With so many new SaaS companies entering the market these days, customer support is more important than ever before. This is because customers have a ton of options available to them, and in many cases, they will choose to work with the company that provides them with the best customer care.
Therefore, in order to remain competitive, SaaS companies need to monitor their customer support performance, and the best way to do that is by keeping track of the most important customer support metrics.
In this article, we will go over the customer support metrics that you should be tracking so that you can monitor your performance and optimize your company's customer support processes.
15 Metrics Your Customer Support Team Should Track
There are dozens of different customer support metrics that you can track, and each of them will provide you with valuable insights into what's working and what isn't in terms of your customer care. That said, some of these metrics are more telling than others, and so we have compiled this list of the most important customer support metrics that every SaaS business should be keeping a watchful eye on.
Here are the metrics to track:
- Ticket Volume
- Ticket Backlog
- Community Resolution Rate
- Self-Service Usage
- First Response Time
- Average Resolution Time
- First Contact Resolution Rate (FCR)
- Interactions Per Case
- Resolution Rate
- Average Handle Time
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
- Net Promoter Score
- Customer Effort Score
- Customer Churn Rate
Want to track and analyze those metrics in Excel or Google Sheets? Copy our spreadsheet below:
Ticket Volume
The first customer support metric that you should track is the volume of tickets that your team receives each month. This metric will tell you how many customer support conversations are taking place on a monthly basis. This is important because it can give you a general sense of how much work your customer support team is doing.
If ticket volume is low, it may indicate that you aren’t doing a good job of marketing yourself to new customers. If ticket volume is high, however, it could indicate that something is amiss with your product or service, hence the high demand for support.
Ticket Backlog
The ticket backlog is the total number of tickets that are unresolved and have been in the system for longer than a certain period of time. This metric will tell you how many tickets have been sitting in your system for too long, and it will also give you an idea of how much work your team is putting into resolving those tickets.
You should keep track of this metric so that you can identify tickets that have been in your system for too long and prioritize them accordingly. You might also want to consider hiring additional team members if you find that your ticket backlog is growing out of control.
Community Resolution Rate
The community resolution rate is the percentage of tickets that were resolved by the community rather than by the support team. This metric tells you how often customers were able to find the answers to their questions without having to contact support, and it also provides you with data that you can use to improve your FAQ and documentation.
This metric is important because it will help you identify areas in which you can improve your documentation, and it will also give you an idea of how often customers are able to find the answers to their questions on your website or in your app.
Self-Service Usage
The self-service usage metric tells you how often customers are self-servicing. This metric is important because it will help you identify your customers’ pain points and will also give you an idea of how much effort your support team needs to put into resolving tickets.
If your self-service usage is high, this may indicate that your customers are having trouble finding your answers, and it may also indicate that your ticket volume is too high. In such cases, you might want to invest in more robust and detailed FAQs or consider increasing the size of your support team.
First Response Time
The first response time is the amount of time that elapses between a customer opening a ticket and the first reply from your support team. This metric is important because it will give you an idea of how quickly your support team is responding to tickets, and it will also help you identify areas in which you can improve.
First response time is particularly important for support teams that offer 24/7 customer care. If your first response time is too high, it might result in unhappy customers, which can result in negative reviews and lost revenue.
Average Resolution Time
The average resolution time is the average amount of time that elapses between a customer opening a ticket and the ticket being closed. This metric will tell you how quickly your team is resolving tickets, and it will also shed light on the types of tickets that are taking the longest to close.
If your average resolution time is too high, it might indicate that you need to hire more customer support agents or train your existing team members more effectively. If your average resolution time is low, on the other hand, it might be a good idea to correlate this with your CSAT score to identify if your support agents are closing tickets too soon, i.e., before they've fully resolved them or answered a customer's gripe or query.
First Contact Resolution Rate (FCR)
The first contact resolution rate is the percentage of tickets that are closed by the first agent that interacts with the customer. This metric will tell you how often your agents are closing tickets with a positive outcome, and it will also provide you with data that you can use to improve your customer support process. If your first contact resolution rate is too low, you might need to hire more agents or train your current team members more effectively.
Interactions Per Case
This is one of the most important SaaS customer support metrics you will track, as it represents how many times customers will interact with your company. In other words, the number of interactions per case will tell you how many times your customers will have to reach out to you for assistance.
As a general rule of thumb, the higher the number of interactions per case, the lower your customer satisfaction will be. This is why it’s so important to track this metric, as it will help you understand your customers’ needs and streamline your support process so that you can handle more cases per day per customer support rep.
Resolution Rate
The resolution rate will tell you how many times your team was able to solve a customer’s issue. This metric is especially important for support teams that deal with customer issues that require technical assistance.
It’s also important to note that the resolution rate will usually be lower than the number of cases that have been resolved, as some cases will have a follow-up process, which will be logged as a separate case. Therefore, if your resolution rate is lower than expected, you can use this metric to figure out which areas of your customer support workflow need to be improved.
Average Handle Time
The average handle time is another very important SaaS customer support metric that will help you understand how quickly your team is able to resolve customer issues. This metric will show you the average amount of time it takes for a customer support rep to handle an issue.
We recommend that you track this metric for all customer support channels, including email, phone, and live chat. While it’s true that some issues will be easier to solve than others, you should strive to provide customers with a consistent experience across all customer support channels.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer satisfaction can tell you how satisfied your customers are with your customer support overall, which is very important because customer satisfaction is a major indicator of how loyal your customers will be.
Indeed, there's a strong correlation between customer satisfaction and customer retention rates. Therefore, it's essential to track customer satisfaction so that you can understand how your customers feel about your company and so that you can improve your customer support offerings.
We've already covered more aspects about CSAT scores and how to calculate it, so make sure you check that article out.
Net Promoter Score
The Net Promoter Score is a metric that is used to determine how likely current customers will recommend your company to their friends and colleagues. In other words, if your Net Promoter Score is high, then your customers are likely to be very loyal, and they will be happy to recommend your company to others. If your Net Promoter Score is low, then it will be very difficult to increase your customer retention rates, which is why it's essential to track this metric.
Customer Effort Score
The Customer Effort Score is a metric that will tell you how much effort your customers have to put into solving an issue. Ideally, you should strive to have as low a Customer Effort Score as possible, as it will indicate that your customers don’t have to put in too much effort to get their issues resolved.
To track your Customer Effort Score, you will need to conduct regular customer surveys so that you can understand how much effort customers have to put into solving their issues.
Customer Churn Rate
Customer churn rate will tell you how many customers are leaving your company each month. If your customer churn rate is high, you will struggle to grow your company because it will be difficult to constantly replace your lost customers with new ones. Therefore, it's essential to keep track of your customer churn rate so that you can take action to lower it whenever possible.
Choose the Most Important Customer Support Metrics
As mentioned, these are not all of the customer support metrics that you can keep track of, far from it. There are countless other metrics and KPIs that may be useful to your customer support management team depending on your specific industry and how you deliver customer care to your clients.
That said, keeping track of customer support metrics such as the ones we've looked at in this guide can be time-consuming and expensive; as such, it’s important that you choose the most insightful metrics to monitor. This is why we curated the list above; so that you can gain the most valuable feedback about your customer support processes.
How Fullview Cobrowsing Can Help You Improve Customer Support Metrics
Fullview can help you raise your metrics across the board and knock your customer support game outta the park!
We offer customer support teams countless features and functions that can help improve all of the key metrics we've been looking at in this article.
One of the most valuable tools we offer is Fullview Cobrowsing. With it, your customer support agents can call users directly from within your app and control their screens to easily and collaboratively solve issues and speed up ticket resolution time.
Your agents can see exactly what's going on and help customer directly, which can eliminate any confusion and reduce customer frustration. This also ensures that the issue is not only resolved but that the customer understands your SaaS product better moving forward.
How Fullview Replays Can Help You Improve Customer Support Metrics
Another equally valuable feature offered by Fullview is Session Replays. This is a new technology that allows your support staff to review a customer's activity within your SaaS platform so that they can see how the customer is interacting with the product and determine why they might be encountering issues.
By replaying sessions, your support staff will be able to reduce the customer effort score because your customers will no longer struggle to explain the issues they're encountering. Your support staff will have all the information needed to guide the customer towards a successful resolution, which will increase your customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and improve your customer retention and loyalty rates.
Fullview Replays also enables you to offer proactive rather than reactive customer support, which is key to avoiding burnout in your customer support team!
Wrapping things up
Customer support is a crucial aspect of any SaaS business. With so many options available to customers, providing excellent customer care can be the deciding factor for wether or not they choose to work with your company. To remain competitive, SaaS companies must monitor their customer support performance, and tracking customer support metrics is the best way to do so. There are many metrics to track, but — depending on what exactly it is you are trying to improve about your customer support processes and workflows — some are more important than others. This blog post sums up the most common SaaS metrics that are worth tracking on an ongoing basis.
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