.
You can also look into search analytics. The number of knowledge base searches with no result or searches with no clicks into articles that exist are valuable insights. They help you determine the articles you need to write as well as those whose usability needs to be improved. Analyzing search patterns thus takes the guesswork out of deciding what topics to cover next.
These efforts should eventually result in improved ticket deflection. This metric shows the extent to which your self-service content satisfies support demand that would otherwise be handled by agents.
Taking your metrics monitoring to a new level
Measuring digital customer service channels can set your team up for success. Metrics reveal when your team is at risk of being overloaded with inbound calls and messages and needs additional agents. Also, you’ll be able to increase customer satisfaction and retention. Rapidly responding to inquiries and handling problems efficiently will be a major competitive advantage.
Each business has its own customer service needs and business goals. Hence, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for deciding which metrics to track. But whatever your needs are, keep in touch with your team to ensure that data you track provides valuable insights.
To that end, RingCentral’s customer engagement platform can be of great help. It tracks interactions with customers over various digital channels and integrates with dozens of popular CRMs like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Zoho. All of your KPI tracking can be done in one place.
If you want to benefit from RingCentral’s analytics capabilities and take your metrics monitoring to a new level, then learn more about our solutions here.
Originally published Aug 10, 2020, updated Dec 30, 2022
