Important KPIs for Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Analytics is a key part of any company’s road to success. It’s important for all departments to have benchmarks for success that can be easily measured and tracked. These are often referred to as KPIs (or, key performance indicators). KPIs are measures that indicate how well a company or specific department is tracking towards a clearly-defined goal.

Call center and customer service teams have a variety of KPIs to choose from, but as each company and support department is different, their benchmarks will vary. Read on to learn about a few measures that are commonly tracked in call centers and customer service departments. They may just work for you, too.

Quality of Customer Service

Quality is a very subjective measure; as such, it can be difficult to quantify. Despite this, it is still worthwhile to reach out to customers and attempt to quantify satisfaction as accurately as possible. Two commonly used measures for customer satisfaction are the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and the Net Promoter Score (NPS). CSAT measures the customer’s level of satisfaction with a product or service on a scale from 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied). On the other hand, NPS measures the customer’s likelihood of recommending a product or service as a proxy for their own level of satisfaction.

While these general scores apply well to almost any customer service department, companies that operate call centers can use more specific and less subjective KPIs for customer satisfaction. For instance, quantifying your abandoned call rate is an excellent proxy for customer satisfaction (high abandonment rates are highly correlated to low customer satisfaction).

Speed of Customer Service

The speed of customer service is becoming increasingly crucial to the overall customer service picture for any brand. With the advent of social media, live chat, and increasingly sophisticated call center technology, customers expect a rapid resolution to their problems. Interestingly, customers seem to value the speed of service as much, if not more, than they do the quality of service. A Salesforce study found that a third of the respondents felt positive about companies that offered a quick first response even if it didn’t fully resolve their issue. This is why automated responses and call back technology in call centers work so well: Customers appreciate a quick response just to let them know that someone will be working on the issue in the immediate future.

Tracking the speed of customer service is a much easier and far less subjective measure than quality. Important KPIs for call centers and customer service teams to consider are: Resolution time (that is, the amount of time it takes for an agent to resolve a particular issue); first contact resolution (which measures the percentage of tickets resolved in the first interaction); and the ratio of ‘active to resolved’, which measures how quickly customer concerns are being addressed.

Thinking Long-Term

When looking at which KPIs would be useful for assessing the success of your call center team, it is important to look at long-term measures as well as short-term ones. There are two important long-term KPIs to consider: 1) Customer Retention Rate; and 2) Lifetime Customer Value. Customer Retention Rate measures the percentage of existing customers who are retained during a specific time period. Lifetime Customer Value is the prediction of the net profit attributed to a single customer during the entire future relationship between the customer and the company.

Don’t Forget Your Employees

Finally, the success of a customer service team doesn’t only depend on customers; it is also important to assess the satisfaction level of call center employees. If employees are not satisfied in their roles, the quality of a brand’s customer service offerings will inevitably suffer. Companies must ensure that employee satisfaction is measured and high levels are maintained in order to deliver a consistently high-quality customer service experience.

Companies are tasked with making a multitude of decisions on any given day to keep their business growing. As such, each company must assess the most important benchmarks for their individual business. With the proper measurement of KPIs in place, companies can stay in tune with their customer base and gain a strong advantage over competitors.