Customer service strategy KPIs you should focus on

Whenever we talk about marketing and sales it doesn’t take long before we start talking about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Honestly, we can’t get enough of them.

We don’t move without having a bunch of marketing and sales KPIs to measure.

And for good reason.

If you haven’t set goals and laid down some measurable KPIs, how are you ever going to know if you’re being successful?

KPIs are important for customer success strategies as well.

It’s not enough to assume that because customers are with you they just must be happy.

Or waiting until they churn before asking them to fill out a form telling you why they’ve ditched you in favour of another company.

By the way, it’s not them, it’s you. Unless you’ve fired them as customers in which case it might have been them - but that’s another conversation.

Don't forget, today's customers have way more choice than they used to and there's so much information being fired at them every day that it's easier for them to walk away from you in search of better service.

SO, can you really afford not to invest in customer service?

So what kind of KPIs should you be focusing on to make sure you are effectively analysing your customer service strategy?

Read on to find out.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

These are probably the most widely used KPI for measuring customer satisfaction. NPS are mostly used for working out how likely customers would be to recommend your company to someone else, so are a key indicator of customer satisfaction.

It’s not likely an unhappy customer would be likely to recommend you to someone else, so a positive NPS is a good indicator that you’re keeping a customer happy.

Net Promoter Scores typically run on a scale from 0 to 10 with 0 meaning they wouldn’t recommend you, and 10 being that they’d be highly likely to.

Within the scale are three sets of customer based on where they fit within the NPS scale.

Promotors (NPS 9-10)

These customers are very happy with your company. They’ll likely continue to buy from you in the future and actively recommend you to others. Having customers who are active promoters of your business can be a huge part of your growth strategy.

Passive (NPS 7-8)

These customers are still happy with your company but could be swayed to make a move if a better offer (or a perceived better offer) came along. There’s also no guarantee they’d recommend you.

Detractors (NPS 0-6)

These customers are not happy with you or your service and are a serious risk of churning. Not only that, they would not only not recommend you to others, chances are they’d recommend people not go with you if it ever came up.

Customer Health

Not the most reliable when it comes to how your customers judge your service specifically, but by analysing how successful your customer is performing in their market you can get a pretty good idea how happy and successful they are.

Some key metrics to look for are:

• Is your customer growing their own customer base and revenue?

• Are they hiring to meet growing client demands?

If you figure out your customers performance you could potentially track some of that success back to the work you’re doing.

Customer Feedback

We know in a world when we’re all trying to automate and streamline as much as possible that simply asking someone something might be a bit “old school”, but customer feedback is still just as reliable a KPI for customer success as it’s always been.

Set time aside to do either qualitative or quantitative research with your customers to find out what they think about your service and product and keep an eye out for positive or negative trends.

Also be sure to interview outgoing customers to find out any specific reasons they left.

Customer churn rate

You should be keeping an eye on this anyway but a high churn rate is one of the biggest indicators that customers aren’t happy.

If you have a high customer churn rate then you clearly have a problem.

This isn’t the best metric for finding out why they’ve left so combine this with other measurements in this list to get a more full picture of what’s going on and to identify any trends.

Customer retention

Like churn rate is a good indicator of poor customer experience, a high retention rate gives you a clear indication that you’re providing a good service.

Retained customers can - over the entire customer lifetime - bring you more money and fewer expenses so set and measure KPIs on customers to assess retention rates and overall service costs against them.

Customer resolution rate

Things will inevitably go wrong with customers at some point - they just do.

But customers will forgive a mistake if you act quickly, keep them informed of what’s happening and fix the problem as quickly as possible.

Keep track of your customer resolution rate and put particular focus on the first touch resolutions - these are issues that you manage to solve in one interaction.

If you can keep first touch resolutions high then you can be confident you have an effective and efficient customer service function.

We've put some more information on this in our blog about managing the customer experience, which you can read here.

Also, if you think you could benefit from improving your customer service function, check out our blog about the key customer service tools and software that you can use today.