What Are KPIs? Defining Key Performance Indicators 2023

This metric helps you stay on top of things and draw important conclusions, such as whether you should expand or contract your team. It is also important to know how many calls are answered within a given period of time. Monitor the revenue churn not just as a bigger picture, but also on an individual (customer) level so that you can identify reasons for churn and improve in the future. Measure this customer service KPI over time and see how your trend line is. If at some point they reach an unusually high percentage, it might be good to dig deeper. We know that these are the eight metrics that matter most because the empirical evidence from thousands of service and support benchmarks supports this conclusion.

You can’t improve your KPIs if your team has no knowledge of what those KPIs even are. Share them with your team and get their buy-in by explaining the “why” behind the KPIs and how it will help them become more skilled agents. The resolution rate should be viewed within the context of the number of reopened tickets because, on its own, it can paint an incomplete picture. For example, you may find that someone with a high resolution rate has subsequently reopened many of the closed tickets. These KPIs provide valuable insights into your team’s effectiveness and are also useful from a financial standpoint because they impact your revenue and profits. For example, if resolutions are consistently behind, you may need to add more staff or look at other ways to increase efficiency.

Ticket volume by support channel

The metric is most often measured monthly because a monthly timeframe is long enough to provide statistical significance. Customer satisfaction and cost per ticket are the yin and yang of IT Support. These metrics are in constant tension, and every IT Support organization grapples with how to strike an appropriate balance between the two. With no restraints on spending, it is relatively easy for a support organization to “spend its way” to high customer satisfaction. Conversely, if customer satisfaction is not an issue, a support organization can reduce its costs almost indefinitely.

There are a ton of KPI options for almost every project, but not every measurable metric is a high-quality KPI. For example, tracking the number of words per post in your blog campaign wouldn’t be very useful, since the “best” post length for an article kpi for support team changes from topic to topic. They’re like looking in the rearview mirror to understand past performance. They can be financial, such as quarterly profits, which tell you how much money was made after all sales are done and expenses are paid.

How our infrastructure scales alongside our customers

We can see that October is showing particularly higher churn rates and this information enables us to dig deeper and discover why. In other words, the performance of your customer support team (and overall customer experience) directly impacts your bottom line. Customer service metrics help you understand — and improve — the value that customer service brings to your business.

It is an ensemble of services agreed upon as a standard that your company is committed to maintaining. For instance, you stated to answer 70% of the email requests you receive within 1 business day. Monitoring these customer service metrics is important for you to know if you are performing well in comparison to this predefined goal. It does not really matter which specific metrics you chose, but it is essential to respect these agreements. Not evaluating them might let you out of track and some problems might also go unnoticed, delaying the moment you are aware of them and start fixing what has to be.