For any support team at an internet service provider (ISP), the primary goal is to help customers with their technical problems. But as with any goal, there needs to be a measurable way to track your progress from day to day.
That’s where key performance indicators (KPIs) come in handy. They help transform subjective goals like helping customers into trackable goals with measurable results, so you can see exactly how your team is performing every day.
So what kinds of KPIs should an ISP support team be tracking? And how do you go about measuring them? Let’s go through eight of the most essential ones.
Note: Every team has different goals, and each team member operates in a different way. What illustrates success for one team may not for another. So be sure to consider your support organization’s ultimate goals when setting KPIs! What are KPIs? What’s the value in tracking them?
KPIs for tech support teams
Customer effort score (CES)
This KPI measures how much effort a customer has to put in to reach your support team. Ultimately, the lower this measurement is, the happier customers will be! No one likes feeling like they’re jumping through hoops just to figure out why their internet won’t work.
How to measure it: This is an incredibly subjective KPI, but it can tell you a lot about how customers feel about contacting your team. It’s typically set up as a scale, and you would gather information from customers through surveys. The important thing to look for is how customer perspectives differ from internal ones.
Average first response time (AFRT)
This KPI measures how long a customer has to wait for that first response from your support team. The times vary drastically depending on the medium; for example, a customer might wait 20 seconds for an automated response on the phone, but up to 10 hours for a response on social media.
How to measure it: This is a pretty straightforward one to measure. With phone calls, it’s a matter of ensuring your system knows how quickly to pick up, and monitoring records to ensure it’s doing what you want. With emails and social media messages, timestamps are your friend.
Average hold time
Customers don’t like to be kept waiting, but unfortunately, it does happen sometimes. This KPI measures how long on average they end up waiting on hold after the first response, but before they get to where they need to be.
How to measure it: Again, this is a relatively straightforward metric that you can measure by monitoring records to see where a customer exits a navigation menu and where an agent picks up. Then, add together all times and divide by the number of calls.
Average handle time (AHT)
This KPI measures how long it takes your agents to completely resolve calls. It can determine nearly all other KPIs on this list—including hold time, customer effort score, abandoned call rate, NPS, and CSAT—so it’s easily one of the most important KPIs for a support team.
How to measure it: This one is a little bit different because where previous call KPIs monitored for a specific part, this looks at the big picture. It’s usually calculated as the sum of your hold time, talk time, and any follow-up time (including calls, emails, and other points of contact) divided by the total number of calls.
First call resolution (FCR)
This KPI (also sometimes called first contact resolution) is another absolutely essential one because it monitors how effectively your team can resolve issues on the first call. If your team can resolve a call the first time a customer reaches out, that improves a whole slew of other KPIs on this list—including AHT, hold time, CSAT, and more.
How to measure it: FCR can be tricky to measure because it comes with a lot of criteria. You’ll need to determine what constitutes a resolution, what the window is between the first call and a potential second call for it to count toward your score, and whether you want to consider customer satisfaction as part of it.
Abandoned call rate (ACR)
This KPI measures how many customers hang up the phone before getting through to someone. The numbers tend to fluctuate through the day as your caseload varies, and can often get confused with disconnects, lost calls, or even short calls.
How to measure it: You can calculate this by subtracting your handled/short/disconnected calls from total calls, dividing that result by the number of total calls, and multiplying by 100 to get a percentage.
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
For many support teams, it’s important to know how happy customers are with their service—and this KPI is the way to determine that. It quantifies customers’ satisfaction based on individual interactions, and can help your team identify strengths and weaknesses in your service.
How to measure it: Typically, support teams will collect CSAT information through post-call surveys. This can take the form of a quick survey at the end of the call, a follow-up email, or even a text, typically asking the customer to rate on a scale and provide comments if desired. Then, divide the number of positive responses by the total responses and multiply by 100 for a percentage.
Net promoter score (NPS)
Though it’s similar to CSAT, NPS is a little different in that it doesn’t just measure how happy customers are. It considers how likely they are to promote your business (or detract from it!) depending on their overall experience with you.
How to measure it: You can measure NPS by surveying customers on how likely they are to promote your company on a scale of zero to 10. Then, subtract the percentage of detractors (zero to six) from the percentage of promoters (nine to 10) to determine your score. You can either attach these surveys to your customer satisfaction survey to save time, or send them separately to prevent answers from being flavored by one interaction.