What are customer service metrics?

In business, there is a cost associated with every action. Reducing the cost of providing customer service without negatively impacting the quality of the service is a primary goal of most service teams.

To cut costs without sacrificing the customer experience, businesses focus on improving operational efficiency. Using the right KPIs, organizations can review and evaluate the effectiveness of their customer service efficiency strategies, making necessary course corrections and ensuring that the company’s success remains top of mind.

Customers aren’t the only ones whose satisfaction can have a major impact on business success; employees who interact with customers have the power to pass that excitement on, and are also more likely to provide higher quality work and be more productive.

Happy, engaged employees are vital to customer service success. The right customer service metrics can help ensure that staffing concerns are being proactively addressed. This encourages improved employee engagement, and naturally leads to a range of other business advantages.

Although customer satisfaction is a complex entity that may depend on a variety of factors, sometimes understanding the customer experience is as simple as asking the right questions. Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) are two survey-based metrics designed to solicit actionable customer insights directly from the source.

NPS is a metric that calculates the likeliness of a customer generating positive word of mouth for a business, showcasing the percentage difference of customers that are brand promoters vs. those who are detractors. Alternatively, CSAT is a rating of user satisfaction with a particular product or service, calculating the average response. Using both of these metrics in conjunction is important to understand a more-complete picture of customer satisfaction.

Almost without exception, customers are happier when they don’t have to put in as much work. The customer effort score (CES) takes a closer look at customers who are attempting to have an issue resolved, and how much effort they need to invest to see it through to completion. CES is often used in conjunction or even interchangeably with NPS and CSAT.

In essence, CES measures how easy it is for customers to do business with a company. Organizations can apply insights gained from CES surveys to reduce friction in the user experience, better tailor self-service options, pinpoint areas that demand improvement, and develop a clearer understanding of their customer service landscape.

It’s natural to lose some customers, but if a large percentage of customers are falling away, that may be symptomatic of larger issues. Customer churn is an extremely important metric in customer service, in that it allows businesses to measure retention levels among their customer base.

It does this by taking a look at the percentage of customers that leave during a given time period. This provides an accurate assessment of how many customers are being lost during the customer journey. This insight is vital to the overall health of a business, and customer service needs to understand what service- and non-service related issues might be impacting it.

Customers don’t appear ex nihilo; they are attracted to do business with an organization based on the products or services it provides. Product adoption is a metric that takes this truth into account, tracking the rates at which customers learn about new products, and decide to purchase and use them.

It’s worth recognizing that purchase rates may not always coincide with adoption rates—a customer may choose to purchase a product, but never actually implement it, resulting in low adoption. Low adoption can easily lead to reduced customer loyalty and increased customer churn.