Top customer service metrics and rating scales explained

According to our SurveyMonkey 2023 State of CX Report, 90% of consumers say customer service and support are important for the brands they like. 

In fact, more than half (57%) say they’d stop doing business with a company following a poor experience. It’s scary, isn’t it? The good news is that customer service is one channel that you can control and measure more easily than others such as social media or word of mouth.

And customer service makes a difference. Only 2% say customer service and support aren’t important at all.

So, how can you meet (and even exceed) customer expectations? The first step is to make sure you’re paying attention to the customer service metrics that matter.

In this article, you’ll learn about customer service metrics that companies use to evaluate success. You’ll also see customer service rating scale examples that enable reliable data to be gathered.

When professionals refer to the customer experience (CX), they mean the entire customer journey, from brand discovery to purchase and beyond. It’s every interaction a customer has with your organisation across every channel as well as their overall impression of your brand.

Customer service is one aspect of the customer experience. It’s how your organisation directly supports both prospective and current customers. The goals of a customer service team are to answer customer questions and resolve issues quickly, efficiently and with care.

Organisations use customer experience metrics to proactively track brand loyalty, customer satisfaction, consumer sentiment and more. Some of these metrics are specific to customer service, which is more reactive versus proactive. 

Related reading: Your guide to running a customer feedback programme

There are two types of metrics that you can use to understand your customer service performance. First, you can collect customer feedback by sending customer satisfaction surveys to customers after they’ve interacted with your support team. The feedback that you collect is subjective, even if it yields quantifiable data.

The second type of customer service metrics that you can track are your input metrics, such as how long it takes your service agents to respond to customer requests. By analysing your agent performance metrics with the feedback from customers, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of how well your customer service is meeting customer expectations and where the customer service can be improved

Here are the different types of customer feedback metrics and inputs that customer service teams use to evaluate their performance.

You may be familiar with the Net Promoter® Score (NPS) question: “How likely is it that you would you recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” Customers choose a number from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). Your results show how loyal customers are to your brand.

You can send a Net Promoter Score survey at any point in the customer experience. The NPS question works well in different contexts because it’s usually not tied to one specific event.

When you ask the NPS question in a customer service feedback survey, you’re able to understand how your support may have an impact on customers’ loyalty to your brand.

When you send a SurveyMonkey survey that includes the NPS question, your score is calculated for you. If you need to calculate your own score, you can use an NPS calculator. Here’s how it works: