This document discusses key customer service metrics that organizations should track, including customer satisfaction, loyalty, feedback, contact volume, agent performance, and more. It recommends focusing on 2-3 metrics that relate to the business' core goals of revenue, profit, and growth. Examples are given from companies like Zappos and Bonobos that illustrate how they measure and improve customer service. The document stresses the importance of proper data collection and analysis to ensure metrics are meaningful.

1. Customer Service Metrics 101
Douglas Hanna
Founder/CEO - Help.com
@douglashanna

2. What to track and why
Customer Feedback Customer Behavior
Agent/Team Behavior
Other
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty (NPS, etc.)
• Qualitative feedback
• Contact volume (by channel)
• Account revenue growth
• Referrals
• Product engagement/use
• Hold time / abandonment rates
• Self-service use/engagement
• Customer churn
• Social media sentiment
• Cost per incident/case
• Trending issues
• Response/resolution time
• First contact resolution
• Issues/cases per agent
• Agent productivity (AHT, etc.)
• SLA attainment
• Escalation rates
• Employee turnover
(both absolute and relative numbers)

3. What’s relevant?
Most businesses have two or three key metrics.
Your customer service metrics should relate to those.
Revenue Profit Growth
How much money
What is customer
is customer
service costing
service helping us
us? What is it
bring in? Retain?
saving us?
What is customer
service doing to
help us grow our
business?
Loyalty
Product use
Customer churn
Contact volume
Agent efficiency
Self-service use
Referrals
Social sentiment
Account growth

4. What do other teams care about?
Customer service is relevant to all parts of the organization.
Finance Operations Sales
• Cost per incident/case
• Employee cost
• Contact volume
• First contact resolution
• Customer satisfaction
• Qualitative feedback
• Referrals
• Account revenue growth
Product Marketing HR/Legal
• Referrals
• Customer churn
• Social media sentiment
• Product usage
• Trending issues
• Qualitative feedback
• Employee cost
• Turnover
• Compliance

5. Example: Zappos
Zappos doesn’t pay attention to call time.
Instead, it asks four key questions:
On a scale from 1 – 10, How likely would you be to recommend
Zappos to a friend or family member?
On a scale of 1-10 how likely would you be to request the person
you spoke with again?
On a scale of 1-10 how likely would you be to recommend this
person to a friend or coworker?
On a scale of 1-10, if you owned your own business, how likely
would you be to try and hire the person you spoke with?
Q1:
Q2:
Q3:
Q4:

6. Example: Bonobos
Employees do QA for each other as a basis
for metrics. “Excellent” is the goal.
Peer review process | peer pong
Bonobos customer service team members (called “Ninjas”) are given
a sample of another Ninja’s customer service interactions each month
and asked to grade it. They then discuss what’s good and what could
be improved.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys in Emails
If customers don’t rate Bonobos “excellent” in an email survey, the
company will reach out and try to understand what they could have
done better.

7. Example: Buffer
Contact volume by channel informs hiring needs.
16000
12000
8000
4000
0
Twitter Tickets Live Chat
April May June July August
(sample data/hiring stats)
New Hire!
Job Req

8. Benchmarking
NPS Benchmarks
41 80 76 66
Industry Benchmarks
Ask Customers

9. Best practices: collection and analysis
Stats Best Practices Proper Scoring
• Large enough sample size
• Statistically significant differences
• Sampling bias
• Use standard deviations
• 0-10 for NPS
• Consistent across channels
• Consider relative vs. absolute
Data that’s relevant Keep it simple/focus
• 2-3 key stats for department
• 2-3 key stats for agents
• Mix of quantitative/qualitative
• Are you measuring what matters?
• “Not everything that counts can be
counted, and not everything that can be
counted counts.”

10. Fun with stats: spurious relationships
Money spent on pets (US)
correlates with
Civil engineering doctorates awarded (US)
Correlation: 0.983038

11. Discussion
Question:
What are the most important metrics that your
organization tracks?

12. Discussion
Question:
How do you report metrics to other teams? What
ones seem to be most interesting?

13. Discussion
Question:
Do you use something like NPS? How (if at all) do
you benchmark your company?

14. Next Steps
Want to learn more?
Check out resources.help.com for free customer
service resources, best practices, tips, and more.