10 Important KPIs and Metrics your Customer Support Team Should Be Using in 2024

Gauging business performance isn’t as skin deep as simply viewing the results and then calling it a day. After all, organizations are composed of customer-facing units departments, each with its own sphere of activities that affect the outcomes of operations. And in a lot of cases, taking a granular approach lets you see areas of improvement that you didn’t know existed.

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, allow organizations to quantify the various aspects of operations and establish metrics through which a unit’s performance is measured. These are relevant in any workflow and particularly useful for critical areas like sales, marketing, and customer support. These identifiers help improve operations and apply adjustments, especially at a time when businesses are faced with COVID-19.

This article centers on the definition of KPIs, their difference with metrics, and the ideal performance indicators for customer support. It also shines the proverbial spotlight on their relevance in regard to customer satisfaction and some of the best customer support software that can help you analyze KPIs.

“If you can not measure it, you can not improve it,” said Scottish scientist William Thomson. This adage underscores the relevance of establishing and applying KPIs in any organization regardless of its nature. These identifiers are flexible enough to encapsulate many of the major areas of a department like customer support. For instance, you can measure a KPI like service time and match it with the rate of satisfied customers within a given timeframe. This way, you can adjust your workforce’s workflow if the customer satisfaction rate is low.

Metrics and KPIs give you the facts and figures to work with and continually improve on. As such, in the case of employee onboarding, a study by SilkRoad indicates that 70% of organizations regard employee retention as their top onboarding KPI. This means prioritizing employee retention for onboarding is the industry standard, and improving it, along with employee engagement, will likely earn your company dividends. The same rationale of applying KPIs follows for other company departments and activities.

Useful as KPIs are, organizations are not advised to measure anything and everything that moves. In fact, managers have to be selective on which areas have to be measured to avoid unnecessary expenses and costly distractions. Analysis is required in both identifying and extracting insights from KPIs to truly make them work for critical departments like customer support and marketing. Thankfully, these identifiers are already accounted for by customer support software and other relevant solutions as part of their built-in reporting and analytics features.

All that said, let’s get to know what KPIs are all about.

What is a KPI?

In business, a key performance indicator is a measurable value that determines how effectively a company is achieving its key objectives. KPIs are used at different levels to gauge the success of an organization in hitting its targets. There can be high-level KPIs that cover the overall performance of a company, and there are low-level KPIs that hone in on employees or processes in departments or units such as sales, marketing, and customer support.

KPI is linked to a target value or goal which provides actionable data so you, or any other stakeholders, can make informed decisions. A KPI gives you insight into how well your team or unit is performing in pursuit of clearly defined team goals and in line with management-defined objectives.

In customer support, KPIs offer measurable values based on metrics gathered from response time, ticket volume, active and resolved issues, escalation rates in complaints, customer feedback, conversion rate, etc. What makes KPIs quite effective are the resulting actions they trigger.

For instance, when you gather metrics on your response speed and find it slower by a few precious seconds as compared to the previous month and which affects your goal of resolving a certain number of issues per month, you set in place a new routing system where inquiries are automatically assigned to the right agent. You acted on the KPI, measuring its effectivity, and made adjustments to improve the process and hit your target.

KPI’s relevance is often evaluated through the SMART criteria used for achieving goals – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound. For example, it should give you answers to the following:

• Do you have a specific objective? Reduce response time
• Is your progress in reaching your goal measurable? Yes, through average resolution time
• Is your goal realistic and attainable? Yes, through smart automatic routing
• Is your goal relevant to your organization? Yes, it improves efficiency and productivity and boosts customer satisfaction
• What is the time-frame you set for reaching this goal? After the regular evaluation period of one month. 

KPI vs. Metric

You may wonder – what’s the difference between a KPI and a metric? They are often used interchangeably, but they are distinct. KPI is strategic, while metric is tactical. In other words, a metric is just part of your KPI, but not vice-versa. For example, we can say our KPI for our website is to increase our Google ranking, say, every quarter. To achieve this goal, one metric we improve on a month over month is the number of visits to our site. There are other metrics to consider, of course, to increase our ranking.

KPI is used to measure performance and success, while metrics are simply numbers within a KPI that help track performance and progress. KPIs are usually initiated by high-level decision-makers in the organization based on metrics extracted and organized by activity or process. Also, metrics apply only to past performance and not future action, which is best handled by forecasting or predictive analysis.

For different companies with different goals and targets, there may be some KPIs more critical than others, and metrics may have varying meanings and applications, depending on the organization. But whatever metrics you decide to pursue and take stock of, they should be:

• Actionable – measure things that have a real impact, value, and which you and your team can act on. Our earlier example of response time fits with this.
• True – reports based on your metrics serve no purpose if they don’t tell you the real score. You don’t have to pad and twist numbers. If metrics show poor numbers, accept the painful reality, assess with the corresponding KPI, and work your way to making improvements.
• Consistent – trends over a period of time often give you more important insights than specific on-the-spot data, allowing you a comparative evaluation to see the ups and downs of your performance. Remember, metrics are produced from past performance data. 

10 Important KPIs and Metrics You Should Measure

Take note that there is no one approach for evaluating all your different KPIs. You’ll be using various metrics and assessment methods specific to the KPI and the goals you set. The operative word is “key,” which means you’ll be concentrating on indicators that impact your customer service performance and which help you reach your goals.

Below are examples of customer support KPIs. We’ll highlight what these KPIs from your customer service processes and operations tell you, how to appraise them, what you can do, and goals to aspire for (this really depends on the goals you set for your unit in line with the overall goals of your company).

1. Average First Response Time (AFRT)

This refers to how long a customer has to wait before getting an initial reply to their support request. Studies have shown that customers prefer good, quality support over fast reply and are even willing to wait it out. Nevertheless, AFRT ensures your customers receive responses within an acceptable time. Things to consider:

• Measure: The shorter the time it takes to respond, the better.
• Time frame: There are industry norms; for example, in social channels, customers expect a response within an hour; for email, response time should be within 24 hours.
• Goal: Hit reply time targets.
• Action: If numbers show you’re not achieving goals, identify root causes, and find solutions such as hiring more agents.

2. Average Reply Time (ART)

As differentiated from AFRT, ART shows whether your customers’ issues, requests, or queries get followed up promptly. It tells you, on average, how responsive and quick you are in getting back to your customers.

• Measure: Same as AFRT – better done in a shorter time.
• Goal: Achieve follow up targets, or other objectives along that line.
• Action: If you get negative results, find what’s causing them and apply remedies such as adding more reps or streamlining your response processes.

3. Number of Support Tickets

Having a large volume of tickets may look good on the surface, but underneath it may be indicative of a problem. You may be having issues with your products or services; hence, many customers are complaining and reaching out to you.

• Measure: The less number of support tickets, the better.
• Goal: Lower the volume of support tickets.
• Time frame: Set this one with an allowable window to observe if ticket volume increases over time or during particular periods.
• Action: Have enough reps to handle ticket volume; determine what factors are behind the increasing number of tickets.

4. Number of Ticket Backlog

This pertains to customer support requests that stay unresolved during a particular period or beyond the usual response time you set. This is crucial – studies revealed that customers don’t mind waiting as long as their issues are resolved. You have to maintain a healthy balance between fast response and fast resolution. But then not all issues are the same, and some are resolved quicker than others.

• Measure: Less number of backlogs, the better.
• Goal: Reduce ticket backlog volume.
• Action: Similar to KPI #3, you may need to have more customer support staff to be able to not only respond promptly but also to resolve faster.

5. First Contact Resolution Rate

FCCR involves resolving customer’s issues in one interaction, such as in a single chat session, a single phone call, or a single email or social media response. In other words, a customer need not contact you again since the issue was resolved in the first instance. Note that FCCR has a direct correlation to true customer satisfaction and can give your customer support a fresh approach and that much-needed boost, so you need to know how effective you are in this area. There’s a simple formula to help you.

• Measure: Divide the number of support issues resolved at first contact by the total number of FCR-eligible support issues (cases that can be resolved by the first contact), and you get your FCR Rate.
• Goal: Get a higher percentage of FCR Rate.
• Action: This prompts you to determine which areas of your product are having issues and can be resolved easily. It also lets you assess the efficiency (or inefficiency) of your support team as well as find out who are the first contact resolvers.

6. Resolution Rate

This shows the percentage of issues actually resolved by your agents from the number of total tickets received. It gives you an idea of individual and team efficiency and productivity.

• Measure: The higher the percentage, the better.
• Goal: Resolve as many issues and reduce backlogs.
• Action: It prods you to find out if there are problems in your product or business that are burdening your agents or taking a considerable amount of their time. You may also consider hiring more agents to improve resolution rates.

7. Average Handle Time

It allows you to quantify the efficiency of your day-to-day operations across your support team and ensures your customers’ issues are being dealt with expeditiously.

• Measure: The shorter period is better.
• Goal: Resolve tickets faster over time or specific periods.
• Action: Determine what prolongs or shortens handling times and employ additional reps if needed, or make tweaks in your ticket management processes.

8. Top Agents

Knowing who your top performers enable you to build a strong and responsive customer service unit. Benchmarking agents or reps creates healthy competition and, conversely, lets you identify those that may need additional nurturing.

• Measure: You have several ways to do this based on tickets resolved, FCCR, AFRT, ART, customer satisfaction feedback, and more.
• Goal: Find out who your top performing agents are.
• Action: Determine which ones are ahead of the pack (for future supervisory roles), and those that may need further skills training or closer supervision.

9. Net Promoter Score

NPS is designed to measure the likelihood of your customers to recommend your brand, product, or service to others. It can be a pop-up form on your website or part of a survey distributed during certain periods. It generally consists of two questions – how likely the customer is to recommend or promote (scored from 0 to 10), and why. By NPS yardstick, 0 to 6 are detractors, 7 to 8 passives, and 9 to 10 promoters.

• Measure: This involves another simple computation: % of promoters minus % of detractors equals NPS score. Ex. if 60% of NPS survey respondents were promoters and 10% were detractors, then your net promoter score is 50. The higher the score, the better.
• Goal: Find out the pulse of customers concerning your business or product.
• Action: If you have more detractors than promoters, you risk customer churn or customers already have turned to other brands. Thus, you need to find out why, assess what’s wrong, and apply remedies or solutions.

10. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

This can be the most important KPIs of all since it has been found out to directly impact your revenue growth. CSAT is as simple as asking your customers (via surveys or feedbacks on various channels) to rate your service after each customer service interaction – was the service good, bad, or improving or whatever criteria you set to gauge if they’re satisfied or not (or in between, ex. not so much, not really)

• Measure: The equation is simple: Divide the number of happy customers by the number of customers asked, and you get the satisfaction score; the higher the score, the better.
• Goal: Find out if most of your customers are satisfied with your service/product/brand.
• Action: If you get low scores, you need to discover why and check where you fell short – is there something wrong with the product they bought? Were agents friendly and helpful when customers called in their issues or submitted their requests? CSAT tells you if it’s probably time to review your processes, people, and products (which you should be doing anyway regularly).

There are other KPIs which you can measure and give you an idea of your customer service performance such as Customer Retention Rate, SERVQUAL (service + quality), Cost per Contact, Call Abandonment Rate, and Employee Engagement (to see if your employees/team members are satisfied with their jobs), among others.

You need not assess all available KPIs and report on outcomes, only the right ones – those that have a critical bearing on your customer service performance and are actionable, true, and consistent. Now let’s get to know some of the tools you can use to evaluate your KPIs and important metrics.

Customer Support Tools to Help You With KPIs

Zendesk

Customer support software Zendesk allows support agents to effortlessly track, prioritize, and solve customer interactions across multiple channels. Its robust features that enable support teams to deliver quality services include SLA views, custom ticket fields, ticket forms, and an admin interface available in more than 40 languages. Besides, Zendesk supports seamless channel integration allowing teams to connect with customers through mobile, web, email, Twitter, or Facebook.

Moreover, Zendesk provides an impressive suite of agent productivity tools. The guided mode helps you queue tickets more strategically for your agents to speed up response time. On the other hand, skill-based routing helps lineup tickets and relay them to the ‘most qualified’ agent. Most importantly, Zendesk provides the tools agents need to collaborate with their colleagues through add-ons like Slack. You can leverage the Zendesk free trial to examine the solutions closely.

Zendesk

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What Zendesk Does:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): With Zendesk, you can create and send NPS surveys to gather critical customer feedback and gauge customer loyalty. This way, you can pinpoint customers that are likely to return and those that are thinking about leaving, and ultimately take the appropriate action.
• Measure CSAT ratings: The platform allows you to send simple customer satisfaction surveys to your customers shortly after the interaction. The customer can respond with either “good, I’m satisfied” or “Bad, I’m unsatisfied. This helps you establish what the customers think about their latest experience and quantify their happiness.
• Satisfaction prediction: Better still, Zendesk leverages machine learning to predict customer satisfaction. It adds an unprecedented layer of intelligence, helping you to foretell how likely the customer will be with your service. This way, you can predict and intercept bad customer satisfaction ratings before they surface.
• Performance dashboard: Even better, the Zendesk performance dashboard provides a bird’s eye view of your support activities. The dashboards offer in-depth visibility into agent performance, ticket volume, and other critical support metrics.

Freshdesk

Our Freshdesk reviews gave this award-winning help desk software high marks on the strength of its ease-of-use and robust features. It offers standard features such as help desk ticketing, knowledge base, and community platform, plus multichannel capability, integrated game mechanics to increase agent productivity, multiple SLA policies, smart automations, and self-service portals. Among its many standout offerings is its reporting feature to help you monitor helpdesk productivity, customer experience, and agent workload so you can make data-driven decisions to improve your team’s performance.

Freshdesk’s reports are designed to direct you towards action. A quick overview of the reports page enables you to understand how your helpdesk and support teams are performing. Every metric like agent response time, resolution SLA, or ticket created can be analyzed based on ticket variables like status, agent group, type, and more. It lets you streamline your support by identifying bottlenecks and examining problematic tickets right from the report. Fortunately, Freshdesk offers a free trial to help you examine the solution closely.

Freshdesk

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What Freshdesk does:

• Insights at a glance. With Team Dashboards, you get to keep track of metrics that are relevant to how you measure performance so you can focus on the metrics that matter.
• Visual data. You can use plain words to ask Freshdesk what you want to know, such as “how many tickets were reopened last month” or “which customer has the most number of unresolved tickets today” the software will pull up the metrics along with a trend graph.
• Plan your workflow. Analyze the weekly or daily workload of your agents and spot trends like the busiest day of the week or the busiest hour of the day, letting you manage shifts effectively.
• Understand every ticket’s lifecycle. Using ticket lifecycle reports, you can identify which team takes the longest to resolve tickets or which group spends the most time waiting on other teams. Freshdesk can even break down the lifecycle of a ticket by the time it has spent with each group or agent, and by various ticket properties.

Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud is a leading customer support software that helps you provide outstanding customer service from anywhere you are. With Service Cloud, agents get a 360-degree view of the customer, which enables them to personalize their interactions.

Businesses of all sizes can leverage Service Cloud to streamline their processes and bring them into one unified platform. Whether you’re a small team or a large enterprise, Salesforce has various plans that offer you flexibility as your team grows.

Salesforce Service Cloud can help companies deliver customer service in a fast, smart, and personalized way. This cloud-based service requires no hardware or software, making it highly usable, so you can get your support team up and running in no time and at less cost. Service Cloud is also adaptable to any industry workflow with its business automation tools and the ability to use custom or pre-integrated apps.

At the heart of the agent’s daily workflow is the Lightning Console. The agent can access all customer information from the console to get the context he/she needs for the interaction. On the side of customers, they can get access to a mobile-friendly knowledge base to get their questions answered.

What Salesforce  Service Cloud does:

• Access all key performance indicators from one place. Salesforce Service Analytics includes prebuilt dashboards based on best practices so managers and agents can quickly explore their data.
• Give team members timely information. Managers can see complete customer data, such as customer satisfaction, case closing times, historical benchmarks, and more. Agents also get their own dashboard where they can see customer satisfaction, previous customer actions, and more. This data helps agents adjust succeeding customer interactions accordingly.
• Helps you do more with AI. Service Cloud customers on the Enterprise and Unlimited Plan can extend their analytics with the Service Cloud Einstein. This artificial intelligence tool allows you to have auto-populated dashboards for all your channels. It also allows you to automate case classification and routing, as well as recommend the next best actions for agents.

Freshservice

IT service desk software Freshservice is a powerful solution designed for the needs of small businesses and enterprises. It features standard modules for ticket management, CMDB and knowledge base, and advanced modules for change, incident and problem management. It provides a scalable, robust way to manage IT service requests and assets. A free trial for the software is provided by the vendor.

One can customize the application’s ticketing system to suit business needs using the built-in field templates. The system also features notification alerts, service levels and escalations, and proactive notifications. Also included is a plug-and-play ITIL, which eliminates the need for consultations as it adheres to best practices. A self-service portal, meanwhile, enables users to raise tickets, check older tickets, and browse the knowledge base. The portal allows customers to resolve issues and concerns on their own.

Freshservice

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Freshservice comes with a mobile app, which allows IT personnel to get the job done even if they are offsite. The feature permits teams to quickly resolve queries and complaints. End users are also given the capability to raise issues and request service from their mobile devices. Since it is cloud-based, the software is maintenance-free. It is capable of securing data and automating the whole help desk apparatus. Finally, with its flexible pricing plans, the system attracts users from businesses of any size.

What Freshservice does:

1. Scalable, advanced modules. Freshservice features change management, vendor management, problem management, and incident management, which can be added to the basic plan, where necessary.
2. ITIL-compliant. Freshservice follows ITIL standards, meaning, tickets are defined, processes are routine and automated in certain areas, and, overall, your service desk operation runs smoothly.
3. Risk detection. It anticipates technical problems based on past and present incidents. Repetitive issues are factored in and mashed with other insights to forecast potential issues. The system generates recommended actions.
4. Service catalog. It’s a self-service portal with eCommerce familiarity, helping users to quickly find the answers or grasp the standard procedures to submit a ticket.
5. Mobile apps. Its Android and iOS apps are robust, allowing users to raise tickets, monitor them, or resolve issues on the go.

LiveAgent

Going through the LiveAgent details, we found it to be a powerful help desk platform suitable for every type of business. It’s billed as the best all-in-one customer support solution that comes with live chat, email support, social media integration (Facebook and Twitter), POP3 accounts, statuses, gamification, contact forms, and file sharing. It is built to give you and your agents a tight grip on feedback to fast track resolution times. It also boasts of scalability, letting you manage a customer-oriented team, whether it is composed of a couple of agents or dozens.

Its analytics capability provides with you an overview of your customer support, enabling you to see customers who are interacting with your company and monitor the service they’re receiving. It lets you see usage statistics, evaluate performance reports, and learn from customer satisfaction ratings. Its extensive reporting possibilities enable you to keep tabs on support agent performance. You can take advantage of the LiveAgent free trial and get to know the features firsthand at no cost and without commitment.

What LiveAgent does:

• Analyze granular details. You can see in the analytics overview every incoming/outgoing message, chats, and calls; performance by time, department, agent, tag, and channel, and a dozen time periods (today, yesterday, this week, this month, last year, etc.).
• Visualized reports. You can view detailed graphs and charts with gross numbers of opened chats, solved e-mails, received Facebook messages, and other metrics viewed per day, week, or month.
• Measure quality & quantity. You can measure and see who is the most productive, who prefers e-mails over live chats, and who delivers consistent results over time. Individual entries can be sorted by time range, department, channel, tags, and agent, and all performance reports can be exported to a CSV file.
• Several performance metrics. You can analyze and report on 20 performance metrics, including new answer average time, open answer average time, chat pickup average time, calls, outgoing calls, missed calls, call minutes, cats, missed chats, finished chats, and many more.

ProProfs Help Desk

Customer support software ProProfs Help Desk is an award-winning ticketing system designed to help support teams provide fast, efficient, and quality customer service for free. On the backend, this help desk solution is equipped with the right tools to help team managers keep track of their teams’ performance to ensure that they consistently deliver excellent customer service.

The software solution helps assess customer satisfaction through its detailed rating feature that can be enabled on chats, tickets, and even help articles. With the rating system alone, you will be able to get a general idea of your team’s and team members’ performance when it comes to how they handle the customers’ concerns. ProProfs Help Desk also enables you to create feedback forms and surveys to gather more information from your customers regarding the customer support they are getting.

Furthermore, ProProfs Help Desk offers advanced reporting tools that can give you a comprehensive view of your teams’ or a team members’ overall performance, analyze which area needs improvement, and the best course of action to take. And if further training is needed, ProProfs Help Desk has a library of online training materials that they can access anywhere and anytime.

What ProProfs Help Desk Does:

1. Real-time customer surveys: With ProProfs Help Desk, you can gather real-time information straight from your customers regarding their customer experience, which you can use as a basis on how to further improve your customer service process.
2. Smart reports: The platform provides quantitative data in different chart types which makes it easy to visualize the performance of your team and team members.
3. Train agents and customers: ProProfs Help Desk offers teams and businesses access to a repository of quality materials for targeted training.

How can KPIs help in employee performance and motivation?

KPIs aren’t only valuable for tracking business outcomes—they can significantly impact employee performance and motivation when used effectively. By setting clear and measurable targets, KPIs give employees a defined path toward success and improvement in their roles.

• Setting Clear Goals:
  • Alignment with Business Objectives: KPIs allow employees to understand how their roles contribute to broader organizational goals, which helps create a sense of purpose and direction.
  • Personal Accountability: Clear, individual KPIs encourage employees to take ownership of their performance, fostering accountability and commitment.
• Driving Engagement:
  • Recognition and Rewards: KPIs highlight top performers, allowing managers to recognize and reward employees who consistently meet or exceed their goals.
  • Healthy Competition: Tracking KPIs can create friendly competition among team members, boosting morale and encouraging continuous improvement.
• Identifying Training Needs:
  • Skill Development: KPIs help pinpoint areas where employees may require additional support or training, allowing management to invest in targeted development programs.
  • Structured Feedback: Regular KPI reviews give employees constructive feedback, showing them specific areas to focus on to improve their performance.

Integrating KPIs as part of employee development can lead to greater productivity, job satisfaction, and alignment with the company’s mission.

Leveraging Customer Support Software KPIs

As discussed, many of the leading customer support applications account for KPIs while streamlining their users’ workflows. This saves you a lot of time in measuring your workforce’s performance and ensures that your company is tracking the most beneficial pieces of information. For this to work, however, corresponding analyses and action plans have to be enacted, especially if your organization is trying to curb the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

Insights have to be derived from the data, from which plans are formed to augment any identified pain point. It’s best that you check if the software you’re planning to purchase tracks all the KPIs that are relevant to your business, so you wouldn’t have to worry about setting and monitoring them. Some even provide insights to let users focus on improving their operations, not the nitty-gritty.

Freshdesk immediately comes to mind with its granular approach to data and insights. Beyond that, it helps you plan out your workflow, meaning you can easily integrate the insights it generates into your operations. The application also visualizes data in a manner that’s easy to understand.

But if you want more options than what was indicated here, feel free to view our list of customer support software and help desk platforms. You might find one that’s even more suitable for your operations.

Key Insights

• Understanding KPIs: KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are quantifiable measures used to gauge the performance of an organization in achieving its business objectives. They are crucial for operational improvement and decision-making.
• Difference Between KPIs and Metrics: KPIs are strategic and used to measure overall performance and success, while metrics are tactical and represent the specific data points within a KPI.
• Importance of KPIs: KPIs are vital in various workflows, especially in sales, marketing, and customer support. They help organizations measure and improve performance in critical areas.
• SMART Criteria for KPIs: Effective KPIs should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound to provide actionable insights.
• Customer Support KPIs: Critical KPIs for customer support include Average First Response Time, Average Reply Time, Number of Support Tickets, Number of Ticket Backlog, First Contact Resolution Rate, Resolution Rate, Average Handle Time, Top Agents, Net Promoter Score, and Customer Satisfaction Score.
• Tools for Measuring KPIs: Various customer support software, such as Zendesk, Freshdesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Freshservice, LiveAgent, and ProProfs Help Desk, provide features to track, analyze, and improve KPIs effectively.

FAQ

1. What are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)? Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurable values that help organizations gauge their success in achieving key business objectives. They provide insights into various aspects of performance and highlight areas needing improvement.
2. How do KPIs differ from metrics? KPIs are strategic indicators that measure overall performance and success against business goals. Metrics, on the other hand, are specific data points within KPIs that track the progress of individual activities or processes.
3. Why are KPIs important for customer support? KPIs in customer support help measure response times, resolution rates, customer satisfaction, and other critical areas. They enable support teams to identify bottlenecks, improve efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction.
4. What are some examples of customer support KPIs? Examples of customer support KPIs include Average First Response Time, Average Reply Time, Number of Support Tickets, Number of Ticket Backlog, First Contact Resolution Rate, Resolution Rate, Average Handle Time, Top Agents, Net Promoter Score, and Customer Satisfaction Score.
5. How can customer support software help with KPIs? Customer support software provides tools to track, analyze, and report on KPIs. These tools offer features such as performance dashboards, automated reporting, predictive analytics, and satisfaction surveys to help support teams improve their performance.
6. What is the SMART criteria for KPIs? The SMART criteria ensure that KPIs are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This framework helps create actionable and effective KPIs that align with business objectives and drive improvements.
7. Can you give an example of a KPI in customer support? One example is the Average First Response Time (AFRT), which measures how long a customer waits for an initial response to their support request. Shorter response times generally indicate better performance in customer support.

By Christopher Robinson

Christopher Robinson is a senior productivity research analyst who specializes in optimizing online collaboration and project management using Scrum and agile approaches. In his work, he always emphasizes the need for distributed work training and the formation of efficient work habits. His work was mentioned in various business publications, including Entrepreneur and InfoQ. He’s a strong proponent of the GTD model. He has been cooperating with the FinancesOnline team for 5 years now, and his publications always focus on practical aspects of productivity tools that can have an actual, transformative impact on a company.