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Customer service can be a grueling job at times. Agents often spend long hours handling calls, trying to address the issues of customers who are often unhappy — or irate. Not surprisingly, industry research shows that well over half (59%) of customer service agents are at risk of burnout.
Establishing clear goals for performance can help agents stay motivated and engaged in their roles, as well as improve their ability to increase customer satisfaction. If they know that they are successful at their job overall, it can help to make those challenging days on the front line feel less stressful.
Key performance indicators, or KPIs, can be helpful tools in this regard. KPIs for customer service representatives are like guiding stars for your team, providing them with real, attainable goals for performance they can work toward every day.
Key performance indicators are also useful for you, as a call center manager. There’s an old baseball adage: “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” Well, KPIs for customer service representatives can help you understand who your real MVPs are, which agents are rising stars, and which team members would benefit from more targeted coaching to up their game.
And once you start using KPIs regularly, you might even want to start setting and tracking customer KPIs and scorecard measures to understand the outcomes your team is helping to drive — like higher customer satisfaction, increased customer retention, and more sales.
But for now, let’s focus on KPIs for customer service representatives. We’ll start with a bit more detail about what they are and why you need them. Then, we’ll look at some customer service KPI examples and discuss how to decide which ones you need and how to implement them. We’ll wrap things up with a few tips for monitoring and evaluating KPIs — and details on how Invoca’s automated quality assurance (QA) can help put your agents on the path to continuous improvement in their performance.
You can set KPIs to measure anything. In the customer service arena though, the brass ring to reach for is high customer satisfaction.
Customer service teams are tasked with handling dozens of calls each day. They’re expected to follow best practices during those calls so that every interaction can be efficient and professional and leave customers feeling satisfied that their problem or query has been addressed.
So, when you’re thinking about what KPIs for customer service representatives are ideal for your team, it’s a good bet you’ll want to include metrics for customer feedback and response. These types of KPIs will help you to gauge overall customer satisfaction.
KPIs can also provide insight into whether or not your call center is running like a well-oiled machine. Metrics for call volume, staffing, first response time, and average call times can all be very useful KPIs for customer service team leaders to track.
Employees who receive clearly communicated goals perform better than employees who lack goals. Using customer service KPIs helps team leaders encourage best practices, set measurable targets, and confidently score employees in relation to those goals.
Customer satisfaction KPIs also provide data that customer service team leaders can use to drive efficiency, optimize customer service performance, and reduce costs across the operation.
There are many customer experience KPIs to consider when developing a program to measure the performance of customer service representatives. Since customer service is a “people business” where tone and approach can mean the difference between a satisfied and dissatisfied customer, it is a best practice to assess agents’ scripts, how they address customers, how effectively they solve problems, and even how well they know the product.
These largely subjective metrics can also be used as KPIs. If you implement Invoca’s software for automated quality assurance (QA), you can access full recordings or transcripts of agents’ calls and then use the platform’s AI-powered tools to automatically score them and do sentiment analysis.
Now, let’s look at five KPIs for customer service representatives that many call center managers use to assess the effectiveness of their teams. These metrics can provide valuable data to optimize your everyday operations in the call center, too. They are:
In the world of customer service, resolving a customer’s issue at the first point of contact is ideal. That helps to drive customer service and retention. It helps agents to be more productive on the job — and feel that way, too.
So, consider using a KPI like FCR, which is known more formally as either the first call resolution rate or first contact resolution rate. This metric measures the percentage of customer service calls resolved on the first attempt.
CSATs are typically calculated based on surveys completed by the customer immediately following a call or digital interaction. Customer satisfaction can be gauged based on the types of questions asked.
A typical post-call CSAT survey might ask the customer to rate their experience on a scale of 1-10 and if the customer service representative greeted them, was polite, and resolved the issue to their satisfaction. CSATs can be key pointers toward your team’s success in driving customer retention.
NPS, developed by global consultancy Bain & Co., is based on a customer’s response to one simple question: “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend us (or our product) to a friend?” Scores of 9 and 10 suggest that the customer is likely to be a promoter of your business while scores from 0-6 suggest they are likely to do the opposite.
To obtain an NPS measurement, subtract the number of detractors from the total number of promoters. Any score above zero is positive — but scores above 20% are considered good.
Average handle time, also sometimes referred to as average resolution time (ART), is the average time it takes for an agent to resolve a call with a customer.
A good average resolution time is about six minutes, but it is a complex metric. A lower AHT/ART is better, but only if a customer’s call is resolved satisfactorily. A call passed on to another department for resolution does not deserve a short handle time in the customer service center because the issue had not been resolved when the call ended.
Response time, also known as the average response time, refers to the average time it takes to respond to each customer inquiry. This could be the time it takes to pick up a phone call to the time it takes to respond to an email or each message in a webchat.
Average response times vary depending on the channel. Email queries should receive a response within 24 hours, although most customers expect a response sooner. Webchat questions should typically receive a response within three to five minutes. (Note: Automated chatbot responses don’t typically count in calculating AVR; the metric is primarily used to measure how fast human agents respond.)
One way to make sure you’re using the best KPIs for customer service representatives in your call center is to conduct a needs assessment. A needs assessment is a best practice that tracks gaps in operations and identifies areas for improvement.
This exercise provides an effective way to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses across your customer support team. You can then identify the right strategies, quickly, to help motivate everyone to keep raising the bar on their performance.
Customer support team leaders have access to several resources that can provide valuable data to identify where individuals or teams are excelling, or where they are struggling. Methods for determining your team’s strengths and weaknesses range from customer-centric opportunities such as short surveys conducted with customers immediately after interactions to more formal focus groups.
Team leaders can also use insight from employee performance evaluations to highlight areas for process improvement of further coaching or training (which can also help to increase agent retention).
There should be straightforward signs in a needs assessment that highlight areas requiring attention. Referring to your KPIs can be helpful here. For example, if customer response times are lagging, this may indicate that your team needs refresher training or that there are technological issues to address.
Similarly, if there are recurring issues highlighted in customer surveys that suggest your customer service team is not fully aware of the product’s strengths and trouble spots, that may indicate the team could benefit from more product demos and additional training.
Once you select the KPIs you want to track with your customer service team, you’ll need to implement them using the three steps outlined below. These measures will help to ensure your KPIs have meaning.
Make sure your team knows how KPIs can help them to advance in their careers, and that these metrics are not just measuring sticks to make them feel like they’re “making the grade” at work — or not. And while KPI data is invaluable for spotting problems, team members consistently meeting or exceeding KPI targets should be acknowledged for setting a high standard for the whole team to aspire to.
After clearly communicating the customer service metrics you want your team to focus on, make sure they have the information, tools and resources, such as technology, to achieve their goals. Setting goals isn’t just about challenging your customer service representatives to hit targets. You need to equip them with proper training so they can go the distance.
Technology has a role to play in helping your customer service team meet KPI expectations. AI-powered technologies like Invoca’s conversation intelligence platform seamlessly deliver data that can be used to track agent performance and much more.
For example, Invoca uses AI to automate quality assurance, scoring every customer service call with the user’s unique criteria to deliver a customized, unbiased QA score that can be confidently used by team leaders and agents alike to assess performance.
Call center data is dynamic, so it’s most useful if it is constantly analyzed. Your customer service KPI process should therefore feature regular data monitoring and frequent reviews of agent results and team outcomes to make sure your customer service operation stays on the right track. Ongoing monitoring also helps you to confirm that you are using the right set of KPIs for customer service representatives in your particular organization.
Technology also makes the monitoring of KPIs easier. There are many software programs you can use to track key performance indicators and other valuable metrics. Most of these solutions display data visually in easy-to-view dashboards, making it quick and easy to monitor KPIs.
Be constructive when providing feedback on KPIs to your customer service teams. The use of KPIs is an opportunity to move your whole call center operation forward in a positive direction — not to spotlight and dwell on individual or team deficiencies in performance.
Don’t assume that the customer service KPIs you’ve settled on must remain static. Operational needs change and so do business goals — as do individual and team performance goals. So, review your KPIs regularly to make sure they are meaningful metrics. And listen to feedback from your team members. They may have suggestions for how to make KPIs more effective, such as tweaking goals so they are high-impact but also realistic.
A 2022 report from Salesforce emphasized the importance of phone calls to business-to-consumer enterprises’ customer service operations, even in a digital world. Just over three-fifths of consumers (61%) surveyed said they prefer questions answered over the phone rather than in a webchat or via email, while 75% said they believe they will get an answer more quickly by making a phone call.
Having the right technology to track those calls and the right KPIs in place to measure performance can create a better working environment for your teams, a more efficient customer service enterprise, and, importantly, happier customers. It also creates fertile ground for improving customer retention. And having a team energized and motivated to achieve realistic, meaningful KPI goals can offer up opportunities to drive revenue from calls, too.
We’ve discussed how AI-powered, automated QA can score your agents’ calls in an unbiased way, providing important feedback on how your team is handling calls, their conversational tone, and their ability to convert calls quickly and efficiently. In addition, Invoca’s call tracking, automatic recording, and transcribing provide huge amounts of data that can benefit your call center operations.
Invoca’s AI algorithms analyze all this data to deliver valuable insights into customer behavior, buying preferences, and even future intent. Plus, you can mine data from Invoca for use in employee training. Complete records of actual customer conversations can provide valuable coaching moments you won’t find in any coaching manual. What’s more, team leaders can coach “on the fly” using Invoca’s real-time analysis of calls.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you improve customer service at your organization? Check out these resources:
