5 Top Metrics for Your Customer Service Team Dashboard

What is a dashboard in customer service?

It’s simple. This is the hub of your entire customer service, displaying the most important metrics for at-a-glance convenience. Agents, team leaders, managers, and quality assurance (QA) analysts all depend on a well-organized customer service dashboard to track performance over time.

You can see where mistakes are made, where agents are improving and which aspects of the customer experience demand closer attention. This is crucial to keep your customer service team’s work at its best.

You have to be careful when choosing metrics to include in your dashboard, though, so here are the 5 most important ones for every company’s customer service team.

1. First Call Resolution

A customer service team performing at maximum efficiency should resolve as many problems at the first point of contact as possible.

Why is this important? Because customers expect to receive the answers they need with minimum delay. A survey by Zendesk revealed 69 percent of customers credited their positive experiences with a business to having their issues resolved quickly.

Furthermore, 65 percent blamed bad experiences on the company taking too long to reach a satisfactory resolution.

Remember: your customers’ time is valuable, so treat it as such. Make sure agents receive updated, in-depth training on products / services. Undertake ongoing quality assurance to keep improving your team’s skills.

And, finally, empower agents with high-quality software to ensure they can access all the resources they need to resolve customer problems. Try to centralize data from different platforms for added convenience.

2. Average Response Time

What is a dashboard in customer service? Both a reminder of how well you’re doing and how much harder you have to work. One metric that requires consistent attention and work is your agents’ average response time.

Think of your own experiences as a customer. Do you like being put on hold for 15 minutes at a time (or longer)? How enraged have you become from hearing that same ‘your call is important to us’ message 20 times in five minutes?

Chances are, you were in a foul mood immediately and nothing the agent did helped you feel any better. And that’s never a good way to start a conversation.

Focus on getting your average response time as fast as possible. If your agents are taking too long to answer calls, start live chats or respond to emails, take a closer look at:

• The size of your workforce: do you need to hire more staff to accommodate demand?
• Productivity: are your agents taking too long to resolve problems, and if so, why? 
• Self-service options: can you alleviate demand by helping customers help themselves?

3. Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is paramount: the happier your audience is, the more likely they are to come back.

You can gather customer satisfaction scores through brief post-interaction surveys, in which you ask people to rate their overall satisfaction with the quality of service received on a scale of 1 to 10.

Customers have more brands to choose from and more ways to vent their frustrations than ever before. If you fail to achieve strong CSAT scores, you could find your reputation starts to suffer at review sites and on social media.

Evaluate interactions attaining good, neutral and bad scores alike to identify strengths and weaknesses. Use your findings to create a strategy to boost your CX overall.

4. Net Promoter Score

Following on from CSAT, your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is another essential metric for your customer service team dashboard.

This measures the likelihood that customers will recommend your business, services or products to people they know. This may be during face-to-face discussions or on social media.

You can gauge your NPS by asking customers how likely they would be to recommend you to someone else, and why. Give them a scale of 1 to 10 to work with, and invite them to choose one of multiple reasons for their choice.

Generally, only customers giving a score of 9 or 10 may be considered promoters, though there’s no guarantee they actually would recommend your business. Those scoring 7 to 8 have no real emotional response, while customers scoring 0 to 6 might be detractors.

Again, evaluate those interactions leading to ‘promoter’, ‘passive’ and ‘detractor’ ratings to understand what leads customers to choose their respective scores. How long do agents take to resolve their problems? What tone do they use during the conversation? Were the customers left waiting for a response longer than they would have liked?

Gather all the actionable data you can and make some changes. The higher your NPS, the more chance you have of acquiring new customers and retaining current ones.

And as the former costs between five and 25 times as much as the latter, you can save money by letting customers do some of the work for you.

5. Average Handle Time

Measuring the average length of your agents’ interactions shows you how productive your team is.

The longer employees take to identify the customer’s problem, find the solution they need and bring the conversation to a satisfactory close, the fewer tickets they’ll get through each day. You should minimize your backlog of tickets as much as you can, to prevent customers becoming frustrated and, potentially, switching to another brand.

Including this metric on your customer service team dashboard keeps you up-to-date on productivity levels. Look at a mix of interactions from different agents to determine what prolongs or shortens the handle time. Develop a strategy to resolve issues and streamline calls and live chats.

Again, self-service options should be available for customers whose problem may not warrant help from your team.

Conclusion

Now you know what is a dashboard in customer service and the 5 most crucial metrics, you can empower your entire team with the data they need to perform at their best.

Good organization is key to delivering a high standard of customer experience, and a dashboard helps you stay informed with just a click or two. You’ll be able to track fluctuations in productivity, customer satisfaction first call resolution rates and more, making changes necessary to boost performance over time.