The Top Customer Service Metrics for Your Support Team Performance
Businesses measure customer satisfaction across different parameters to rate their support function but they need to be considered as a whole and individually. Similarly, both individual agent performances and the productivity of the entire support team need to be considered. This gives greater control of the customer support function, its effectiveness and an effective strategy to enhance customer service efforts.
The entire customer experience has to be considered by measuring key metrics and there ‘hangs a tale’ behind each of them. You may discover that the team is responding slowly or that the customer needs to get in touch repeatedly and hence the low satisfaction scores.
The key parameters to watch out for are:
- Tickets solved – This provides a measure of the immediate value of the customer support team. A good way to track this is to look at the daily average over time which throws up trends in agent performance and resourcing needs. I would also suggest comparing the number of tickets solved to the number of open tickets—a sure pointer to the need for agents to focus on tackling their ticket backlog. Our Service Desk does this effectively with its multi-channel ticket management and real-time reporting feature.
- Issues handled– The most common resolution issues areas point to the areas in the product or service that need service desk for customer support and how effective the agents are in handling those issues. A deep-dive for that particular area with metrics like time-to-resolution and CSAT ratings can tell us how good we are and also the areas where the product should be improved. Our auto-tagging feature helps solve effectiveness of resolution by ensuring that the right agent always attends to the incident.
- Response Speed– The speed of response has a significant correlation to customer satisfaction. I have known great customer service efforts from companies with fairly low scores on matrices such as first-reply time, average reply time, and the number of replies on a ticket. The real-time reporting with Service Desk for customer support is the solution to this.
- Resolution time- Resolution times indicate the speed of the agent-based support, but speedy resolution isn’t always indicative of high quality. With resolution metrics managers can be sure their agents are spending an appropriate amount of time on tickets. But then if there are many tickets with first-contact resolution (FCR) these issues might be better handled with self-service, a ready feature on Wolken Service Desk.
- Resolution effort – This shows the effort agents are putting into their tickets and is measured by agent touches, ticket comments, and requester wait time. Customer service needs to devise ways to measure this since it could lead to low customer satisfaction. Wolken Service Desk Software addresses this with features such as agent management and real-time reporting.
- Ticket reopening is about changing a ticket’s status is changed from “Solved” back to “Open”. Sounds a bit weird, but it does happen when dealing with complex support issues that don’t have an easy fix. To state it simply, too many ticket reopens mean that agents might need more training in that area, or the product or service could have issues that customer support cannot fix on their own. Multiple features of Wolken customer service desk such as real-time reporting, dynamic rules, and auto-tagging support this issue which also needs to look at total number of reopens, average number of reopens, and the percentage of tickets with reopens.
- Avoiding next issue – This metric indicates how successful the customers are in handling the product/ service after interacting with customer support. While it may mean that agents have less to do in future, it is a positive indicator of the brand and overall customer satisfaction. Look for the number of customers requesting multiple support requests for the same issue and you have some pointers. The auto tagging and dynamic rules of the Wolken Service Desk anticipates incidents and ensures that support agents are always on top of their game.