# Key Metrics for Measuring Customer Support

Customer service metrics provide a behind-the-scenes look at your support team and customer interactions. Today you’ll learn about the five metrics you need to track as part of your customer service workflow. Collect your data, streamline your operations, and provide the best customer support experience.

Customer service is a discipline that relies on human interactions. If you want to elevate your customer assistance and make it exceptional, you need to establish a ground floor of “hard numbers.” We LiveChat professionals are well aware of this, which is why we collect all the customer service trends and statistics in our interactive [LiveChat Customer Service Report](https://www.livechat.com/customer-service-report/). It’s always up to date and filled with the latest and most inspiring findings. The report also makes it clear: Tracking performance and drawing insights from every move is essential in any business.

There are many articles on the internet with titles such as “30 Customer Service Metrics You Need to be Measuring.” Well, I’m already overwhelmed when I read such a headline. Do I really need to know and track all 30 of them? No way.

I decided to put together just five of the most important ones so that you can commit to tracking your results. Now, in the following paragraphs, you’ll learn what customer support metrics are and how to measure the five most powerful ones. Let’s dive in!

## What are customer service metrics?

**Customer service metrics are measurable values that show the support team’s performance in terms of efficiency, speed, and workload. They also show what progress has been made towards defined business goals.**

If you weren’t tracking the results of your work, would you be able to tell if you were doing it right? Definitely not — because you can’t improve what you don’t measure. That’s why it’s so important to get a numbers-based perspective. Find customer care metrics that suggest you’re moving in the right direction and growing.

## Key Metrics

### 1. First response time
First response time is the time that passes between a customer sending a message and receiving the first response from a customer service agent. This time can be counted in minutes, hours, or even days depending on:

- **Communication channel**. It’s quicker to reply to synchronous messages, such as chat messages, than asynchronous, such as email messages.
- **Internal rules and priorities**. Teams can handle customer tickets differently depending on the issue type or customer type they’re dealing with.

### 2. Average resolution time
The average resolution time is the average time it takes to resolve customer cases, that is, to go through all the steps from opening a ticket to marking it as “solved.”

### 3. Ticket volume
The ticket volume is the total number of tickets (or rather, customer conversations) that the support team has in the selected period.

### 4. Ticket resolution rate
Ticket resolution rate is the ratio of the number of tickets assigned to a support agent to the number of tickets solved by them in a selected period.

### 5. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
The customer satisfaction score shows how satisfied your customers are with your product/service or daily support. It’s the customer’s subjective assessment of your efforts, created from their “good feelings” as well as “hard evidence,” such as response time or availability of helpful resources.

## Summary
This lesson was all about customer support metrics that you should focus on. I listed a few of them that will definitely bring consistency to your highly subjective support actions and reduce customer friction. Find your customer care metrics today and be fully prepared for tomorrow’s challenges.