A good customer service team works like a well-oiled machine. Every piece of it has its unique place, all elements work together seamlessly and form a perfect mechanism. No matter what happens, it’s reliable, scalable and productive.
But what if your support people are not as productive as you’d like them to be? What if you struggle to help them and you don’t know what to start with? You wonder how to help them to become a close-knit team?
In this post, I’ll describe the most important live chat metrics, which helped us to turn our customer service into a team of support heroes. I hope you’ll find these tips easy to implement in your business too!
Metric #1: Number of chats
The number of chats is the first statistic you should check. Contrary to appearances it’s not only information about how many chats your team deals with, but it can tell you two additional things:
- When you should start to think about adding live chat agents to handle additional chats,
- How many chats your team had.
Since our support helps our customers and responds to questions related to our product, we don’t use to have traffic peaks and downs, but, obviously, some months are better than others.
1. Number of chats vs. staffing planning
Historical data is crucial when it comes to planning a staffing strategy because in many e-commerce businesses there are peak months and months of stagnation.
For example, if you’ve seen that in June and July the number of chats started to grow, you should carefully monitor it to make sure that it’s not a permanent growth.
If you don’t do that, it might happen that in October you’ll have 5k additional chats per month and insufficient staffing.
Another thing is that you can monitor how many chats each of your agents has per shift. If your agents used to have a certain amount of chats and this number goes up, it might mean that you should start with hiring a new person.
Tip: Our support heroes typically have about 80 chats per 8-hour shift and when this number goes up to about 100, we know we have to hire another person.
2. Number of chats vs. chat tagging
One very important live chat features is chat tagging. It allows you to add a brief information to your chat to know what the chat was about and filter the archived chats and reports by those tags.
Most basic chat tags are “support” and “sales,” but if you receive a lot of spam chats, you can tag them as “spam.” Having that, you can check your archived chats and see how many of them were important and how many of them were just junk.
If you get a lot of irrelevant chats, it might mean that maybe people are confused with your website or simply want to troll your support.
In the first case you ought to update your website, in second – you might want to set up a pre-chat survey to make chatting less accessible for random visitors.
Metric #2: Customer happiness
This metric is one of the most important ones you can track. It’s all about your customers, so their happiness should be your primary concern.
Live chat, unlike phone or email, has an inbuilt feature allowing to track how happy your website visitor was after a chat. Thanks to that, you will know:
- How many visitors liked chatting with your agents,
- What’s their feedback,
- Who of your agents performs best.
The last metric will be a piece of information whether you should invest some time into customer service training. If you see that one agent has a significant amount of bad rates, you should find some time to dig into that problem and solve it.
Tip: When checking your chat happiness, make sure to check it for relevant tags, e.g. sales and support. Your “spam” visitors might leave your agents unreasonably bad notes, and it might lower the overall result.
Metric #3: Number of tickets
While it’s obvious why you should track the number of tickets, it’s important to monitor how many of them were solved and, more importantly, how many of them are still open.
It will give you information about how quickly your team is able to solve tickets, if you require to add some additional resources to a ticket-solving team and if there are any major problems.
You should always check how many tickets are:
- Unassigned (you should make sure that there are no unassigned tickets because it means that no one is working on it).
- Open (this status means that your team is working on the ticket).
- Pending (these are cases that have been solved and are now awaiting feedback from a customer).
- Solved (success!).
Metric #4: Ticket resolution happiness
There are no successful cases without satisfied customers. Even if a problem seems to be solved, it might turn out that the solution is not what customers expected or they didn’t like the way the problem was solved.
The best metric to monitor customer’s satisfaction is ticket resolution happiness, an indicator of how well your agents are dealing with cases. You can also see top-rated agents and those of them who might need additional training.
Tip: A good metric to take a look at is also first response time. While resolution time is also important, it’s not the best metric to check as some cases can be resolved quickly and some need hours or days.
In case of first the response time you can clearly see how much time it took your agents to notice a ticket, assign it and take action. We always make sure to send customers an update in under 1 hour time.
Customer service metrics that matter
There are many customer service metrics. Even if we limit them to live chat only, we still will have a lot of productivity, performance and quality data.
Sometimes it’s hard to say which metrics are most important and probably it will differ from business to business. But there are a few metrics that are more important for amazing customer service. It’s customer happiness, the number of chats, number of tickets and ticket resolution happiness.
If you keep these metrics in mind, you can be sure your clients will love the seamless customer experience and your support heroes team.
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