Customer Service Reporting Structure: Key Customer Service Metrics
As a customer service professional, you have all sorts of data at your fingertips. From hourly ticket totals to the number of chat sessions per day and everything in between, a good customer service system can provide you with the metrics needed to improve your service operation. But, how do you evaluate all available metrics to create a report that’s helpful for you AND highlights the key information upper management wants to see? Here’s our quick guide on how to build an awesome customer service report.
Include the following…
Customer requests received daily (across all channels) – This is one of the basic metrics that all customer service reports should have. After all, deciding how many employees to staff on a specific day is often directly tied to this information. By keeping an eye on this metric daily, you’ll begin to spot trends over time and prepare for them. For example, you may notice you receive a lot of tickets on Tuesdays or after a new software version has launched. Keeping an eye on this information will help you analyze trends so you can avoid being short staffed.
Customer requests closed per day – While it’s important to see how many tickets and chat sessions you respond to each day, it’s arguably more important to track the progress made on solving these customer requests. By keeping an eye on number of customer requests closed per day, you’ll be able to determine two things – how productive your team is and how complex the requests are. In addition, don’t forget to look at requests closed by specific agents on a daily basis to see if anyone is trailing behind.
Average response time – This is a significant metric for customer satisfaction in general, but especially for companies that are bound to SLA agreements with their customers. Why? Because in an agreement there is often language around when a customer should receive a response depending on the severity of the request. If they don’t receive acknowledgement in a certain timeframe, they may be granted account credits or even become eligible to terminate the agreement. Make sure to monitor when customers are receiving responses and that they are occurring in a timely fashion.
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Average time to close traditional tickets – This is a metric that can vary greatly by industry, especially if your customers are businesses with complex requests. Long ticket close times can become common if agent responses are poor and there’s a lot of back and forth with a customer. Tracking this metric is valuable as it ensures agent responses are hitting the mark and customers are getting the answers they need. With this said, sometimes this metric will spike if a barrage of complex requests are being submitted on the same day. If this occurs, loop in the product team because there’s likely an information gap elsewhere (i.e. poor product instructions) that are creating these lengthy conversations.
Total number of customer requests in the past 30 days – Lastly, it’s important your customr service report contains a “big picture” metric. One of the most common data points found in a customer service or help desk report is looking at total customer requests received in the past 30 days and comparing it to a previous timeframe (previous month or same month, previous year). An analysis like this will let you see bigger trends – such as an increase in the number of requests or a decrease in response time – that you may not identify just looking at daily metrics. If you’re utilizing customer service software, viewing legacy data to do comparisons requires very little effort.
In short, taking the time to build an awesome customer service report is an endeavor you won’t regret. Including top level metrics around daily requests received and daily requests closed is a no-brainer. As a next step, getting into response and close times is more complex but worthwhile to ensure customers remain happy. Finally, don’t forget to keep an eye on metrics over time so you can spot and investigate any anomalies. Reporting is not something all customer service departments excel in, but thanks to customer support software it’s easier than ever to get started.
