One of the primary responsibilities of a customer support manager is to monitor the team’s performance and help them deliver first-class customer service. In the process of providing outstanding service and the best support strategy, support managers need to view, organize, analyze and share data, and thus quickly and efficiently keep track of customer satisfaction.
Customer service management tools allow the team to collect actionable insights and apply a service-oriented approach. Additionally, the customer service dashboards across a multitude of software offer assistance to track support teams’ efficiency and improve customer experience, loyalty, and retention. Moreover, by tracking customer service, businesses and all parties included, such as customer support agents, team leaders, and C-level executives, will have insight into how happy their customers are with the support they offer.
Support dashboards can be personalized, and by adding critical performance metrics, support managers can make important decisions regarding balancing agent workload, prioritizing customer issues, and tracking issue resolutions.
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What Is a Customer Service Dashboard?
A customer service dashboard is a practical solution that offers hands-on monitoring of all relevant customer service metrics. Through the customer service dashboards, the customer service team, managers, and executives at higher levels get a 360-degree customer view, which helps them improve the service team’s performance.
The development of businesses and the way companies operate today requires customer service managers, professionals, and agents to become data-driven employees that will keep track of and evaluate customer service KPIs (key performance indicators) and regularly generate insights with the ultimate goal of improving customer experience and ensure increased income for businesses.
Typically, customer service dashboards are visual representations of any data that impacts the customer experience, loyalty, and other attributes that affect customer behavior and lead to customer retention. The generated information through a service dashboard is used for basic and advanced data analysis to ensure the best possible outcomes for the business.
Users/managers can insert data from various sources within the customer service dashboard and explore the key insights for understanding customer expectations to take action-packed steps to improve productivity and brand performance. Additionally, the service dashboard is helpful for the optimization of workflow and keeping track of internal processes. In the long run, this can help the decision-making process regarding reallocating resources in high profitability in high-productivity sectors.
Metrics That Should Be Included in Customer Service Dashboard
Depending on the customer software, several metrics are non-negotiable and essential for any business:
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer satisfaction score is one of the essential metrics that measure the level of satisfaction a customer feels after any interaction with the business, including a conversation with a customer service agent. This popular survey-based metric indicates customers’ satisfaction with their recent support experience. Additionally, the CSAT performance indicator tracks how the customers are satisfied with the company’s products and services. Over time, the company can analyze customer satisfaction with the overall interaction with a particular customer service agent and get an insight into individuals’ performance.
It can be calculated by asking the customers questions such as: “How satisfied were you with your experience?” “On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your overall satisfaction with the service you received?” “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the help you received from our agent?” with answers ranging from extremely satisfied to extremely dissatisfied (including moderately and slightly satisfied, neutral, moderately and slightly dissatisfied).
How to measure CSAT: calculate the (number of satisfied customers [those who answered with high scores]/number of survey responses) x 100 to get the percentage (%) of satisfied customers.
Note: only responses satisfied and very satisfied are included in the calculation since the highest values on feedback surveys most accurately predict customer retention.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer effort score is a customer experience metric that measures the user experience and how much effort the customer has to exert to get a support issue resolved, a requirement fulfilled, a question answered, complete a transaction, or a product purchased/returned.
Companies ask customers to rank their experience using a product or service on a scale ranging from “Very Difficult” to “Very Easy.” CES provides a perception of how much effort was required for the user and how likely they’ll continue purchasing the company’s products and services. By focusing on reducing customer effort, companies create a better customer experience.
The cost of a frustrating customer experience is high for businesses at all levels. CES surveys identify issues and difficulties that customers encounter and prevent losing a repeat customer and negative reviews. Moreover, if the online purchase requires a lot of effort, customers will likely start a new web search and purchase from a competitor. Customers are loyal to brands that are easy to interact with and effortless to do business with.
How to measure CES: ask survey questions that can be answered with numerical information to calculate scores and get an average score. For example, questions such as “On a scale of 1-10, how much effort was involved in getting your question answered?” provide an average number and summarize the data into value that reflects the customer experience score.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net promoter score is a customer loyalty specification that measures how likely the customers will recommend the business to a friend.
This survey-based metric can be measured by asking questions such as “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service/company?” Customers with ranks between 0-6 are detractors, 7-8 are neutral, and customers with answers 9-10 are promoters. The neutral responses are irrelevant.
How to measure: calculate (percentage % of detractors) – (percentage % of promoters). The result is an NPS score. The ideal number is as close to 100 as possible, and the score can vary over time. For best results and complete insight, managers must recheck this score at intervals.
Note: there is a similarity between CSAT and NPS. The main difference is that CSAT measures customer satisfaction with a product, service, or interaction, and NPS measures customer loyalty.
Customer Churn Rate
Customer churn, also known as customer attrition, can be explained by a case when a customer chooses to stop purchasing products or services from a particular brand. This metric is trickier to measure since no one can predict customer churn.
The churn rate measures the company’s loss in subscribers and the number of customers who cancel or don’t renew their subscriptions in a given month. Operational insights, such as a decline in repeat purchases or reduced purchase amounts, can provide insight to some extent. For instance, a customer with declined visits and lower NPS after the previous shopping experience has a higher probability of customer churn.
How to measure it: (number of customers the brand churned last month) / (number of customers that the brand started with at the beginning of the month) x 100. This metric is measured monthly.
A lower churn rate means company growth. Still, businesses need to identify the factors that might lead to customer churn and consider methods to retain customers, including analysis and resolving the underlying issues.
Social media monitoring
Over the last few years, social media has become a place to express personal opinions regarding anything, including satisfaction and frustrations about products and services, brands, and businesses. However, it seems that very few brands embrace the power and influence of social media. Lack of response from companies creates a one-way experience for the customers.
Social media monitoring tracks hashtags, keywords, and mentions relevant to a brand. This provides insight into the bigger picture and keeps the company informed about the customers and their overall satisfaction. Thus, brands can respond to customer feedback, solve negative experiences, and answer questions related to the brand.
Tracking social media experience metric data such as engagement, subscriber or follower count, and audience insights are great for surveying quantitative (metrics and analytics) and qualitative (the inspiration for posts and strategies). Social monitoring helps brands to stay relevant and engaging and avoid making reckless mistakes.
On the other hand, the company can carry out great sales, create exceptional marketing initiatives, and ultimately enhance customer experience, but support managers need to measure their impact to track how successful the business is and which aspect requires improvement.
Many more critical customer service metrics can help answer crucial questions, including whether the support teams provide first-class service, how the brand resonates with customers, what customers think about the business, how easy/difficult engage with the brand, and how effective are the sales processes. The following customer service metrics measure customers’ happiness, which provides insight if the customers will buy more, respond well to company products or services, and whether will advocate for the brand.
First-Contact Resolution Rate
First-contact resolution rate or first-call resolution rate is a metric that shows the percentage (%) in which the service team can resolve customer issues with one reply through any channel (phone call, email, or live chat).
Customers don’t have time and energy to explain the issue several times and don’t appreciate being bounced around by agents while waiting for their cases to be resolved. By monitoring and improving this metric, companies significantly increase average resolution times.
How to measure it: calculate the (number of incidents resolved on the first contact / total number of incidents) to get the first contact resolution rate.
First Response Time
The first response time is a metric that shows the amount of time that takes someone from the support team to reply from the moment a customer reaches out for support.
Customers expect companies to value their time, and they expect a fast reply when they reach out with a question or concern. In other words, when customer queries are solved quickly, they have an outstanding customer experience.
How to measure it: calculate the (time of first response – time of customer request) and get how many [#minutes/hours/days] is the company’s first response rate.
Average Response Time
Average response time or average reply time is the metric that shows the average amount of time it takes the service team to reply to a customer who reached out for support. Fast response time to a support request leads to a better customer experience.
Average Resolution Time
Average resolution time, also known as average ticket resolution time (ticket handling time), is the average amount of time it takes someone from the support team to resolve a customer ticket from the time it is opened.
In addition to tracking average response time, businesses should also track average ticket resolution time. A fast average response time is only relevant if the tickets are resolved quickly. Short handling time means a more efficient support team.
Average Ticket Count
Average ticket count or customer ticket request volume is a metric that represents the number of support tickets submitted by customers over a certain period of time in the company support queue.
Companies with resembled ticketing systems directly interact with their customers, but getting too many requests can indicate an issue. Therefore, keeping track of these operational metrics can help businesses determine and resolve the issue before it becomes a more severe problem.
How to calculate it: keep track of the number of support tickets over a certain period (one month or one week) and pay attention if the number of tickets increases after a new product release.
Ticket Resolution Rate
The ticket resolution rate or issue resolution rate is a metric that shows the number of tickets that are solved. Managers keep track of this number on a daily or weekly basis. A high and/or growing number of unresolved tickets indicates product issues or attracting the wrong types of customers, both of which tend to lead to customer churn. Additionally, a high-resolution rate can indicate that the support team effectively resolves customer issues.
How to measure it: calculate the (Total number of tickets / the number of tickets solved) to get the total resolution rate metric.
Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
Customer retention rate is a metric representing the percentage (%) of how many customers the business can retain over time.
Customer Retention Cost
Customer retention cost is a metric that shows how much the company spends to keep a paying customer. This number helps companies discover customers that are a better fit with the brand.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is a metric that represents the percentage (%) of website visitors who complete/convert a desired action out of the total number of page visitors.
Cost Per Conversion (CPC)
Cost per conversion or cost per action is a metric that shows how much the company pays to obtain a new customer.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value is a metric representing how much an individual customer is worth to the company. Keeping track of this factor is vital because it is essential in creating a marketing strategy and planning the budget.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
A metric that shows the total revenue that the business gets from subscriptions in a month. The MRR is particularly important for SaaS and subscription businesses.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Businesses with enterprise customers should include SLA metrics in their dashboards to track the expectations between the two companies regarding service uptime and specific services/products delivered.
Preferred Communication Channel
The preferred communication channel is metrics that track the support channel or channels customers commonly use to interact with the brand. For staffing purposes, it is helpful to know whether customers prefer to contact the support team via phone, email, live chat, community forum, or social media. The results will help managers to pay more attention to preferred channels and train staff to handle such requests.
Renewal Rate
Renewal rate is a customer retention metric that shows how many customers with fixed contracts renew for another term at the end of their contract. Generally speaking, retaining customers is more straightforward than acquiring new ones, so a high renewal rate indicates a prosperous business.