Customer service productivity metrics are essential for any business that wishes to remain competitive. However, not just any productivity metrics will do because it’s essential to get feedback on what helps drive your business and keep your customers happy.
The need to use the right metrics leads to the question of which metrics you should use, so let’s take a closer look.
Staff Productivity
By staff productivity, we mean time spent by staff on productive tasks rather than time-consuming, menial tasks that offer little value. It’s not to suggest that employees are necessarily lazy, but some processes might take up much of your team’s time without you realizing how inefficient your processes are. A survey has shown that around 89% of people waste time every day at work, making it an issue that clearly needs addressing.
One way to help ensure your staff are working productively is to track how much time they spend on particular tasks. Sophisticated time tracker software like the PK4 Time Tracker makes it seamless for you to track how long your staff are working for, including a breakdown of which tasks they are working on. Armed with this information, you can refine and streamline your process to help ensure your staff get more done during their working day.
Time tracker software can also help reduce time spent on other tasks like updating systems with cases that were worked on during the day. Such features help to reduce the workload on staff, giving them more time to focus on more productive tasks.
Ticket Volume
Even the hardest working and most efficient staff are only human. If there are too many tickets to process, some customers will be left waiting too long for a resolution. Monitoring your ticket volume will help ensure your customer service teams can cope with their workloads. When monitoring ticket volume, you can get helpful information like which days of the week are busiest and whether you need more staff to help.
In addition to looking at ticket volume, you should also monitor ticket backlog. If the backlog is building then, it’s a clear sign that you need to take action, especially if there are tickets not being resolved at all due to staff being too busy.
First Response Time
Making customers wait too long for a response from customers services makes a bad impression. Make them wait for too long, and you may end up losing them altogether. The need to make a good impression makes it essential that your customer services department delivers a good response time.
Monitoring first response time will help give you a good overview of how effectively your case management is and whether you have enough staff to cope with the workload.
Average Resolution Time
Responding to queries is a good start, but how long it takes to solve resolutions is another critical metric. If issues take too long to resolve, customers are likely to become frustrated, which could easily mean they choose to do business with your competition instead. Calculating your average resolution time is easy. Simply divide the total time spent on resolving tickets by the total number of tickets processed, and you have your figure. Automatic case time tracking software will help make this easy for you.
You can improve average resolution times in several ways. For example, empowering your agents with an appropriate customer relationship management (CRM) platform will help ensure they have quick and easy access to all the details they need. Another potential solution is to check that your agents have sufficient training in resolving customers issues.
First Contact Resolution
The holy grail for customer service teams is to solve customers’ problems on the first contact. Customers may begin to get quite frustrated if they must call or message multiple times to have their problems solved. Like average response time, the first contact resolution metric will help you gauge how well trained and equipped your agents are for case management.
Customer Satisfaction Score
The customer satisfaction metric probably speaks for itself and is one of the most powerful customer service metrics there is. This metric involves asking customers how satisfied they were with your customer service department. It’s also an opportunity for you to discover what you could be doing to improve the experience for your customers.
In many cases, customers’ opinions can be gathered with help from automated messaging systems or similar. At others, it might be necessary to run customer surveys to gauge how satisfied or otherwise your customers are with your service.
Customer Churn Rate
No matter how much effort you put into solid customer services, some of your customers will still leave. The number of customers who stop doing business with you is known as churn rate, and the lower the churn rate, the better.
Churn rate is an important metric because it helps you look deeper into why your customers might be leaving. If a customer says they are happy with the service they received from your agents but still left, it suggests another underlying issue that you need to address.
Summary
If you don’t monitor how well your customer service department is doing, it can be easy for standards to slip, which could be very bad for business. Above is a selection of metrics that you can use to help ensure your business remains effective at case management, maintaining customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
It’s important to remember also that technology has transformed the way we communicate in recent years, and your customers will expect you to adapt accordingly. Not only that but using the right technology can help you keep your staff productive by monitoring which tasks they are working on. The right technology will also help ensure your customer service agents have the tools they need to do their jobs effectively.
