As a part of a fully functional management system in your e-commerce business, it is imperative to keep track of various departments within your organization. One such important department is your e-commerce customer service team, as they are your clients’ first point of contact.
Taking care of this is precisely what will help you with business growth, scalability, and customer retention.
Luckily, there are some primary vital metrics that you can utilize to measure your customer service team productivity. Let us take a look at some of these critical metrics.
The 8 Key Metrics to Track Your eCommerce Customer Service Agency
Though there are many different eCommerce customer service metrics you need to track, and the most important ones are listed below:
First Response Time (FRT)
FRT for your customer service team refers to the time taken by your IT support team to reach out to your customers. The longer the duration of the time elapsed, the higher your customer’s chances of leaving your website. Hence, bridging this gap and ensuring rapid communication by your customer service team is essential. Ideally, it should be less than 1-2 hours.
Studies have shown that around 59% of consumers are likely to purchase products/services from a particular company if they get answers to their queries within a minute or so (Ifbyphone, 2012). The rationale is twofold: it helps them make financially prudent choices when their questions are resolved while they are in their decision-making process.
The second reason pertains to the psychology of the consumer mind, wherein an active and enthusiastic support team makes them feel valued and prioritized. Thus, it is crucial to ensure that the first response time (FRT) is short.
What can you do?
Take a look at the response time and if you find that the FRT is long, then plan on allocating more resources and recruiting an additional workforce to your IT support team.
Pro tip: Add in a live chat feature to your website to drastically bring down your FRT! If you want to incorporate this feature in your business, then visit Vserve eBusiness.
Average Issue Count (AIC)
Despite having quality services or top-notch products, you are bound to encounter customers that have complaints. Your customer support team must ensure that these complaints are addressed and adequately resolved.
Keeping track of the issues will help you zero in on the common issues and subsequently take care of them. Additionally, such data helps in observing how the quality of performance has improved over the years. Thus, tracking this component will help you make some critical decisions to enhance your services’ quality.
What can you do?
Now that you know that issues are bound to crop up, it is essential to calculate the average number of complaints you receive. You can categorize these complaints daily, weekly, and monthly for precise measurement.
Issue Resolution Rate (IRR)
We discussed the importance of issue counting; an equally important aspect is the rate of issue resolution.
IRR is calculated by taking the total number of complaints received and identifying the number of complaints that have been resolved. If the resolution rate is high, then it indicates that your e-commerce customer service is efficient.
What can you do?
You have to ensure that your IT support team has complete knowledge of the services/products to help your customers. However, there may be one or two complaints that your team may not be able to resolve.
In such cases, you must review these issues closely and try to find alternatives. Hence, you may need to step in to resolve the issues personally.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Another strong performance indicator is how satisfied your customers are with your eCommerce customer service. Because you need to know your customer satisfaction rate, CSAT is your business’s commonly-used key performance indicator.
CSAT proves to be helpful in conjunction with other ratings you obtain in your support service. Since it is subjective, it allows you to look closely at the mentioned areas and work accordingly. Thus, a customer satisfaction score directly gives you a great measure of how your client service team is.
What can you do?
You need specialized surveys and rating systems in place to obtain feedback from your customers. Place these forms at the end of the purchase so that customers can fill them. You can conduct surveys, ask questions, or ask for honest feedback from your consumers to collect CSAT.
Pro tip: You can also incorporate the above-mentioned live chat feature to obtain real-time feedback from customers. This has proven to be the most reliable and practical approach. You can head to Vserve eBusiness to know more about live chat features.
Customer Experience Rating (CER)
CER probes into the experience of your customers without any biased questions. Hence, providing a closely accurate picture of their experience and what you can do to improve. This is a highly useful indicator to boost your eCommerce Customer Support Agency!
Did you know that approximately 90% of the consumers in America would put in extra money just for better customer service? (McGinnis, 2019).
This significant number points out how your staff’s minor elements also matter when it comes to interactions with your clients—some things to pay attention to your writing style, tonality, professionalism, and so on.
What can you do?
Holding regular seminars and training on effective communication will prove to be valuable. One specific way to measure your CER is explained below:
[(E-N)/S] x 100 = CRR.
- Calculate the total number of customers at the end of the time period (E).
- Subtract from it (E) your total number of new customers gained during a particular time period (N).
- Divide the outcome by the total number of customers at the beginning of the time period (S).
- Multiply the outcome by 100.
Ticket Backlog
This refers to the tickets that have been unresolved and have accumulated over time by your customer service team.
Simply relying on response time and the number of resolutions won’t be sufficient. The percentage of complaints or requests backlog is a significant indicator of the performance of your support team.
What can you do?
If these numbers are high, you have to take a closer look to prevent this from happening further. You may uncover various reasons behind this situation, such as a high volume of queries that may mean that you have to hire additional help.
Alternatively, poor quality responses by your team may mean that they need more training. Thus, looking into the backlog every month is imperative to track productivity.
Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
You are not done simply by acquiring customers. Instead, you want to retain them and make them repeat purchases. You can measure this customer service team metric by tracking the CRR metrics.
It will cost you more to acquire new clients than to hold onto your existing clients. Remembering this golden rule will help you strategize accordingly.
A higher customer retention rate means that your brand has a loyal customer base. This is also a clear indicator that your customer support service must be impeccable.
What can you do?
Ensure that your strategies outline how your company would retain your clients. Once the top-level management has clarity, then this can easily be communicated to your customer support team for implementation.
Pro tip: Include email support service to retain your customers.
Thus, these were the 8 key metrics to measure your eCommerce customer service! All these elements provide helpful information on the areas of concern and strengths.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
While CSAT captures particular action or time-based triggers, NPS indicates the impact of the customer service team on customers’ overall perception of your brand. This simplest metric reveals how likely your consumers are to recommend your products or services to others.
What can you do?
You can measure the NPS metrics from survey responses. If you go for surveys, then you can ask demographic-related questions like age, income, gender, location, etc.
Alternatively, you can also use concepts of ‘promoters’ and ‘detractors.’ Promoters are consumers who promote your products/services, while detractors are less likely to do this.
The following image shows the formula to calculate NPS:
Pro Tips: Segment your customer’s NPS score to find ways to improve certain touchpoints or customer experiences. You can do segmentation by social class, behavior, demographic, or market. You can use the NPS score to ask for customer feedback through their preferred channel. So, this is helpful with tracking your customer service team.
Conclusion
Taking these metrics into consideration and making necessary changes accordingly will prove helpful for your eCommerce business. This way, your customers will be satisfied with your top-notch services, and your business will boom!
If you want to improve your overall customer experience, you can outsource your customer support to a reliable service provider. A good outsourcing partner can handle everything for you from call support and email processing to live chat support and everything in between. It’s like a fully-equipped customer support team working from outside your company. You get team mobile customer service for your needs.
For more information on measuring your customer service team productivity, please visit our website, Vserve eBusiness.
