Jérôme Mormiche
Customer Service Director

The phone is the first way customers contact a company. Your call center, whether in-house or outsourced, is, therefore, a key contact point in your customer relationship strategy.

To measure your customer service’s efficiency, it is essential to regularly monitor specific KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Some of them are also necessary criteria to obtain the NF Service Relation Client certification framed by the Afnor.

Beyond monitoring your customer satisfaction, measuring KPIs will guide you in optimizing your customer service management: are your staffing resources sufficient to manage the volume of calls? Are your training methods adapted to maximize the performance of your call center agents? Is your call management workflow optimal?

Here are our recommendations to help you manage your strategy more effectively and achieve your customer relationship management objectives.

1. First Response Time (FRT)

First Response Time (FRT) is the time elapsed between a customer raising a ticket and an agent first responding to it. First response time reflects your commitment to customer service: it lets the customer know if their feedback is being acknowledged. A low first response time indicates that your customer is satisfied with your service.

First response time is essential for two significant reasons.

1. It provides a measure of how effective your team is in dealing with customer’s feedback
2. It gives you a visible picture if your team needs a quick overhaul or reform

“… it’s indisputable — a speedy first reply results in higher customer satisfaction.”
Anton de Young – Zendesk blog

💡 Best practices 💡 In order to reduce your response time, you must either scale your support agents or implement a chatbot. Chatbots can handle the basic queries 24×7 when your agents are busy or unavailable, which reduces the number of support tickets raised and human handover.

2. Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

How long do your customers stay customers? That’s what your customer retention rate (CRR) measures: the rate you keep customers over time.

What is the Customer Retention Rate, and why does it matter?

Your CRR is a metric that reveals whether your marketing and customer service efforts are losing money or strengthening your business. The most valuable customer retention strategies allow you to build long-term relationships with consumers who will eventually become loyal to your brand. They may even speak up in their own circles of influence, which can help attract more newcomers to your brand.

https://www.salesforce.com/products/service-cloud/best-practices/customer-retention-rate

💡 Best practices 💡 All companies strive to improve retention rates, so it should be among the top customer support metrics to evaluate. A generally positive brand image and high satisfaction score will directly increase your customer retention.

3. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The Customer Satisfaction Score is the most widely used indicator by marketing teams to evaluate customer satisfaction in real-time. This indicator is mainly used to collect the “emotions” of customers in real-time. For example, just after purchase or interaction with the brand, the customer is most likely to give a reliable answer because his experience will still be fresh. He will not have time to rationalize his response.

CSAT allows you to collect customer opinions on precise points. However, each survey focuses on a single item such as:

A product
A service
A contact with the after-sales service
A purchasing experience
A website update

To calculate the CSAT score, we need to collect consumer responses to a single question:
Are you satisfied with your product/the responses of our employees/service provided?

There are two possible answers to submit to these users. One is the yes/no answer. The other is the scale response, which is usually constructed as follows:

Very satisfied
Satisfied
Neutral
Not very satisfied
Not at all satisfied

This last option is the most used because it allows obtaining more precise answers and categorizes them. Several gradations and formats are possible for this option: grades from 1 to 10, stars, smileys …

💡 Best practices 💡 It is important to keep in mind that CSAT must be consulted and measured over time like other buyer satisfaction indicators. It must be compared periodically in order to identify a real trend and to be able to judge the impact of the actions implemented by the marketing teams.

4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The NPS is an indicator used to determine the proportion of customers ready to recommend a brand, a product, or a service. The score obtained makes it possible to measure the satisfaction and average loyalty of a customer base.

To calculate the Net Promoter Score and evaluate the experience and relationship between customers and  brand, it is necessary to ask a single question to a panel of its customers:

“How likely are you to recommend brand X to a friend, colleague, or relative? “

The possible answers are scores ranging from 0 (not likely) to 10 (very likely). The score given by the customer determines the category in which they will be classified. There are 3 categories:

• • • Promoters for clients giving a score of 9 to 10
    • Passives for clients giving a score of 7 to 8
    • Detractors for clients giving a score of 0 to 6

How is NPS calculated?

https://www.trustcruit.com/blog/calculate-candidate-net-promoter-score/

💡 Best practices 💡 : The NPS metric is considered a good loyalty metric, but it is closely associated with increased business growth. So never miss out on a single opportunity to take your business to the next level.

5. Average Resolution Time (ART)

Average Resolution Time is a metric that tells you on average how long it takes your customer service agents to resolve issues.

How to calculate Average Resolution Time?

Calculating Average Resolution Time is pretty simple as long as you know your preferred range. Take the total time of all resolved conversations and then divide. Then divide that number by the total number of resolved requests.

How to identify if time-to-resolution can be improved

To understand if there is room to improve your average time to resolution metrics, you can look at two specific considerations:

• 📈 Look for patterns in repeated questions (FAQs), then …
• ✋ Examine and compare the performance of your agents to see if there are differences in the ways they handle these particular issues

💡 If you see a disparity between different support agents’ resolution times for the same frequently asked questions, a training or knowledge gap needs to be fixed to bring these metrics more in alignment. This should also improve resolution time.

Measuring customer care metrics and key performance indicators are critical to delivering a fantastic experience.

Customer service is more about consumers than measuring numbers. If you have gathered that, you can turn your company into a support powerhouse and boost employee engagement.

Here are the key takeaways from measuring customer service ratings:

• Get insights from customer analytics – this is an essential aspect of delivering excellent customer service
• Regularly measuring it allows you to close gaps and improve customer service
• Customer service is a people business. Hiring and training should be part of the process

Today, customer service is key to a strong brand reputation, and making customers happy is vital for business success. Consumers are living experiences, and purchasing is a part of the experience. Get in touch to find out how Nexway’s Customer Care can enhance your competitive edge. To learn more about how Nexway can help your company to get closer to your customers, increase your conversion rate and maintain your brand’s reputation contact our Team today.