Manage your customer service

The benefits of measuring your customer service performance

Guide

Monitoring your customer service performance is crucial for the success of your business. It gives you valuable information about the level of satisfaction your customers have with your services, allowing you to pinpoint areas that need improvement and address any concerns your customers may have promptly.

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. The more satisfied your customers are with your business, they will talk positively about your business to their networks. 

Metrics for measuring customer service performance

There are a range of metrics available to help you measure the performance of your customer service. 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 the phone before their call is answered by your customer service team.

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. You can do this by finding the average duration between the time a customer contacts you and the time it takes for a member of staff to respond to their request.

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 question is then calculated by working out the difference between your proportion of promoters and detractors, to generate a score of anywhere between -100 and 100.

The higher your score the more satisfied your customers are likely to be with your service and the customer experience you’re delivering.

When using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in conjunction with each other, they can provide you with a full understanding of your performance and help you identify areas where you need to improve. In turn this, contributes to cost savings and improved overall operational effectiveness.