Customer Service Metrics 101

Douglas Hanna Founder/CEO - Help.com

@douglashanna

What to track and why

Customer Feedback Customer Behavior

Agent/Team Behavior

Other

• Customer satisfaction • Customer loyalty (NPS, etc.) • Qualitative feedback

• Contact volume (by channel) • Account revenue growth • Referrals • Product engagement/use • Hold time / abandonment rates • Self-service use/engagement • Customer churn

• Social media sentiment • Cost per incident/case • Trending issues

• Response/resolution time • First contact resolution • Issues/cases per agent • Agent productivity (AHT, etc.) • SLA attainment • Escalation rates • Employee turnover

(both absolute and relative numbers)

What’s relevant?

Revenue Profit GrowthHow much money is customer service helping us bring in? Retain?

What is customer service costing us? What is it saving us?

What is customer service doing to help us grow our business?

Loyalty Product use Customer churn

Contact volume Agent efficiency Self-service use

Referrals Social sentiment Account growth

Most businesses have two or three key metrics. Your customer service metrics should relate to those.

What do other teams care about?

Operations SalesFinance

Product Marketing HR/Legal

• Cost per incident/case • Employee cost

• Contact volume • First contact resolution • Customer satisfaction

• Qualitative feedback • Referrals • Account revenue growth

• Referrals • Customer churn • Social media sentiment

• Product usage • Trending issues • Qualitative feedback

Customer service is relevant to all parts of the organization.

• Employee cost • Turnover • Compliance

Example: ZapposZappos doesn’t pay attention to call time. Instead, it asks four key questions:

On a scale from 1 – 10, How likely would you be to recommend Zappos to a friend or family member? On a scale of 1-10 how likely would you be to request the person you spoke with again? On a scale of 1-10 how likely would you be to recommend this person to a friend or coworker? On a scale of 1-10, if you owned your own business, how likely would you be to try and hire the person you spoke with?

Q1:

Q2:

Q3:

Q4:

Example: BonobosEmployees do QA for each other as a basis for metrics. “Excellent” is the goal.

Peer review process | peer pong Bonobos customer service team members (called “Ninjas”) are given a sample of another Ninja’s customer service interactions each month and asked to grade it. They then discuss what’s good and what could be improved.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys in Emails If customers don’t rate Bonobos “excellent” in an email survey, the company will reach out and try to understand what they could have done better.

Example: BufferContact volume by channel informs hiring needs.

0

4000

8000

12000

16000

April May June July August

Twitter Tickets Live Chat

(sample data/hiring stats)

New Hire!Job Req

Benchmarking

NPS Benchmarks

Industry Benchmarks

Ask Customers

41 80 76 66

Best practices: collection and analysis

Stats Best Practices Proper Scoring

Keep it simple/focusData that’s relevant

• Large enough sample size • Statistically significant differences • Sampling bias • Use standard deviations

• 0-10 for NPS • Consistent across channels • Consider relative vs. absolute

• 2-3 key stats for department • 2-3 key stats for agents • Mix of quantitative/qualitative

• Are you measuring what matters? • “Not everything that counts can be

counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Fun with stats: spurious relationshipsMoney spent on pets (US)correlates withCivil engineering doctorates awarded (US)

Correlation: 0.983038

Discussion

What are the most important metrics that your organization tracks?

Question:

Discussion

How do you report metrics to other teams? What ones seem to be most interesting?

Question:

Discussion

Do you use something like NPS? How (if at all) do you benchmark your company?

Question:

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