Customer satisfaction is a major factor in business success and growth. It’s no secret that better client retention rates will most probably lead to better revenues for a company. And so with that said, customer satisfaction and service should be a priority for every company in any industry.

Nowadays, much of client concern resolution has moved online. Studies show that 90% of customers with client concerns expect companies to have an online customer service channel in email support or chat support form. But the beauty of online tools for customer service is that it allows for easier tracking of customer service performance and setting up important customer service metrics to help determine whether a company is meeting its customer service goals.

What metrics then should companies measure to determine whether their customer service staff or departments are performing effectively?

Here are the top five essential customer service metrics that any business should measure:

Customer concern volume

Learning how to evaluate customer service starts with determining the volume of customer service concerns. Some businesses might get a few dozen concerns a day while some might get a few a week. It really depends on the industry and the technicality of a business’s product or service. The more technical the challenges of a product might be, the higher the customer concern volume. One would probably get more customer service concerns when selling computers and gadgets versus apparel.

What’s important is that a company sets its own KPI by determining the average volume it gets per day or week and then shooting for anything lower than that. Most online customer service dashboards have a feature to measure bug report volume on their platform.

Ticket backlog

Another important customer service KPI to measure is ticket backlog. This metric is the number of tickets that stay unresponded to. When a company gets a large number of tickets and doesn't have the staffing or system to support response time, ticket backlogs can build up.

Hiring more staff to respond to tickets isn’t always the best solution. A company can make use of better service desk software that allows for more productive customer support work with the use of response templates, concern triaging, automated replies, and so on. Ultimately, balance is key to minimizing job automation risks and ensuring your staff still stays on top of your processes.

Response time

As time goes by and technology improves, the average wait time that customers demand becomes shorter and shorter. According to studies, 48% of consumers want a response to social media queries within twenty-four hours at the least. Observing and measuring response time is another important metric for customer service personnel.

The price companies pay indirectly due to long response times can be detrimental to the business’s overall performance. So measuring this index is vital if a company wants to improve client satisfaction and get more clients that will patronize their brands for a very long time.

Resolution time

Another KPI for customer service is resolution time. If response time is the duration for an agent to respond to a customer, the resolution time looks at the amount of time it takes to close a ticket and consider a complaint or concern resolved. Choosing a customer support help desk tool that measures this metric with performance management analytics could be a great investment as it often indicates how proactive staff is not just in responding to concerns, but actually seeing them to completion.

The goal of customer service is never to respond to concerns but to resolve them. This fact indicates that this metric will become a make-or-break for many companies that want to improve their customer service efforts.

Customer satisfaction rating

Many customer service help desks provide customers with the chance to rate their experiences with an agent after the ticket gets closed. This rating system helps because it shows the overall satisfaction people have with your company’s customer service experience. Some of those satisfaction ratings come in either a five to ten-point rating system or a simple “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” rating. You’ve probably experienced something like this on chat support or even an email template.

On top of post-support ratings, some customers will take those opinions and post them on more public rating systems like Google, Facebook, Amazon, or other business aggregating sites. This reality is important for businesses given that 88% of consumers look at online customer service reviews before deciding to buy from a business. Listen to these ratings as they often provide a lot of clarity as to how your business is doing in terms of meeting your client’s expectations.

Bonus: Upsell rate

Here’s a bonus customer service metric that somewhat relates to your client experience performance— your upsell rate. When responding to requests, there will be windows of opportunity to introduce another product or upsell a service. Customer service staff should be ready to spot these opportunities and capitalize on them. When using a service desk solution to respond to inquiries and leads, provide scripts that client support agents can use to sell products. You can also track those sales and provide incentives to agents if they’re able to close deals.

Measuring Data For Better Operations

As the old adage goes, what you measure grows. When we measure the right things in our customer service operations, we become better at it and serve our clients better. This in turn can lead to better overall company performance in terms of the bottom line.

If you're looking for a robust Service Desk, Hipporello is the solution that you've been searching for. With Hipporello Service Desk, you can turn your Trello into a fully functioning help desk, receiving tickets and requests to your Trello board via forms and emails. Moreover, Service Desk for Trello offers analytics that allows you to keep up to date with essential customer service metrics.

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