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:

While you should use NPS to understand your team’s impact on customer loyalty, you need the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score to measure how well your team is supporting customers. (Read more about when to use NPS vs. CSAT.)

There are many different examples of customer satisfaction questions. For a customer service survey, ask a question such as: “How satisfied were you with the response time of our customer support team?”

Customer satisfaction survey answers are usually on a scale of 1 (extremely dissatisfied) to 3, 5 or 10 (extremely satisfied). To get your CSAT score, you only consider customers who are satisfied with your customer service.

Calculate CSAT by dividing the number of satisfied customers by the total number of respondents and multiplying by 100. 

Our research shows it’s likely that 91% of consumers will recommend a company after a positive, low-effort experience. The Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy or difficult it is for customers to achieve tasks when interacting with your product or service.

For example, in a Customer Effort Score survey, you could ask: “How easy was it for you to resolve your recent issue with our customer support?” Answer choices can range from “Much easier than I expected” to “Much more difficult than I expected”.

Your resulting CES will be between 0 and 100, which shows the total number of customers who respond positively to the question.

To calculate CES, divide the sum of the responses by the total number of responses.

Also known as first reply time, first response time (FRT) measures the average time a customer service agent takes to respond to a customer request or ticket.

(Total first response times / Total number of resolved tickets) x 100 = FRT

Total handling time / Total number of calls = AHT

*Total handling time includes total talk time, total hold time and after-call work

First contact resolution: This is the percentage of customer service requests and calls that are resolved during the first customer interaction.

Time to resolution: The average time it takes for your service team to resolve a customer request or issue.

Average ticket touches: Also known as replies per resolution or replies per ticket, this metric shows the average number of times your service agents respond to a request or ticket.

Tickets resolved: This metric helps you see how many of your customer support tickets are resolved. You can compare this to how many open tickets you have at any given time.

Ticket reopens: The percentage of support tickets that customers reopen after the tickets are resolved. When a ticket is reopened, it shows that a customer’s issue wasn’t resolved to their satisfaction. Your ticket reopen rate can help you understand how effective your customer service is.

Cost per resolution: What is your average cost of resolving a support ticket? Choose a period of time and assign a cost to all of your operating expenses (salaries, tools, etc.). Then divide that by the number of tickets you received during that time.

There are different methods you can use to measure customer service. If you’re running a Voice of the Customer programme, you’ll be paying attention to customer feedback across your customer experience, from social media to purchase feedback.

Using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software such as Zendesk, you can see key customer service metrics and customer feedback. You can even integrate Zendesk with SurveyMonkey to easily map feedback to customer records, send surveys to segmented customer lists and automate customer service surveys.

There’s a reason why there are so many types of customer service feedback surveys and metrics: each organisation has its own definition of what a great customer experience looks like; and customers, too, have their definition of what a great customer experience looks like.

Your customer service team can’t control the entire customer experience. But you can tap into the five dimensions of service quality that matter most to consumers.

Get to know these dimensions of service quality and then make sure you’re covering the areas that make sense for your organisation and team. This will help you choose the right questions and the most important metrics to focus on.

You know how to collect different metrics and which topics you should be covering to find out whether you’re exceeding customer expectations. But how do you know what to ask in your customer service surveys to get reliable results?

Remember that customer service feedback questions are more than the questions themselves. The answer options, or the responses that generate your customer service scores, matter. Here’s an example:

Keep reading for an overview of different customer service rating scales, including when to use numbers and words and how many answer options to provide.

Let’s suppose you called customer service to request help with setting up a new mobile device. You had to wait more than 20 minutes to get in touch with someone, but once you did, they were helpful and mostly able to resolve your issue. (You’ll have to take a few extra steps to get your device to start working.)

After the call, you receive a survey that asks: “Overall, did you have a positive customer service experience?” You see two answer options: Yes and No.

How would you answer? The customer service agent was extremely helpful, empathetic and took the time to resolve your issue. But you had to wait a long time to talk to someone and are unhappy that you couldn’t complete the setup over the phone. So you choose “No”.

What does this customer feedback tell the company? In this context, not much. It would probably be in the company’s best interests to provide answer options that follow a 5- or 7-point rating scale, such as the Likert scale.

Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the customer support you received?

This 5-point scale allows for a neutral answer option and a more nuanced understanding of an experience’s positivity or negativity level. To turn this into a 7-point scale, add “Extremely satisfied” and “Extremely dissatisfied” to both ends of your list of answer options.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, rate your experience with our customer service.”

Many people recognise 1 (bad) to 10 (good) as a standard numeric rating scale. And the numbers’ value can directly translate to customer service scores.

That said, a numbered scale can be subjective and leave customer sentiment somewhat of a mystery. Customers may avoid numbers at either extreme, and numbers in the middle may not tell a service team much at all about their performance. 

Worded scales give people a better opportunity to think about their own experiences and try to choose the most accurate description.

How responsive or unresponsive were our customer service agents?

When it comes to numbered vs. worded scales, you can combine numbers and words to give respondents a good idea of scale and what those numbers actually mean. The NPS survey question is a good example of this. It includes a 0 to 10 rating scale but qualifies each end with “Not at all likely” and “Extremely likely”.

Besides words or numbers, more organisations are using emojis for their customer satisfaction rating scales. The smiling, neutral and frowning faces were originally developed as a pain scale for healthcare. Patients point to the face that best represents their pain level, while practitioners can correlate this to a number to measure the severity of the pain.

You can also use pain scales for customer service satisfaction. Emojis can be helpful because they’re an easy visual cue that often translates well across languages and cultures. Plus, people may be more inclined to take the time to respond if they don’t have to read too many answer options or think too much about the number they want to assign to their experience.

Similar to emojis, you can use star ratings to ask customers about the effectiveness of your service, help articles and more.

See how SurveyMonkey can help improve your customer satisfaction with our expert-written customer feedback surveys. Easily create and send a survey in minutes to start taking action today.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.