Manage your customer service

Monitoring your customer service performance is crucial for the success of your business. It provides insights into customer satisfaction, helping you identify areas for improvement and address customer concerns quickly.

Tracking and reviewing your customer service performance allows you to assess the effectiveness of your staff training programmes and the need to review your customer service strategies. Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your business to others, raising your reputation. 

Metrics for measuring customer service performance

Many metrics can help you measure your customer service performance. Some may be more familiar than others, they include:

Average resolution time

To measure your performance in resolving customer cases, you can use the average resolution time metric. To calculate this metric, add up the total duration of all case resolutions and then divide it by the number of customer cases resolved. This will give you the average time it takes for you to resolve a customer case.

Customer service abandonment rates

Another useful metric is the customer service abandonment rate. This is the percentage of customers who hang up before your team answers their call.

To calculate it, divide the number of abandoned customer service enquiries by your total number of enquiries.

First response time

It is important to provide customers with prompt assistance. To evaluate how well your customer service team is meeting this expectation, you can calculate your first response time. Find the average time between a customer's contact and your staff's response.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

An NPS metric is a tool for measuring customer service performance and satisfaction. It can be a valuable benchmark to determine how well your company is performing compared to others in your industry.

To measure customer service performance using NPS, you could develop a questionnaire and ask customers questions such as: ‘Based on your latest service experience, how likely is it that you would recommend our service and our company to a friend or colleague?’

Respondents would be asked to rate their likelihood to recommend you based on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 would be extremely unlikely and 10 would be extremely likely.

These answers would then be sorted into three groups including:

• Detractors – this would include anyone rating you between 0 to 6
• Neutral – this would include anyone rating you with a score of 7 or 8
• Promoters – this would include anyone rating you with a score of 9 or 10

The NPS score is the difference between your promoters and detractors. It can range from -100 to 100.

A higher score means your customers are more likely to be satisfied with your service and the experience you provide.

Using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) together gives you a full view of your performance. It helps you find areas for improvement. In turn, this contributes to cost savings and improved overall operational effectiveness.