8 Customer Service Metrics To Track and Optimize

When you picture the power players in a company, your mind probably goes to the owner, the CEO, or the COO. But one crucial group often gets left out of the spotlight: the customer service team. Overlooking customer service is a big mistake. Most of your customers may never chat with a CEO, but they will talk to customer support agents. That makes this frontline work the real public face of your business.

So, how do you know if support agents are representing your brand in the best possible light? One way is to track customer service metrics, which evaluate how quickly, efficiently, and thoroughly your support team resolves customer service requests.

Here’s a guide to the key customer service metrics you can measure to enhance customer service performance and, with it, customer satisfaction.

What are customer service metrics?

Customer service metrics are quantitative measures businesses track and analyze to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of a customer support team. Also known as customer support metrics, they can help reveal the quality of interactions when existing customers reach out to the business for help.

Businesses leverage these metrics to determine whether customer service agents—both human and virtual—were able to solve a customer’s problem. The metrics also gauge customer satisfaction. Did the customer service performance meet the user’s expectations? Satisfied customers often correlate with greater customer loyalty, as people are more likely to return to businesses that meet or exceed their expectations. This makes customer service metrics important to your long-term prognosis for success.

Customer service metrics vs. customer success metrics

Businesses use both customer service metrics and customer success metrics to evaluate the customer experience and clients’ relationship with their brand. These two sets of metrics measure different things.

Customer service metrics

Customer service metrics focus on the interactions between the customer and the company’s customer service team. They are reactive by nature—they track how well a company responds to and resolves customer inquiries, issues, or complaints.

Customer success metrics

By contrast, customer success metrics are proactive. They aim to track long-term customer outcomes, which is reflected in metrics such as product adoption rate, customer churn rate, customer health score, time to value, and customer lifetime value.

While service metrics measure immediate interactions, success metrics reflect broader customer relationships and growth potential. Company leaders track success metrics to determine how well their business helps customers achieve their desired outcomes, which can directly impact the company’s customer retention rate.

8 customer service metrics to track

1. First response time (FRT)
2. Average resolution time (ART)
3. First contact resolution (FCR)
4. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
5. Customer effort score (CES)
6. Average ticket handling time (AHT
7. Agent utilization rate
8. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Business owners don’t go by gut instinct when gauging how satisfied customers are with their offerings. They track important customer service metrics—key performance indicators to quantifiably measure whether customer service operations are functioning as they should. Measuring customer service metrics has become ever easier thanks to customer support software like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Help Scout, which calculate and track many of these metrics automatically.

Here are some essential customer service metrics to track:

1. First response time (FRT)

First response time (FRT) measures the average time it takes for a customer service representative to respond to a customer inquiry or request. You can collect this data by tracking the timestamp of when a customer submits a request versus when the representative responds. Most modern customer service platforms track FRT automatically, calculating the time from when a customer’s inquiry is received to when an agent sends the first personalized reply.

The ideal FRT will depend on your organization’s size and the medium through which you receive customer requests. For live chat, FRT should be less than one minute. For a phone call, users should be able to connect (either to a human or a menu) within 20 seconds. Email inquiries can have a multi-hour FRT, but your team should try to reply to these emails within one business day.

Long FRTs often indicate understaffing or inefficient reply systems. If certain channels consistently show delays, consider reallocating staff or adding automation for simple inquiries. For example, if your social media customer service team has a short FRT but your email team has much longer response times, consider shifting more customer support agents to email replies.

2. Average resolution time (ART)

This tracks the total time from when a customer submits a service request to when it’s resolved, averaged across all your customer queries. Customer service software tracks this by measuring the total time from a ticket’s creation until it is officially marked as “resolved” or “closed.” This includes all back-and-forth communication and internal processing time.

As with FRT, the ART metric will vary based on the size of your company and how your customer initially reaches out. A good ART for live chat might range from 10 to 15 minutes. A good email ART should be 24 hours if the query is simple. Complex cases involving unusual tech or product support could take a few days.

A long ART indicates inefficiencies in the problem-solving process, leading to prolonged customer frustration. To improve this metric, identify common types of customer issues that have disproportionately high ARTs. Train your customer service representatives on the specific way to address such support tickets.

3. First contact resolution (FCR)

First contact resolution (FCR) rate measures how often customer service agents mark tickets as “resolved on first contact” or “resolved in one interaction.” It’s cross-checked with customer satisfaction surveys asking, “Was the agent able to resolve your issue?”

A good FCR rate may fall between 70% and 80%. As a business owner, you want agents to be able to address customer issues without involving other workers. A low FCR indicates unclear answers or a lack of agent empowerment.

You can address this by offering comprehensive agent training to help more agents handle common inquiries without escalating them to a supervisor. You may also choose to invest in self-service options (like AI chatbots or detailed FAQs) to quickly address simple problems without requiring agent intervention.

4. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

One of the top customer service metrics, the customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is collected via short surveys deployed immediately after a customer service interaction. They’re typically sent through email, an in-app widget, or SMS. For phone support calls, you might ask customers to stay on the line and reply to a brief survey.

Strive for the highest possible CSAT, but know you can’t please everybody. A very small business with dedicated customers might have a CSAT above 95%. A larger business with an array of customers, each with unique needs, may top out closer to 80%.

You can use CSAT data to recognize top-performing agents. You can also pinpoint specific areas where customer experience falls short. To improve service quality and enhance customer satisfaction, train service teams on empathy and tone, along with product knowledge and troubleshooting. Most customer inquiries come when the user is experiencing trouble, so it’s smart to validate their concerns and steer them toward solutions as efficiently as possible.

5. Customer effort score (CES)

Customer effort score (CES) measures how much effort a customer had to put in to get their issue resolved. As with the CSAT metric, CES is measured via customer feedback surveys. Customers might be asked: “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?” Or they could be prompted to respond to a statement, such as: “To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: ‘It was easy for me to handle my issue.’”

When it comes to customer effort scores, lower is better. For instance, you can ask customers to rate the effort required on a scale of one to five—where one means almost no effort and five means immense effort. Aim for as many ones and twos as possible. A high CES (above 3, on average) means customers had to put in a lot of effort to resolve their issues. This can negatively affect customer sentiment.

To reduce customer effort, map out customer journeys for common issues and identify points of friction. Can you simplify the menus on customer service pages? Can you better leverage customer service data to reduce repeated information requests, such as entering a membership number multiple times?

6. Average ticket handling time (AHT)

This metric measures the average duration of customer interactions. For phone queries, it includes talk time, hold time, and after-call work. For chat and email inquiries, it includes work done by customer service representatives behind the scenes when they aren’t interacting with the client.

This critical metric is similar to average resolution time (ART), but with a key difference. ART tracks the total time it takes to completely solve a customer’s issue. By contrast, AHT tracks the average amount of active time an agent spends on a customer interaction. It focuses on agent efficiency and the duration of their direct engagement with the customer’s query.

Lowering your average handling time is important for meeting customer expectations. It’s also critical for optimizing team members’ working hours. If a customer support interaction takes too much time, it pulls an agent away from other duties. You may need to alter your customer service strategy to include more automation and chatbots, freeing up workers to take on new support tickets.

7. Agent utilization rate

This metric tracks how efficiently your organization utilizes its customer service agents. To calculate it, divide the total time agents spend handling tickets by their total available work hours. Time tracking and call or chat logs from your support software help calculate this.

Aim for a 70% to 80% agent utilization rate. This range allows agents to be productive while leaving time for breaks, training, team meetings, and unexpected spikes in ticket volume. A low agent utilization rate might indicate overstaffing or inefficient processes, while a high rate could lead to agent burnout and lower service quality. Striking a balance can help you ensure attentive customer engagement and efficient use of company resources.

8. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how likely customers are to recommend your business to others. Customers may be asked, “How likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?” Many businesses group these responses into NPS categories: Promoters (9 to 10), Passives (7 to 8), and Detractors (0 to 6).

A large percentage of Promoters correlates with business growth as satisfied customers recruit new customers. This isn’t just about customer service—it covers multiple elements of your brand, including product design, product quality, and pricing. While optimizing your customer support platform can boost NPS, it’s not the only influencing factor.