17 Most Effective KPIs To Evaluate Customer Service Performance
Customer service agents have a tough job. As they’re representing a business or organization, they have to remain professional, courteous and respectful. This in itself can prove hard when a difficult customer is bombarding them with criticism or even abusive language.
On top of this customer service agents must strive to keep callers satisfied. This may mean providing in-depth information, technical guidance or simply providing a sympathetic (yet still impartial) ear during complaints.
Add the pressure of hitting targets and presenting the company’s values in the right way for eight hours a day, and … well, as we said, it’s a tough job.
However, it’s vital agents continue to perform at their best in the interests of both the customer and the business they’re representing. Knowing how to evaluate customer service KPI performance can be difficult — how do you measure your agents’ success in a practical, actionable way?
In the following article, we’ll take a look at the 17 most effective customer service KPIs to evaluate your performance.
1. First Call Resolution (FCR)
First Call Resolution is a fantastic metric to add to your custom Playvox Performance dashboard. If agents are solving problems within a single call, your customers will be satisfied and see that your service team is well-trained and efficient. Review First Call Resolution recordings and identify how successful are agents in solving a customers’ issue the first time around.
Related: 6 Huge Mistakes That Are Hurting Your First Call Resolution
2. Customer Waiting Time
As many as 60% of customers feel being put on hold for even one minute is too long. If customers are left waiting for help, they’re unlikely to be happy when an agent finally answers — making the customer service rep’s job just that much harder.
Related: Customer Service Response And Wait Times On Social Media
3. Customer Greeting
Focusing on how agents greet customers is a key part of how to evaluate customer service representative KPI performance. They should speak clearly, introduce the company and themselves, and make the caller feel valued. Define a flexible script that can adapt for various situations so your agents can make it their own.
4. Product/Service Knowledge
Your agents should have a good working knowledge of products and services. If they appear clueless, they’ll create a poor image of the company overall. Poor scores in this area show a need for better training. Keeping a knowledge base at the tip of your agents’ fingers could also be very helpful in such situations.
5. Agents’ Problem-Solving Skills
Did the agent take the initiative to solve the problem as expected? This is crucial when exploring how to evaluate customer service performance. Customers want to have their issues identified, diagnosed, and fixed as quickly as possible.
6. Customer Handover Rates
If one agent can’t solve a problem or knows a colleague is better qualified to do so, they’ll hand the customer over. However, if this happens multiple times or the caller has bounced around with no one knowing how to help, it’s not a good sign.
7. Minutes Spent on Call
Calls should be answered and problems resolved fast and efficiently. The more interactions your agents get through, the more customers they can help.
Define an average range of time depending on the department to see how productive and efficient your team is.
8. Customer Complaints During Call
Ideally, customers should have no reason to complain or criticize an agent during a call. Using a speech analytics software could help analyze what customers are complaining about and allows you to pinpoint the problem so you can provide an effective solution.
9. Number of Callers Abandoning Calls
Abandoned call rates are a major part of how to evaluate customer service performance. Customers who spend too long waiting for help may abandon the call altogether and go to a competitor instead (and 68% won’t go back after switching).
Adding this metric to your scorecard helps you spot if this is happening, so you can find out what’s holding your agents up.
10. Ratio of Submitted Tickets Solved
Of tickets submitted, how many are being solved? If the answer is “not many,” you may need to find ways to boost productivity, provide more knowledge and tools, or even expand your customer service team.
11. Success Rate of Calls
Success is an essential part of customer service evaluation — agents should solve all customers’ problems and measuring the success rate will show you where more attention is needed.
12. Agent’s Tone and Language
Customer service agents are not only expected to be polite and well-mannered, they also have to be the right fit with your company.
It’s unpleasant to be greeted unpleasantly, left in silence, or be treated too formally/casually or in a tone that doesn’t match the company you are reaching out to.
Related: How To Build Your Brand Voice To Increase Sales
13. Cross-Selling Opportunities
Knowing how to evaluate customer service performance includes seizing cross-selling opportunities when available. Agents missing these could be missing valuable opportunities and failing to answer customers’ needs.
Related: Cross-selling Techniques That Actually Work
14. Calls Answered Over Time
How many calls are agents getting through in an hour? If they have a lot of idle time between interactions, they may be given other tasks to complete. If they’re getting through more than anyone else, they could be rushing calls.
15. Immediate Responses Versus Queued Calls
Getting through to an agent immediately may be a rare occurrence, but it will definitely help improve the customer experience. Good scores for this metric show your agents are enthusiastic about attending to customers.
16. Response to Training
Agents must integrate lessons learned through coaching and training into their customer interactions. This measures how effective your learning management is and identifies which agents need closer attention.
17. Customer Satisfaction By End of Call
Are customers praising and thanking the agent by the end of a call? Do they sound happy? Do they express intent to use the business again in the future? Customer satisfaction is the goal.
By evaluating your customer service performance through measurable KPIs, you’ll get a comprehensive insight into where your agents are failing and succeeding, enabling you to train and reward accordingly.
Do you measure any of these KPI’s? Do you struggle to centralize all this information to share across teams? Playvox is a quality assurance and performance software. With our Performance add-on you can connect all your data, manage and measure all your performance metrics regardless of what those are.
