As per a report by Salesforce, “89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.”
In today’s competitive landscape, providing exceptional customer service is a differentiator that sets your business apart from the competition. Thus, measuring the customer service KPIs becomes a necessity to analyze the service and support efforts of your organization. This KPIs measurement will give you a very clear idea of what are the pain points that need to be addressed to ensure a positive customer experience leading to increased customer loyalty.
It is clear from the above discussion that measuring customer service KPIs is important for a business’s growth, let’s learn more about these metrics:
Escalation rate
Sometimes first-line customers service agents are unable to resolve a ticket, in that case it is redirected to a senior agent for resolution. This is called an escalation.
Escalation rate is the percentage of support tickets that are escalated to senior support agents before they get resolved. These support agents are the ones with the right set of skills to solve the case. A higher escalation rate leads to a negative customer experience. Thus, it becomes important to track escalated tickets.
By measuring the escalation rate, it is easier to understand if our customer service efforts are working well or not. Also, in case of a higher escalation rate, the focus is shifted toward the cause of escalation. There are cases when escalation is unavoidable, the focus should be to reduce the number of escalations.
Average Resolution time
The time taken by agents to resolve support tickets is referred to as resolution time. This customer service metric is crucial as it indicates the efficiency and effectiveness of the support team in resolving a ticket. It varies based on the complexity of the support ticket. Lower resolution times indicate an effective handling of tickets. A decrease in average resolution time leads to an increase in positive customer experience and vice-versa.
Understanding resolution time makes it easier for organizations to improve customer service and enhance efficiency along with increasing their customer retention metric or capabilities. We can track resolution time using:
First contact resolution (FCR)
Consider this, a customer’s issue is resolved in the first interaction with the support agent, without any further escalations, delays, or follow-ups. This type of resolution is referred to as First contact resolution (FCR) or First call resolution.
Like other customer service metrics, this is also related to customer experience and their level of satisfaction with the product/service. If an issue is resolved at first go it will save time for both the customer and the support agent. Thus, we can say that it impacts the customer experience positively and reduces customer frustration as well.
First contact resolution can be measured in the following way:
Many GenAI-powered solutions facilitate first-call resolutions nowadays to increase the number of issues resolved in first contact. These technologies provide relevant information, past issues with technical similarity, and so on thereby helping support agents to solve issues with complete information. Thus, helping them streamline the resolution process.
Customer retention rate
Customer retention is the key to long-term success of any organization. Retaining customers can be more cost-effective than acquiring new customers. This is a direct customer service performance indicator. Behind higher customer retention rates is an exceptional customer service experience.
It measures the organization’s capability to retain customers which helps to understand the effectiveness of service and long-term customer loyalty. The customer retention rate can be measured as follows:
The customer retention rate can be improved by adopting strategies like personalized customer service experience, improving customer service quality, and addressing customer issues proactively.
Customer effort score (CES)
Customer effort score is the metric that is used to measure effort put in by customers in whole interaction with the customer service team and resolving issues. It is generally measured through surveys i.e. by asking for customer feedback, and their experience with their support teams, to get a very clear picture of CES. The lower the CES, the higher will be the customer satisfaction levels (CSAT).
It is important to measure CES as it helps to build long-term customer relationships, improve the customer satisfaction level, and gain customer loyalty. Customers whose issues are resolved easily without much effort will have a positive customer experience leading to a lower churn rate.
It indicates that customer satisfaction depends on the ease of finding information. This acts as a lens that helps organizations to understand what customers need and helps them to identify the content gaps and find opportunities
to meet their needs.
AI-based solutions help to provide the right information at the right time thereby improving customer effort score.
Transform your customer service with AI-powered solutions!
We can say that measuring these KPIs will help your organization to understand the delivery gaps and areas of improvement. This understanding will help you to address these challenges and stay on track. However, measuring these customer service KPIs is crucial to reap the benefits.
With the advent of artificial intelligence, it has become a lot easier to measure and analyze these KPIs and keep track of our customer service success trajectory. But to gain benefits from these AI-powered technologies, you have to choose the right one that can help your organization streamline processes and ultimately lead to success.
If you’re weighing your options, then SearchUnify offers a varied range of AI-powered solutions that can help you improve customer service and empower your organization in every possible way.
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