During the past two years, we saw unprecedented competition in eCommerce, pushing acquisition costs higher.
With that, merchants shifted focus to retaining customers, and providing an exceptional customer experience became a central strategy for most businesses.
Today, delivering an exceptional experience is just as important as the product.
So, how does your customer support stack up?
The first step is self-assessment — you need to evaluate your customer support program in order to ensure that your support is in line with customer expectations.
How to evaluate Your Customer Service Program
To do this, it’s essential to track metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) around customer service.
Source: Gorgias.
It can be tricky to evaluate your customer service program, but here’s why you should do it anyway:
Understand where your support team is spending their time
By measuring your team’s activity and watching those metrics over time, you can figure out where you might have inefficiencies to fix, or activities to reprioritize.
Customer service platforms, like Gorgias, have this tracking built-in.
And our intuitive dashboards provide a quick look at the health of your support team, at a glance.
Source: Gorgias.
Balance revenue-generating and expense-gathering
Customer acquisition is becoming more expensive, so keeping track of customer service can give you an idea of how much customer service truly provides within your organization.
Calculate the true lifetime value
As mentioned above, your customers’ lifetime value is a metric you should follow on a regular basis.
True lifetime value is the measure of a customer’s worth over the duration of the customer-business relationship.
Keep in mind, that it’s always less expensive to keep current customers than to find new ones.
3 powerful customer service KPIs to help with your evaluation
Now, let’s dive into 3 of the most important customer service KPIs you can start tracking today to help evaluate your company’s customer success program.
Source: Gorgias.
1) Customer retention rate (CRR)
Ecommerce companies in particular have an average CRR of about 30%, according to Omniconvert, so if your company’s CRR is lower than that, it could be a sign that your customer support isn’t as effective as it could be.
How is it measured?
To calculate CRR, you will need the following information: number of customers at the end of a given time period (E), number of customers gained within that time period (N), and number of customers at the beginning of the time period (S).
Then, plug those numbers into this formula:
CRR = [(E-N)/S] x 100
Why is it important?
Your company’s ability to retain customers directly relates to its success because when customers disappear, so does revenue.
Source: Gorgias.
2) First reply time (FRT)
First reply time is how long it takes one of your customer service reps to respond to a customer inquiry — on average.
This could be over email, phone, or chat.
Typically, a “good” first reply time is less than 24 hours in a ticketing system, less than 90 seconds for live chat, and three minutes for the phone.
How is it measured?
You can calculate your first reply time by measuring the duration of time between when a customer submits a request and the time when a member of your customer support team responds.
FRT = Total first response times during the period of time / Total number of tickets resolved in that period
Tools for measuring FRT
- Gorgias
Why is it important?
First reply times are directly related to your brand’s CSAT.
No customer wants to wait days for an email response, or sit on hold for several minutes.
Decreasing your first reply times will inevitably increase customer satisfaction.
Source: Gorgias.
3) Average resolution time (ART)
As we’ve seen, customers are happier when they don’t have to wait a long time, and average resolution time (ART) is another metric that keeps track of this data.
This metric can provide insight into how customer service team members are performing, and lets you see who may need additional training or support.
How is it measured?
To find your company’s ART, you can take the total duration of all resolved conversations and divide that by the number of customer conversations that took place over a specific period of time.
This metric is also sometimes referred to as the mean time to resolve or MTTR.
ART = Total resolution time for all resolved tickets / Total number of tickets solved
Tools for measuring ART –
- Gorgias
Why is it important?
Your ART is a vital metric that helps keep tabs on how efficient your customer service team is.
If your ART is long, or you notice that it’s getting longer, this is a sign that you need to give your processes a closer look and adjust your strategies if needed.
Evaluate your customer service data in one centralized platform, with Gorgias
Now that you know which customer service metrics are the best to track to ensure your eCommerce business’s success, you can start evaluating your existing customer service program.
Every metric I included above can offer your business better insights into what your current customer service program is doing right, and where there’s room for improvement.
You may choose not to track all of these KPIs, but I highly recommend using a platform that can help you organize your analytics in one place — and Gorgias can do that for you.
If you’re ready to revamp your customer service program, learn more about what Gorgias can do for eCommerce businesses or sign up today.
Get 2 months FREE of Gorgias with this link Now!
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