Customer Service Metrics

In this report, we adopted five main customer service metrics to help businesses measure their live chat performance. We came up with the benchmarks based on the real-world data from our customers, operating businesses in different industries across the globe.

What the Metrics Are

• Customer Satisfaction Rate: The average percentage of customers who have left a positive rating for the service they received.
• Wait Time: The average amount of time the visitor waits before his/her chat request is answered.
• Chat Duration: The average amount of time it takes to finish a chat.
• Chats per Month: The average number of chats handled per month by a company
• Chats per Operator per Month: The average number of chats handled per operator per month.

If you have already adopted live chat as a customer service channel, you can use these metrics as benchmarks for your organization.

But if you are just starting out and wondering what metrics to look into to gauge your live chat performance, you can use the following benchmark metrics as a point of reference.

Customer Satisfaction Rate

In this report, we define customer satisfaction by the rating score visitors give the chat service they have received. At the end of each live chat, visitors can be invited to leave a satisfaction score from 1 to 5 in a post-chat survey. If a visitor left a score of 3 or above, we counted it towards the customer satisfaction rate for the purposes of this benchmark report.

Then we calculated the percentage and rating score by deriving the average value from all of the relevant customer satisfaction data.

Wait Time

IT TAKES LESS THAN A MINUTE TO ANSWER A CHAT FOR THE AVERAGE COMPANY.

The wait time refers to the average time a visitor waits before his/her chat request gets answered by an operator. This metric reveals how quick your customer service has the potential to be. It’s also the most important time-based metric, proving that customers want answers from operators as quickly as possible.

Chat Duration

This metric records the duration from the first message to the end of a chat. A chat may be ended manually by a visitor or an operator. Or a chat may end automatically when no communication occurs after a pre-defined period of time.

While chat duration is a significant metric to consider when evaluating your live chat performance, it is important to note that this metric reflects only the speed of interaction and not the quality of interaction.

So the chat duration metric should be considered holistically, and as part of a plan that integrates quality with speed.

Chats per Month

This metric records the average number of chats a company deals with in a month. Please note that only accepted chats are counted; the missed and rejected chats are excluded.

The number of chats per month can affect the recruiting and the staffing of your live chat team and as a result is a useful metric to track.

When calculating the average number of chats per month across companies, we found that there was a significant gap between the largest and the smallest chat volume. Possible factors that can affect chat volume include business hours, website traffic, and nature of business under operation, among other variables. For example, a company offering 24/7 live chat support is more likely to handle a higher chat volume than those organizations which offer chat support only during business hours of weekdays.

As a result, it’s important to consider the importance of external factors when you compare your own chat volume with the benchmark value.

Chats per Operator per Month

This metric records the average number of chats an operator handles a month. Just like the chats per month metric, only accepted chats are counted.

When calculating the average number of chats a single operator deals with per month, only the operators who work for an entire month were taken in to consideration, as fluctuations in turnover and onboarding could compromise the accuracy of the benchmark value.