Customer service is a full-contact sport. You need to be there when customers need you most.

Businesses need to be proactive to get ahead of their customers’ needs by using tools like customer service automations while avoiding overspending on novelty solutions. Digital customer service is a must for businesses looking to offer a competitive customer experience (CX).

Customer expectations drive businesses to innovate, and those expectations aren’t going anywhere. With convenience on the rise, patience is lower than ever. According to Forrester:

19% of brands saw their customer experience (CX) quality decrease in 2022 — the lowest CX rate in 17 years.

To curb those expectations, businesses should offer a robust suite of digital customer service tools where users can connect with the right internal teams or find the right information. In this guide, we’ll break down the importance of digital customer service and give tips on implementing an effective digital strategy.

Let’s dive right in.

Why Should Businesses Offer Digital Customer Service?

Businesses should offer digital customer service because most customers use digital tools like mobile apps and messaging to inquire about and purchase products.

In 2023, 63% of customers surveyed by PwC purchased goods directly from brands online. Many of those customers will need customer support for a variety of reasons. When those customers look for answers, U.S. businesses risk almost $500 billion in annual revenue due to inefficient and ineffective customer service.

Rather than risk missing out, use digital customer service to reach more customers with less money than traditional customer service methods.

Related Article

100+ Essential Customer Service Statistics & Trends for 2024

Some of the benefits of digital customer service include:

1) Make your product or service easier to access and use

Digital customer service helps speed up response times and increase the number of people your team can help. Use digital tools that make integrating your product into your customers’ lives easier.

It’s no secret that customers probably use your products outside of your business hours, especially SaaS tools. Your customers could be in any market or time zone (or keep odd hours), and they’ll expect support whenever they need it. Digital customer support platforms enable round-the-clock service, which is crucial for meeting customer expectations, building trust, and growing satisfaction.

The seamless integration of customer service directly into SaaS platforms creates opportunities for speedy problem-solving. This, in turn, translates to a better overall CX.

Thanks to tools like intelligent virtual agents, chatbots, and email support, digital customer service gives businesses the resources they need to support a high volume of customers regardless of their location.

2) Offer a personalized, customer-centric experience

CRM helps to personalize digital conversations and give the customer the perception that every interaction is authentic — or at least feels like it. According to Deloitte, the brands that offer the most personalized experiences exceed in customer loyalty metrics — at least 1.5x more effectively than those that offer less personalized services.

With a digital customer service platform, you can effortlessly collect and analyze data on customer interactions. This makes it easier for you to provide personalized support and even product improvements based on customer behavior and feedback.

In addition, CX analytics make it simpler to segment customers by preference. When you segment customers, you can market to them more accurately with personalization, whether that’s a new product or an improvement to one they already use. This can even help improve your customer retention by introducing existing customers to new product offerings.

Related: Customer Experience Analytics: How to Track and Improve CX

3) Improve productivity by freeing agents from repetitive tasks

Your agents work hard to ensure customers have all the information they need. Make work easier for your team with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) tools like chatbots that can answer simple prompts.

Self-serve resources like FAQs can help customers to answer their own easy, repetitive questions. This saves the more challenging questions for agents, who will get to flex their problem-solving skills.

Digital support means that automation can handle back-office tasks like leaving notes The right suite of tools can improve efficiency and productivity for all of your internal teams, helping them work together seamlessly to improve overall CX.

4) Strengthen business continuity

With digital customer communications, your business can maintain a consistent presence in the market no matter what changes in the industry. Inclement weather, tech issues, and even geopolitical events are less of a threat to your support team when you’re connected to your customers on multiple channels.

This is especially important for companies that sell complex products where customers may require immediate real-time support, such as many SaaS offerings. Live chat and instant messaging can help ensure continuous use of service for your customers, helping to improve their satisfaction in the long run.

5) Shift from a cost center to a profit center

Digital channels can be more cost-effective than traditional customer service channels like call centers. With digital channels, you can automate answers to common questions and limit the size of the support team you need to field inquiries.

Digital customer service can even help curb customer churn by flagging suspect accounts to managers for intervention. Those account managers can then use customer history to speak to specific issues that interest the customer and may influence them to stay on board.

Reimagine customer support as an investment to stay connected with customers and raise awareness of new and related products.

Related Article

10 Customer Service Trends CX Leaders Must Know in 2024

How to Implement a Digital Customer Service Strategy: 3 Action Items

It’s easier to keep up with stringent customer expectations with the right tools.

According to a survey from Webflow, 57% of responding marketing leaders agree that customers expect more than they did even 12 months ago. Additionally,  a staggering 93% of respondents agree their team “must continually innovate to remain competitive” when it comes to improving the customer experience through a company’s digital offerings.

However, you might be overthinking how simple a comprehensive digital customer service experience can be. 

Try these tips for a seamless digital strategy.

1. Don’t make your customers chase you

Businesses that offer customers a seamless omnichannel experience across phone calls, chats, emails, text messages, social media, and more may stand a better chance at meeting customer expectations and delivering a positive CX.

In an interview with NPR, author, management consultant, and customer service expert Amas Tenumah calls out a poor cross-channel experience as a sign of a negative customer experience:

“[E]xpectations are rising…. Commercials…promise you the world…and then objective reality hits. And you try to reach customer service. And you are met with a bot. You are met with wait times…that’s really where the chasm is. This gap between expectations and objective reality just continues to get and wider wider.”

~ Amas Tenumah, customer service expert and author

Find your customers where they are. The best place to communicate with customers is where they prefer to reach you (or to be reached, depending on their preferences).

2. Get to the point with faster responses

You should prioritize fast responses to customer inquiries for the best impact on customer experience. Businesses that respond quickly to customer requests are seen as more attentive, which lets customers know that their needs are on the way to being met if not met already.

There are plenty of ways to speed up agent response times to digital requests, including:

• Chatbots for automated responses to common questions
• Templated responses for quick and consistent agent answers
• Triage methods for prioritizing urgent messages

You can also use unified communication (UCaaS) tools to make the most of your customer channels by integrating phone, chat, and video conferencing into one platform. This way, agents can collaborate across teams so everyone has the information they need to tackle customer requests.

Self-serve tools for customers, like FAQs, can take redundant questions away from agents so they have more time to solve complex problems that require human intervention. This can also help empower your team with the authority to make decisions that benefit the customer. And when employees feel trusted and responsible, they’re more likely to have high satisfaction and performance.

3. Take advantage of the data at your disposal

Customer data is a treasure trove of valuable information — don’t waste it. A digital customer service solution can help you track and make sense of customer habits, behaviors, conversations, and purchases to flesh out complete individual customer journey maps.

Most importantly, customer data helps businesses with the “why” of digital customer service. Data is key for personalizing services, strengthening customer relationships, and improving loyalty. Data is also crucial for any predictive analytics businesses might want to use to forecast the future, like during revenue planning.

Related: How to Build the Best Digital Customer Experience Strategy in 2024

Choose the Right Tools for Comprehensive Digital Customer Service

When your customers are satisfied, you don’t have to spend as much to retain their business.

Customers rely on more business communication channels than ever before, making digital customer service the newest battleground for capturing customer loyalty. To win this battle, you should use data to your advantage.

With a comprehensive customer service tool like Nextiva, you can oversee smarter data collection and analysis. With customer insights from digital interactions, you can reach a wider audience, personalize more interactions, and swiftly resolve more issues.

Smarter data analysis makes businesses more attuned to customer needs, and customer centricity creates a path for a more sustainable business.

Every interaction a customer has with your organization impacts their relationship with you. Yet, many companies may rely only on a few select high-level metrics when measuring customer experience (CX). Those customers are shortchanging themselves when it comes to their customer service goals.

To measure CX, first understand each step of the customer journey and the customer service tools guiding the way along those steps. Then, connect key metrics to each step that tells you if the customer is on the right path. We’ll break down measuring customer experience below and the 10 best metrics to measure it with.

Let’s jump right in.

How to Measure Customer Experience

Rather than skipping ahead to the end of a customer journey, dig down into the exact moments that need your attention to usher in the biggest changes. Companies that harness data-powered insights to become CX leaders have shown up to 70% higher customer loyalty and 190% higher revenue growth over three years, according to research from Boston Consulting Group.

To measure the customer experience, break up your CX analytics and metrics into steps of the customer journey.

To do this, we’ll create a framework that uses what you already know about your customers to measure the impact and efficiency of your CX initiatives.

1. Outline the customer journey & touchpoints along the way

Define your goals for the actions you want your customers to take by mapping your customer journey. For instance, your goals might be booking a demo, signing up for your service, onboarding other teammates, or even receiving a product on time.

Every journey to that goal comprises a series of “touchpoints” that customers go through, and each touchpoint is a focused opportunity to improve the customer experience. As you improve each touchpoint over time, you’ll start to identify larger opportunities and impact the overall customer experience with your company.

Related Article

Customer Experience Marketing: 5 Strategies to Reduce Customer Churn

2. Set a customer experience success metric for each touchpoint

Customer experience success metrics are in-journey signals that will become the guardrails keeping your customers moving in the right direction. 

Think about what customers experience, feel, and do. Forrester calls these interaction, perception, and outcome metrics:

• Interaction metrics are what happens to the customer while they engage you.
• Perception metrics are what and how they feel about the interaction.
• Outcome metrics are the resulting actions that occur after that interaction.

Measuring metrics at each stage of the customer journey helps evaluate the complete customer experience instead of a siloed view.

Related: How to Create a Unified Customer Experience (CX) at Scale in Four Steps

3. Set up automation campaigns to ask for customer feedback

Customers have limited time to give feedback. By making the process short and sweet, you’ll have a higher chance of getting the data you need.

Follow these best practices when asking for customer feedback:

• Meet them where they are. Every customer has a preferred channel. Rather than force them into your flow, use an omnichannel contact center to keep the conversations where they want to be.
• Reach out at the right time. Timely feedback is essential to understanding your customer’s emotions. However, it can also skew data in the wrong direction. For example, rather than use IVR after a long support call to ask for feedback, choose a medium they can use at their leisure, like SMS or email. 
• Use data sources beyond surveys. The more effort a customer exerts when using your product, the less satisfaction they’ll likely have with you. Instead of only asking for customer feedback directly, take advantage of advanced tools like AI call analysis and product usage to give you a full picture of the customer experience.

Lastly, move away from manual processes so your CX measurement isn’t restricted to business hours. For example, in Nextiva, you can set up customer service automations to analyze customer conversations and actions and trigger a relevant response. 

Related: Customer Experience Analytics: How to Track and Improve CX

Automations help you ask for feedback at the right time and provide 24/7 support while saving you money. According to McKinsey, businesses that use automation to revamp their customer experience strategy can save up to 40% in operating costs.

Related Article

Call Center Turnover Rates: How To Boost Agent Retention

4. Create a central customer experience dashboard

Customer experience data isn’t less beneficial if it isn’t accessible, easily understood, and actionable. A central dashboard for all your metrics is a single source of truth and an essential tool for measuring customer experience.

Look for a unified communications (UC) tool like Nextiva that combines tools like phone, chat, and video with a service CRM. This way, you can access real-time and historical data alongside customer conversations.

Related: How to Build a Customer Experience Dashboard (+ Best Practices)

5. Future-proof your customer experience with regular quality assurance monitoring

Even with a framework for tracking CX, your customers, business, and industry always evolve. 

Measuring customer experience is an ongoing process — that is, you’re never quite done measuring it. Instead, you should build in regular quality assurance (QA) to find ways to improve your CX.

Customer experience QA comes in many forms. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

• Listen in on calls. Transcripts only capture so much information. Instead, listen to how customers interact during critical touchpoints of their journey. 
• Use sentiment analysis to track how customers feel about changes. Modern technology like AI and natural language processing can scale your QA effort by analyzing customer sentiment. This is especially helpful for tracking the return on investment (ROI) of your support investments, as you can track trends over time. 
• Define quality benchmarks. Historical benchmarks give you a bottom line to track changes or prepare agents for challenging scenarios. For example, your support agents can see the average handle time in your contact center and anticipate customers getting agitated when they go beyond it. 
• Set predictive metrics. QA isn’t just about looking at the past. Setting predictive metrics shifts your thinking from reactive to proactive support. This is a great way to continue to evolve and scale your CX strategy.
• Segment data by customer or behavior type. Not all customers are the same. Use customer data to define your most problematic or loyal customer groups and see how their experiences differ. You might find different customers have different in-journey signals for the same goal.

Once you’ve established a quality assurance protocol, you can begin measuring customer experience and looking for patterns.

Related Article

12 Key Call Center Metrics & KPIs To Drive Better Performance

10 Best Customer Experience Metrics to Measure

The customer experience dictates whether customers will be loyal to your business or churn and go elsewhere.

You can measure CX directly and indirectly to grasp the full breadth of the customer experience. Direct measurements are surveys asking the customer for feedback, and indirect measurements involve backend customer support data analysis.

According to Leah Leachman and Don Scheibenreif with the Harvard Business Review:

“You cannot be successful if you rely on one measurement to determine performance, because you risk managing to a score instead of the customer’s needs and expectations.”

CX metrics are best to put to use after you’ve mapped your journey and understand your customer’s goals. Experience-led growth through the maximization of CX efforts is a strategy that McKinsey says is key for companies to stay competitive in the current disruptive business environment by harnessing data already available through the full picture of CX metrics.

Related: What Is Unified Customer Experience Management (CXM)?

1. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Satisfied customers are more likely to return, and loyal customers spend more. Where are your customers most satisfied with your services? More importantly, where are they unsatisfied?

A customer satisfaction (CSAT) score gauges customers’ satisfaction when they buy your product or service — or even when they just communicate with your business.

Measuring CSAT provides businesses with valuable insights into customer happiness and identifies areas for improvement. The higher the score, the more satisfied your customers likely are. Meanwhile, a low score might signal a customer service area that needs attention.

Improving CX involves analyzing CSAT data to understand specific pain points or gain insight into your customer service wins. When you properly address issues highlighted by low CSAT scores, you can enhance customer service, improve product offerings, and even increase customer loyalty. And if you regularly track your customer satisfaction numbers, you’ll stay more customer-focused and increase your responsiveness to changing needs.

2. Net Promoter Score® (NPS)

Net Promoter Score (NPS) dissects customer loyalty by assessing how likely a customer is to recommend you to others. It’s measured by asking customers a single question that customers answer on a scale from 0 to 10:

“How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?”

NPS categorizes customers into three distinct groups:

• Promoters (scores 9–10)
• Passives (scores 7–8)
• Detractors (scores 0–6)

NPS is far from the only CX metric to keep an eye on. Some business leaders might consider NPS an incomplete metric because it only measures customer intention, not actual action. In other words, customers can say they’ll recommend your business, but whether they do is an entirely different metric.

3. Customer effort score (CES)

Your customer effort score (CES) evaluates how easily customers can achieve their goals when interacting with your business. The more effort a customer exerts when working with you, the less likely they are to return to give you their business.

A lower CES indicates that customers find it relatively easy to engage with your company, while a higher score suggests higher perceived effort. Lowering customer effort doesn’t just improve CX by reducing friction in interactions but can also lower your cost of providing customer service.

Interactions with low effort can reduce the frequency of time-drains like repeat contacts or issue escalations. They can also discourage customers from channel-switching, which is when a customer changes communication channels during an interaction within an omnichannel contact center environment, usually out of frustration, like when an FAQ section fails to answer a question.

Reducing customer effort can boost employee retention by improving employee satisfaction, thanks to more of their interactions helping customers.

Related Article

13 Essential Customer Service Goals for 2024 + How To Set Your Own

4. Customer lifetime value (CLV) 

Customer lifetime value (CLV) quantifies the total projected revenue you can expect from a customer throughout your entire relationship. It considers the value and frequency of a customer’s purchases and the duration of their engagement with your business.

CLV is a key metric for businesses seeking to understand the long-term profitability of their customer base. CLV helps you make informed decisions about customer acquisition costs, marketing strategies, and customer retention efforts. Higher CLV indicates a more valuable customer relationship, emphasizing how valuable it is to retain customers over the long term.

Stronger CX can improve CLV over time, so tracking CLV is crucial to ensure your CX efforts pay off.

5. Monthly active users (MAU)

Monthly active users (MAU) is a CX metric that measures the number of unique users who engage with a product, service, or platform during a given period.

MAU gives insights into your regular user base in the context of digital products, websites, and applications. If people aren’t engaging with your product or service, they may not be satisfied with what they receive.

This metric helps assess user engagement, track growth or decline over time, and evaluate the overall popularity of a product or platform. A high MAU can signify a healthy and active user community, while a decline should prompt you to investigate and address potential customer retention strategies.

Related: 18 Customer Engagement Metrics Businesses Need To Benchmark

6. Average resolution time (ART)

Average resolution time (ART) is the average time it takes for a team or system to resolve an issue or address a customer inquiry. It’s a metric commonly used in customer support or service environments to assess problem-solving efficiency.

Monitoring your ART helps identify areas for improvement in your support workflows, allocate support resources more effectively, and enhance overall operational efficiency.

A lower ART shows quicker issue resolution, contributing to higher customer satisfaction and demonstrating your commitment to customer service. Efficient issue resolution also plays a role in customer retention by building trust and confidence in the brand, fostering loyalty, and encouraging positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

7. First contact resolution rate (FCR)

Your first contact resolution rate (FCR) is the percentage of customer issues resolved during the first touchpoint with customer service without needing a follow-up contact.

FCR measures your support team’s competency and efficiency in solving customer issues. This is especially important for CX as the first contact sets the tone for a customer’s relationship with your business.

A high FCR shows that your team is helping reduce support costs by limiting costly and time-consuming follow-up contacts.

Related Article

Managing Customer Feedback: Why It Matters & Top Strategies

8. Churn and retention rates

You will measure these customer service metrics retroactively to show how many customers left or stuck around during a given period. High churn can be a CX red flag indicating dissatisfaction, and sustained high churn can negatively impact your brand reputation, making it harder to stay competitive.

Finding new customers costs more than keeping existing ones, and you can make drastic changes to your bottom line with small boosts in customer loyalty. Reducing churn and raising the customer retention rate (CRR) by just 5% can increase profits by as much as 95%.

9. Referral rate

Customers who refer aren’t just satisfied but are eager and enthusiastic about your brand, with a willingness to recommend you to their network.

Referrals indicate customer loyalty and trust and don’t cost any marketing dollars to acquire. Referred customers are also more loyal and profitable, spending more and churning less than ordinary customers.

10. Response time

Your agents’ response speed is critical when customers expect shorter wait times. Shorter response times shape a more positive brand image and boost CX.

Your customers appreciate timely assistance — fast response times keep them engaged and prevent frustration. Quick responses are often precursors to faster issue resolution, lowering your ART. They can also give you a competitive edge that sets you apart from slower competitors.

Make Your CX Data Easier to Analyze

When it comes to measuring customer experience, simpler is often better. 

Instead of drowning in CX metrics, prioritize a single journey, understand the in-journey signals to watch out for, and bring it all together in a single dashboard like Nextiva. 

The more unified your data, communications, and software are, the easier it is to create meaningful and enjoyable customer relationships.

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

How to Measure Customer Experience FAQs

Customers now have more touchpoints than ever, interacting with your business by visiting your website, direct messaging on social media, sending emails, and making phone calls. 

There’s never been more to keep track of — and it’s never been more important to measure it accurately. 

Knowing how engaged your customers feel is important, so it’s no surprise that you may worry if customer conversations seem hollow or you don’t have a plan in place to ensure customer loyalty and retention. 

Marketing and support strategies can help you reach users across the entire customer journey, and. Let’s look at 18 essential metrics to help determine how engaged your customers are. 

Why Is Measuring Customer Engagement Important?

Customer engagement metrics provide insight into how happy and invested customers are with your business, products, and support team. Engaged customers are often loyal customers, committing for longer and purchasing more. 

Tracking customer engagement metrics can offer the following benefits:

• Keeping a pulse on customer satisfaction
• Tracking the impact of your customer onboarding and retention strategies
• Identifying areas of improvement through cross-department teams and efforts
• Assessing if employees consistently have positive interactions with customers. 
• Optimizing every touchpoint throughout the customer journey. 

18 Key Customer Engagement Metrics

When tracking the impact of customer retention strategies, it’s important to note that there are different segments of metrics to track. For example, your customer support team will want to monitor these customer service metrics closely.

The 18 metrics we’re about to discuss are the most important KPIs for customer engagement in your company. 

1. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Your CSAT details how satisfied your customer is with your company, product, or service. This information is typically collected with a customer feedback survey sent after an interaction with your business, such as a purchase or a customer support call. 

This score can help determine if customers feel you’re putting them first. 

It’s calculated by compiling the responses that score either a four or a five and dividing them by the total number of survey responses received. Satisfied customers will typically give either four- or five-star ratings. 

(Number of responses scoring either four or five/total number of responses ) x 100 = CSAT

So, if you had 40 responses with four- or five-star ratings out of 50 responses, that would be:

40 / 50 = .8 x 100 = 80% 

CSAT Benchmark: Scores of 75–85 are considered “good” CSAT scores. 

2. Net promoter score (NPS)

NPS will show how willing a customer is to recommend your product or company to another person. This is another metric that comes directly from customer feedback and often on a scale of 1–10.

These are the ratings and their values: 

• Promoter: Scores 9 and 10; these customers are extremely likely to recommend.
• Passive: Scores 7 and 8; these users are relatively neutral.
• Detractor: Scores 0–6; these users are unlikely to recommend.

You can calculate NPS using this formula:

% promoters – % detractors = NPS

So, if 50% of responses fall within the promoter category and 10% within the detractor category, you have an NPS of 40.

Customer referrals are often a major business driver, indicating a customer’s overall happiness with your company. This score should be tracked closely. 

NPS Benchmark: Above 0 is good, above 20 is great, and above 50 is excellent.

3. Customer effort score (CES)

Your CES tells you how much effort customers must put into fixing a problem they experience. 

For example, you don’t want a customer encountering a technical glitch to need to send an email and a chat message and make three follow-up phone calls over a week. You also don’t want them to have to argue with a customer support agent for an hour after four call transfers. Minimizing your CES will result in an improved customer experience.

Your CES is calculated based on customer survey results. Surveys often use a five- or seven-point scale, asking users how difficult it was to resolve their problem. One would indicate that it was very easy to solve their problem, while higher numbers would indicate greater difficulty. 

CES Benchmark: Low scores are better for CES. Scores of one or two on a scale of five are good; scores of one to three on a seven-point scale are good. 

4. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

CLV tells you the average total revenue customers bring in over the lifetime of their relationship with your business.

You want this number to be as high as possible, and it’s worth noting that the longer you retain a customer, the more money they’ll typically spend with you. 

Calculating CLV can be tricky, and some businesses assess CLV for specific audience segments. You can use this formula:

Average order value x purchase frequency x estimated average customer lifespan = CLV

So, if the average customer purchases a monthly subscription at $20 and they typically retain it for three years, you’ll use this calculation:

20 x 12 x 3 = $720

CLV Benchmark: A good CLV is 3–5 times your customer acquisition costs. 

5. First week engagement

This metric measures a user’s interactions with your product or service in the first week of use. It speaks to the overall user experience and ease of use. It can help you determine how engaged new customers are from the start and how approachable your product or service is.

The goal here is low abandonment. For SaaS products, you want to see regular active usage of key features. 

First Week Benchmark: Low abandonment rates here are critical. 

6. “Stickiness”

“Stickiness” tells you how happy your customers are using your product and how likely they are to return. It’s calculated by comparing your daily active users (DAU) to your monthly active users (MAU). These are simply the number of unique customers interacting with your product daily or monthly. 

(DAU / MAU) x 100 = Stickiness 

The closer your DAU numbers are to your MAU metric, the higher your “stickiness” is, indicating that users are highly engaged.

Stickiness Benchmark: A ratio higher than 13% is good, meaning your customer uses your product once a week.

7. Customer churn rate

Your customer churn rate tells you how many paying customers stop using your product and cancel their contract or subscription. For e-commerce businesses, this may indicate customers who cease purchasing after a set period.

Tracking and decreasing your churn rate can improve customer retention and LTV. Determining why customers churn can be instrumental to improving your customer success process.

Your churn rate can be calculated with this formula:

(Number of customers who churned in a set period / total number of customers during that set period) x 100 = churn rate 

If, for example, you lose 10 customers out of 100 total customers, you’d use this formula: 10 lost customers / 100 total customers = .10 X 100 = 10%. 

CRR Benchmark: A 2–8% churn rate is considered healthy for most businesses. 

Related Article

How To Build a Customer Success Process (Key Steps & Tips)

8. User activity rates 

User activity is a massive indicator of engagement, so it’s one of the most important user engagement metrics on our list.

You want to track both DAU and MAU. 

You can use your DAU and MAU to determine how many customers engage with your product daily or monthly. To do so, use this formula:

(Daily or monthly active users in a given period / total number of paying customers in a given period) x 100 = rate of DAU or MAU

Activity Rate Benchmark: Active user rates of over 20% are usually considered solid. 

9. Feature usage

Feature usage is a significant KPI for startups and SaaS companies with trackable online user activity.

This data will tell you which features customers are using the most. It helps you determine what matters most to customers and can even provide insight into where your product team can expand your offerings further. 

While you want to track your feature usage overall, you’ll want to pay particularly close attention when a new or updated feature rolls out. 

Feature usage may be calculated using this formula:

(Number of users utilizing a feature / total number of active users) x 100 = feature usage rate

Feature Usage Benchmark: 28% is usually a sign of good feature adoption.

10. Social media engagement

Social media engagement is a great way to assess how your community feels about you and your marketing efforts. A loyal and supportive customer is more likely to engage in some way on social media than those who aren’t.

Each social media platform has its own unique metrics, but they often include a mix of likes, shares, saves, comments, and mentions. 

Remember that while likes are always a good sign, other forms of engagement are often more “high-intent” and, therefore, more valuable. 

Social media platforms each have their own native analytics for business accounts. They’ll calculate the engagement rate using this formula:

(Total amount of engagement on a post / total impressions on a post) x 100 = engagement rate

Social Media Engagement Benchmark: An engagement rate between 1 and 5% is considered good, depending on the platform.

Read More: Provide Amazing Customer Experience on Social Media

11. Pages per session

This metric details the average number of website pages users view in a single session before leaving. 

The more pages, the better because they’re consuming your content and potentially interacting with your CTAs. 

Service-based businesses may only need two pages per session to reach immediate sales goals: the home page and a contact page. 

Retail or e-commerce businesses, however, may benefit from more pages per session. Users need to navigate at least one product page, view cart page, and checkout page to make a purchase.

Pages per Session Benchmark: 1.7–4 pages per session is considered good. 

12. Time on page

This metric details how much time the average user spends viewing a specific page on your site. 

For product pages, this can tell you how quickly users are finding the information they need. This metric may be low for contact pages if customers are looking for a specific answer promptly or don’t find your content relevant. 

Website analytics platforms will provide this metric for each page. Average session duration is also a valuable metric and can help you identify how long people spend on your website overall. 

Time on Page Benchmark: 52 seconds is considered a “good” time on page. 

13. Pageviews

Pageviews tell you the total number of times viewers have visited a particular page on your website. Every page on your site will have its own pageviews metric to help you determine how much traffic it generates.

Website analytics software can tell you how many pageviews each page has. A tool like Ahrefs or Similarweb provides estimated pageviews a site gets.

Pageviews Benchmark: Small businesses may want to aim for around 1,000 pageviews per month. For large businesses, a solid benchmark is around 10,000 pageviews per month. 

14. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate tells you the number of visitors who came to your site and left immediately without engaging with your content. These visitors don’t view any additional pages or click on links. 

A high bounce rate indicates a disconnect between the audience you’re reaching and the target audience you want to reach. It may also suggest that you need to strengthen your website UX, copy, or navigation. 

Use website analytics tools such as Google Analytics to track your bounce rate. 

Bounce Rate Benchmark: Average bounce rates may vary between 20 and 55%.

15. Click-through rate (CTR) 

Your CTR details the number of people who saw a particular marketing message and clicked on it. That message may be a social media link, an ad, an email newsletter CTA, or an on-page link. 

CTR is expressed as a percentage, and it’s calculated with this formula:

(Number of users who clicked on a link / total number of impressions on the link) x 100 = CTR

So, if you publish an email newsletter that 200 people open and 50 people click on the link inside, you’ll have a 25% CTR for that particular newsletter. 

CTR Benchmark: While CTR benchmarks vary depending on the platform, a 6–7% CTR is generally considered strong. 

16. Unique visitors

This metric tells you the total number of individuals who have visited your site in a given period. Each visitor will only be counted once on their first visit; repeat visits count toward total site visits but not your unique visitor count. 

In general, the more users, the better. 

Unique Visitors Benchmark: 10% of your website visitors should be new users to balance scalable growth and customer retention. If your returning site visitor count is low, engagement may be an issue. 

17. Scroll or page depth

This metric tells you how far down a page users typically scroll before leaving the page or your website. It can help you gauge how quickly users find the information they need and whether they’re engaged enough to read on to the bottom of the content.

Remember that some pages will have relevant CTAs placed high up on the page; if they’re effective, you may not have a high scroll or page depth, so check your on-site traffic behavior to see how users interact with your page. The quicker you meet the customers’ needs, the better. 

Scroll Depth Benchmark: 50% is considered good, depending on the page type. 

18. Exit pages

Your exit percentage on a specific page tells you how many users left your site after viewing it. An exit page is, therefore, the last page on your site that users visit before clicking away. 

Most website analytics platforms will provide exit page data for you; no calculations are required on your part.

Look at pages with high exit rates and see if you can do anything to keep users on your site longer. This may include adding clickable CTA buttons, improving the on-page content, or adding more prominent navigation options.

Exit Page Benchmark: This list (and the percentage of users exiting each page) needs to be as low as possible. 

Tracking Customer Engagement Metrics With Nextiva

Nextiva is an all-in-one communications and customer support platform that offers VoIP service, customer experience features, and social media management tools. 

Nextiva provides contact center technology that can help you improve your customer experience no matter where they’re at in their journey.

And while we can’t enforce your company’s training or engagement tactics, we can help by providing a powerful set of tools to help you foster a customer-centric culture. 

So, if you’re unhappy with your customer experience and engagement metrics, there’s no time like the present to make a change. Talk to a Nextiva expert about how our tools can help.👇

For most companies, contact centers are an extension of the business. As such, the need to measure and improve call center performance is critical.

95% of companies say measuring call center metrics is important for improving customer satisfaction. But which key performance indicators (KPIs) should you track?

With over 100 potential call center metrics to choose from, it’s essential to identify and focus on the vital few KPIs that offer the greatest insight and pinpoint areas for improvement.

We’ll walk you through 12 key call center metrics to focus on and how to use the data to improve performance and processes that boost productivity, efficiency, and the overall customer experience.

What Are Call Center Metrics?

Call center metrics are standard measurements used to assess the performance of a contact center. In many cases, businesses use call center analytics platforms to track these data.

These metrics may be used by call center managers to look for ways to improve the customer experience and agent efficiency. Over time, these metrics have evolved to keep pace with call center industry trends and customer feedback.

Why It’s Necessary To Track Call Center Metrics

Contact center metrics provide insight into key performance indicators (KPIs) like first contact resolution, peak hours, call lengths, first response time, repeat calls, and total time spent on customer queries across workflows and channels like phone, email, chat, social media and more over a period of time.

Tracking metrics is a best practice for call centers.

Since call centers act as the voice of their client’s brands in many customer interactions, these metrics offer vital insights. By regularly monitoring metrics, you can spot potential issues that may lead to poor customer experiences and high churn rates.

Tracking metrics over time helps you catch emerging trends early so you can resolve issues promptly or optimize processes that are working well. Quick action ensures customers have the best possible experience, making them more likely to remain loyal to the brand.

Regularly analyzing call center metrics, identifying shifts, and taking corrective action is crucial for maintaining high customer satisfaction.

Tracking performance through properly selected KPIs provides the visibility needed to continuously refine operations. This focus on metrics enables call centers to better serve their customers.

Related: Contact Center Optimization: How to Run a Smoother Contact Center

Top Call Center KPIs and Metrics To Monitor

Here, we’ve rounded up 12 call center metrics businesses need to track. They fall under three categories:

1. Customer experience metrics
2. Agent performance metrics
3. Call center performance metrics

Customer experience metrics

Customer experience metrics help you assess the ease of getting help from your company and the resulting customer satisfaction.

These metrics are essential because high scores indicate satisfied customers who are less likely to churn. Use these call center KPIs to look for opportunities to improve the customer journey:

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS®)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a powerful metric used to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction. At its core, it asks the customers the following question:

“On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our company to your friends and peers?”

Customers respond with a score ranging from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). Based on their scores, customers are categorized into three groups:

• Promoters (score 9-10) — Loyal enthusiasts who will promote your company to others.
• Passives (score 7-8) — Satisfied but unenthusiastic customers.
• Detractors (score 0-6) — Unhappy customers who can damage your brand through negative word-of-mouth.

The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

Formula: (Number of Promoters ÷ Total Number of Customers in the Sample) − (Number of Detractors ÷ Total Number of Customers in the Sample)

For example:

• Percentage of Promoters: 80%
• Percentage of Detractors: 20%

NPS = Percentage of Promoters – Percentage of Detractors = 80% – 20% = 60

The higher the NPS (maximum is 100), the more loyal and enthusiastic your customer base is. The score provides actionable data — you can study what your Promoters love and what’s causing your Detractors to be unhappy. Over time, an improving NPS signals greater customer loyalty and advocacy for your brand.

2. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) provides insight into the average customer experience and satisfaction rates with your customer support or services. Consider this metric a key component of your quality assurance system.

Companies typically ask customers for feedback on whether a customer service agent or interaction has adequately solved an issue or met the customer’s needs. CSAT scores offer the most direct way to gauge the customer’s perception of the support experience received.

Based on a scoring system, companies categorize responses into sentiments such as:

• Very satisfied
• Satisfied
• Not satisfied
• Very dissatisfied

The CSAT is calculated using the following formula:

Formula: (Number of Satisfied Customers / Total Number of Survey Respondents)

The final CSAT score is expressed as the ratio of “very satisfied” and “satisfied” responses to the total number of survey respondents.

Tracking CSAT over time provides visibility into customer satisfaction trends. It enables companies to identify areas of strong performance to continue supporting, as well as potential areas for improvement in customer experiences and interactions.

The higher your CSAT score, the better the customer experience being delivered by your organization.

3. First Call Resolution (FCR)

The First Call Resolution (FCR) rate measures your call center’s ability to resolve customer issues within the first contact, whether by phone, email, chat, or other channels.

Formula: FCR = (Total Issues Resolved on First Contact ÷ Total Number of First Contacts) x 100

A higher FCR demonstrates excellent call/contact quality – with agents able to quickly understand, troubleshoot, and address customer needs. This creates a seamless and satisfactory experience for the customer without the frustration of callbacks or transfers.

Tracking FCR helps assess:

• Call center success at issue resolution
• Individual agent performance and efficiency
• Areas for improvement through targeted coaching and training

Analyzing interactions that required multiple contacts prior to resolution helps organizations identify the root causes and build action plans to fill gaps.

An increasing FCR rate signals positive momentum for the customer experience and call center operations overall.

Some industry benchmarks range between 70-85%, with the top call centers exceeding 90% first call resolution rate.

4. Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much effort a customer had to exert to get an issue resolved by your customer support team. While there is no standard CES measurement system, many companies use a 5 or 7-point scale.

The CES relies on asking customers a single question after the service interaction, such as:

“On a scale of 1-7, where 7 means strongly agree and 1 means strongly disagree, to what extent do you agree with the following statement: The service I received made it easy to handle my issue.”

The higher the CES, the less effort a customer had to expend to get their issue resolved, indicating superior service quality and ease of getting support.

Companies track CES trends over time as a key indicator of customer experience. Low and declining CES signals customer frustration and lost productivity in getting issues handled.

As an actionable customer experience metric, improving CES points to areas where self-service tools or agent training can better assist customers. Leading companies aim for high and rising CES scores, demonstrating seamless support experiences for their customers.

Related: Top 17 Customer Service Metrics You Need to Track

Agent performance metrics

Improving individual call center agent performance is a common call center strategy. When you’re fully leveraging each staffing asset, your entire organization becomes more productive and efficient.

These are the agent performance metrics that you should monitor:

5. Agent Utilization Rate

The Agent Utilization Rate measures the percentage of logged-in time call center agents spend actively handling customer contacts during a given time period.

Formula: Agent Utilization Rate (%) = (Total Handled Call Time / Total Logged In Time) x 100

Handled call time includes talk time, hold time, and after-call work. Logged-in time is the total hours agents are clocked in and available to take contacts during a scheduled shift.

A utilization rate of 75-90% is generally considered a best practice target for contact centers. This allows agents adequate time between calls for a break, personal time, and catching up on administrative tasks.

Tracking utilization rates enables better workforce management, including:

• Identifying top-performing agents who handle contacts efficiently
• Determining training needs to improve slower-performing agents
• Right-sizing staffing schedules to match call volumes
• Monitoring individual and team adherence to schedules

High utilization signals agents spending maximum time on revenue-generating activities.

Yet ultra-high rates approaching 100% allow little flexibility between contacts, risking longer handle times and agent burnout over time. An optimal rate balances customer experience, revenue generation, and agent engagement.

Related: 18 Customer Engagement Metrics Businesses Need To Benchmark

6. Occupancy Rate

The Occupancy Rate measures the percentage of logged-in time that call center agents spend actively handling customer contacts versus being available but idle.

Formula: Occupancy Rate (%) = (Total Handling Time / Total Logged In Time) x 100

A target Occupancy Rate range is 75-85%. Rates below 70% may signal inefficiencies with agents having excessive idle time between contacts. This could limit revenue potential and agent productivity.

Low Occupancy Rates can guide management decisions on:

• Condensing schedules during slower periods
• Reducing time for breaks, meetings, etc.
• Identifying non-call related tasks that could be assigned elsewhere
• Coaching agents on best practices for contact handling

Monitoring Occupancy Rates ensures schedules and staffing are aligned with contact volumes to optimize customer service and operational efficiency.

Higher rates correlate strongly with first-call resolution rates and positive customer satisfaction.

7. Average Speed of Answer (ASA)

The Average Speed of Answer (ASA) measures the average time it takes for a call to be answered by a live agent in a call center. It assesses call center responsiveness and service quality from the customer’s perspective.

Formula: ASA = Total wait time of all answered calls / Total number of answered calls

Many call centers establish an ASA goal or target threshold, such as answering calls within 60 seconds. This internal benchmark is based on industry standards and customer service expectations.

Tracking ASA over periods of high and low call volumes indicates whether service level goals are being met consistently. If ASA rises, it signals lower productivity, insufficient staffing, or the need for efficiency improvements.

Combining ASA trends with customer satisfaction scores provides insight into the impact of waiting times on overall customer experience.

Maintaining a low and consistent ASA demonstrates excellent inbound response rates and alignment between customer expectations and service capacity. It’s a key quantitative metric focused specifically on call center speed and productivity.

8. Average Handle Time (AHT)

The Average Handle Time (AHT) measures the average amount of time call center agents take to handle customer calls from start to finish, including hold times and after-call administrative tasks.

Formula: AHT = (Total Talk Time + Total Hold Time + Total After Call Work Time) / Total Calls Handled

Tracking AHT helps call center managers:

• Set performance benchmarks for individuals and teams
• Identify agents who may need additional training, coaching, or system support to improve efficiency
• Right-size staffing needs and schedules based on call volumes and complexity

Analyzing trends in handle times, including fluctuations between the average, shortest, and longest calls, provides data to enhance customer service, agent productivity, and call resolution rates.

The target is to balance optimal AHTs and first-call resolution, ensuring customer issues are solved without sacrificing quality by rushing calls.

Low AHTs may indicate agents closing calls prematurely without confirming issue resolution.

An overly high AHT could signal inefficiencies in processes or agent skills. Driving continual AHT improvements ensures customers get quick yet thorough support.

Related Article

20+ Call Center Features You Should Look For

Call center performance metrics

Call center performance metrics track the performance of your contact center overall within a given period. Improving your call center performance metrics may reduce costs, increase profits, and enable you to deliver stronger results for your clients.

9. Cost Per Call (CPC)

The Cost Per Call (CPC) metric measures the average cost incurred by a call center to handle each phone call. Tracking CPC over time shows the financial efficiency of contact center operations and can be used for capacity planning and budgeting.

Formula: CPC = Total Cost of Call Center Operations / Total Calls Handled

The total cost of call center operations includes:

• Staffing expenses (agent salaries + benefits)
• Telecommunication fees
• Technology costs
• Facility overhead expenses

A lower CPC indicates higher contact center productivity and financial efficiency. Companies often establish a target CPC threshold and monitor actual monthly/quarterly performance against that goal to control budgets.

If CPC rises above the set target, call center managers can dig deeper to analyze root causes:

• Are agent labor costs increasing disproportionately?
• Is call handle time rising?
• Are technology investments paying off as planned?

Continuous monitoring of CPC ensures contact center resources are allocated optimally for service quality and cost efficiency. When paired with customer satisfaction scores, CPC also shows the ROI of customer experience investments.

10. Service Level

The Service Level is a key performance indicator measuring a call center’s ability to efficiently meet inbound demand. Specifically, it assesses the percentage of calls answered by agents within a defined threshold time.

A common Service Level target is 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds or less. Companies determine their target based on factors such as customer expectations, cost efficiency, and service quality goals.

Formula: Service Level (%) = (Calls Answered in X seconds or less / Total Inbound Calls) x 100

Tracking Service Level performance over time and against internal targets enables assessment of operational efficiency, capacity planning, and adherence to customer service standards.

If the Service Level drops below the goal consistently, it signals a need to adjust resources, agent scheduling, or inbound demand flows.

Call centers strive to maintain a high Service Level to limit customer wait times, prevent call abandonment, and meet customer service benchmarks.

Optimizing processes around skills-based routing, cross-training, and peak staffing helps balance cost efficiency with service quality targets reflected in the Service Level metric. Most leading call centers target 80-90%+ on Service Level to enable prompt response times.

11. Call Volume

Call Volume measures the total number of inbound and outbound calls handled by a call center over a defined period (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly).

Formula: Total Call Volume = Number of Agent Calls + Number of Self-Service Calls

Call volume is typically segmented into two main categories for analysis:

1. Agent Calls — Total calls handled directly by live agents
2. Self-Service Calls — Total calls handled by an automated system such as an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.

Tracking overall and segmented call volume over time provides insight into:

• Changes in contact center activity and demand
• Effectiveness of self-service tools in deflecting calls from live agents
• Scheduling and staffing requirements to meet customer demand
• Identifying peak and low volume periods

Analyzing trends in call volume and origin points helps call centers stay aligned with customer needs and size operations appropriately.

When paired with other metrics like Average Handling Time and Service Level, call volume paints a picture of contact center efficiency and resource allocation.

12. Call Abandonment Rate

The Abandon Rate measures the percentage of calls into a call center that disconnect (“abandon”) before being answered by a live agent.

Formula: Abandon Rate (%) = (Number of Abandoned Calls ÷ Total Number of Call Attempts) x 100

Customers typically expect fast service and have limited tolerance for long hold times. A high and rising abandon rate signals customer frustration, potential loss of business, and damage to your brand’s reputation.

By tracking abandon rates over time and setting internal benchmarks (ideally less than 3-5%), call centers can quantify the impact of operational changes and identify periods of inadequate staffing.

Common strategies to reduce abandon rates focus on optimizing interactive voice response (IVR) menus, boosting agent staffing during peak periods, and keeping callers informed if delays are expected. Lowering your abandon rate leads to better customer retention over the long term.

Setting a target for abandon rates and analyzing performance trends versus that goal keeps supervisors aligned around providing sufficient resources to meet inbound demand. This real-time metric serves as an early warning signal when additional agents are needed to keep customers from disconnecting prematurely.

Related Article

How To Increase Call Center Productivity (+ Real Scenarios)

How To Improve Call Center Metrics

Monitoring your call center metrics is the first step. Knowing how to leverage that data to improve contact center performance is the next.

These call center strategies can help you improve call center metrics and performance:

1. Set realistic and achievable goals based on metrics

Setting realistic and achievable goals requires analyzing historical data to identify trends and patterns.

Use metrics like call volume, handle time, and customer satisfaction to set realistic targets that align with business objectives.

Goals should stretch teams but also instill confidence. Regularly reviewing progress ensures goals adapt to changing needs.

2. Use data to identify areas for improvement

Using data to identify improvement opportunities takes consistency in what is measured and how it is monitored. Key metrics like first call resolution, transfer rate, and call abandonment should be tracked in real-time dashboards.

Slicing data by agent, region, and call type helps identify specific areas for training or adjustment. Setting data-driven goals and openly discussing progress builds an improvement culture.

3. Track your progress over time

Plenty can change in your organization, including call center strategies, agent scripts, and even staffing policies. Evaluate your progress over time, considering these changes to determine what’s helping (and what isn’t). Tools such as Nextiva Call Analytics can help you monitor all your call center KPIs.

4. Conduct agent training and coaching based on metrics

Effective agent training and coaching are impossible without metrics.

Key indicators like customer effort score, net promoter score, and quality audit performance provide objective insights into individual development areas.

Assess evaluations, surveys, and quality assurance trends over time for each agent to create targeted and personalized training and coaching that drive continuous skill improvement.

5. Use technology to optimize call center performance

Technology is essential for optimizing call center performance.

Metrics-driven routing engines efficiently match customers and available agents and real-time customer sentiment analysis facilitates agent coaching.

Evaluate how technology innovations impact key metrics like customer satisfaction and cost per call to identify the highest return solutions.

Customers also want to interact with businesses using their preferred communication methods. Choosing call center phone systems that include options for SMS messaging and even video conferencing can deliver customer excellence as a result.

Choose the Right Solution To Make Tracking Easy

Call center monitoring is critical to evaluate everything from the quality of customer support to agent productivity and efficiency.

The right call center technology can help, especially if it has a built-in analytics offering.

Nextiva’s call center solutions come with an analytics add-on that offers the following:

• Performance metrics, including total calls, total talk time, and total number of inbound calls
• Reporting templates to measure activity across your organization, including for individual employees
• Call reporting metrics, including the number of answered calls compared to the number of missed or abandoned calls or incoming calls vs. outbound calls

Our analytics are fully integrated with our virtual call center software, allowing you to collect data in real time while your team works hard to deliver outstanding customer support. Nextiva also integrates with popular CRMs, streamlining data synching across multiple platforms.

Knowing which KPIs to track — and what your call center’s standard benchmarks are — ensures that you’re delivering the best customer experience possible.

Related: Omnichannel Customer Experience: The Complete Guide

Call center agents are your company’s unsung heroes. They shape brand loyalty and ensure business success. They have a set of soft skills that gives them incredible power to handle complex customer situations and turn them around. 

How your agents master these essential soft skills impacts customer loyalty. The list of call center soft skills needed for an impactful customer experience (CX) is long. It includes active listening, positivity, collaboration, and resilience.

Valuing soft skills is crucial to building a strong team, delivering standout CX, and driving your company’s growth.

According to McKinsey, personalization increases performance and delivers better customer outcomes. Businesses adopting this strategy in their customer service have seen average revenue increases of 10-15%:

As a call center manager, you can use this guide as a helpful outline for the skills your team needs to elevate performance and increase satisfaction in every customer call. Read on to learn about the most important soft skills that go into delivering first-class CX. 

Live Agents Must Stand Out

There’s no denying it: Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing everything about customer service.

But the need for genuine human interaction is more apparent than ever. The way your service agents converse with clients directly impacts your company’s reputation and customer satisfaction. Clients miss warm and personal service experiences.

In fact, 56% of consumers believe most businesses view them as just a number.

This gives your company the opportunity to make a lasting, positive impact on customers by treating them well. 

Today, your business’s survival depends on providing unforgettable customer service. Gartner reports that an astonishing 80% of businesses compete primarily on the basis of CX. Forrester also affirms this by saying that CX is the only long-lasting competitive advantage. Therefore, CX isn’t just a strategy. It’s the backbone of your business success. 

So, how can you outshine others in customer service? The answer is simple: by improving soft skills.

Enhancing soft skills is your team’s key to success. Given AI’s potential to cut customer support roles by as much as 30%, refining soft skills is an opportunity for your team to stand out and for your agents to advance in their careers.

What is a call center soft skill?

A call center soft skill is an interpersonal behavior or characteristic that helps customer service agents interact.

This helps callers by helping agents to be respectful when asking questions and listening to customer concerns. Thanks to these emotional skills, call center agents build rapport with customers and interact well with them. These skills take more time to practice and develop than hard skills do. But anyone can learn these soft skills. 

In customer service, soft skills are about connecting with, understanding, and genuinely engaging with the person on the other end of the line, email, direct message, or chat box. They include clear communication skills and emotional intelligence skills, such as active listening, empathy, and conflict resolution.

Most importantly, they aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re deciding factors in a memorable call center experience. And they’re increasingly valued across all industries. Gartner highlights that nine of the 10 key skills that are gaining importance in the new hybrid work landscape are soft skills:

Contrast these with hard skills, such as typing speed, call center software proficiency, and product knowledge. Hard skills might help get the job done, but soft skills are vital to the overall experience. In a call center environment, where every interaction can sway customer loyalty, soft skills are the foundation of every successful call.

12 Top Soft Skills Call Center Agents Need to Compete

1) Active, inquisitive listening

Excellent customer service starts with call center agents who are good at active listening and show genuine interest in the customers. The first step in handling a client’s issues is understanding their specific needs. Every call center agent needs to learn and perfect the skills of active listening and asking the right questions. If you’ve mastered these basic skills, you can make your customers feel recognized and appreciated.

For instance, let’s consider a scenario in which a customer calls with a complaint about an erroneous credit card charge. A call center agent who merely offers automated responses might make the client feel that their problem isn’t being addressed. An agent who employs their active listening skill will ask the caller to clarify the facts, inquire about related matters, such as previous unauthorized charges, and reassure the caller that the company takes their issue seriously.

How to improve

Your agent training should always include active listening. This could mean teaching the agents techniques such as repeating what the customer has said to make sure the agent has understood them and asking questions that elicit long answers so the agent can collect as many details as possible about the customer’s problem.

2) Empathetic excellence

Empathy is the capacity to understand and share other people’s feelings. It’s the bedrock of exceptional customer service. When your call center team members cultivate and employ this soft skill, they’re in a strong position to convert routine customer interactions into opportunities for fostering customer loyalty.

Empathy enables your agents to look at issues from the customers’ perspectives, respond with genuine care, and provide tailored solutions that best address their needs and expectations. 

Consider the example of what happens when a longtime customer calls to express disappointment over a recent service mishap. An empathetic customer service representative doesn’t merely offer a formulaic apology. Instead, they express genuine regret over the incident and acknowledge that the mishap has inconvenienced the customer.

For example, with this call center soft skills, they might say, “I understand how upset you must be. It’s really frustrating when something you rely on doesn’t perform as expected. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience you’ve experienced.” 

After validating the customer’s feelings, the agent might turn the conversation toward a resolution by saying, “I want to make sure we rectify this immediately. Let’s discuss how we can resolve this issue for you.” Throughout this interaction, the representative maintains empathy, mirrors the customer’s emotions, and uses responsive language to show that they understand and share the customer’s feelings. 

How to improve

Encourage your agents to actively listen to the customers without interrupting them. Active listening helps agents comprehend the customers’ issues more accurately and understand their emotions better. Include role play in your call center training so agents can practice responding to customers in a caring, understanding way.

Responsive language such as “I understand how upsetting this must be” acknowledges the customer’s emotions and lays the foundation for a constructive conversation.

3) Operational resilience

Call centers are fast-paced and unpredictable. Contact center agents must be resilient to thrive in a dynamic environment that might not always be sunshine and rainbows. Agents’ ability to stay calm, focused, and positive even in challenging situations is crucial for maintaining high service standards and personal well-being.

How to improve

Team leaders should promote a culture of continuous learning and adaptive thinking. Agents should be encouraged to view challenging situations as opportunities for growth rather than setbacks. Practicing emotional agility exercises, mindfulness training, and stress management techniques can cultivate resilience.

4) Patient problem-solving

In a call center, patience isn’t just a virtue. It’s a necessity. Effective listening skills allow agents to analyze situations and apply creative solutions. Problem-solving skills enable them to address customer concerns effectively and ensure that each issue is resolved on the first call.

How to improve

Monitor real call instances to identify escalation points and use them as case studies to illustrate how patience could resolve the situation more effectively. Encourage team members to take brief mental breaks between difficult calls to refresh and reset. Creating a supportive environment that allows employees to voice their concerns can foster patience, as they feel more understood and less pressured.

5) Customer-first mindset

“The customer always comes first” is an age-old business adage for a reason. Agents who own the customer-first mindset prioritize callers’ needs and satisfaction and ensure that every action enhances CX. A customer-first mindset can play out in several ways. It can include increased personalization, shorter interaction times, and omnichannel tools such as Nextiva that provide call center employees with complete pictures of customer journeys.

How to improve

Reinforce customer-centric behaviors through regular constructive feedback and by setting an example in your interactions. Consider implementing metrics that reflect customer satisfaction as key performance indicators. A culture of putting customers first isn’t built overnight; occasional reminders, patience, and a determined example set by leadership are instrumental. Celebrating customer and company wins also goes a long way.

6) Positive language

The power of positivity cannot be underestimated in situations in which conflict resolution takes place. Using positive language and choosing affirmative words are constructive approaches to problem-solving. For businesses that prioritize world-class CX, there are rarely any situations that are so heated that a dose of positivity cannot turn them around.

How to improve

Encourage phrases that explicitly assure the caller of your willingness to assist and solve their issues. For example, instead of saying, “I can’t do that,” guide your team to say, “What I can do is…”. Regular call center QA and feedback sessions can reinforce this positive language use over time. Framing what is possible is better than what is not possible — it’s all about being solutions-oriented. 

7) Conflict resolution

All your agents must be able to diffuse tension and resolve disputes effectively. Agents who are skilled in conflict resolution can gracefully navigate disagreements and deal with unsatisfied customers. These agents know how to come up with effective solutions that won’t impact the integrity of your brand.

How to improve

Practicing active listening and empathy in every customer interaction. By expressing understanding and assurance that their problem will be addressed, call center agents can defuse the situation and earn the customer’s trust.

8) Concise communication

Your customers are busy people, and contacting your reps is probably the last thing they have time for. That’s why clarity and brevity are key. Agents must master the ability to convey information and solutions clearly and quickly. This skill prevents confusion and enables them to help customers in the most efficient ways.

How to improve

Don’t overexplain technical topics. It also helps to ask helpful probing questions so the customer service rep can meet the customer at their level of understanding and curiosity for the topic. For instance, many customers don’t care much about why a problem happens and simply want it resolved. A few, though, want to understand its cause to prevent it in the future.

Establish this expectation early on to keep your handle time low and your satisfaction high. 

9) Adaptive flexibility

The only constant in a call center is change. The agents who can easily adapt, take in new information, accept new policies, and accommodate shifting customer needs are the ones who will provide the agile service that customers now expect.

How to improve

Prepare your team to make decisions quickly and with a higher level of critical thinking. You hired them to help customers while balancing the needs and operations of the business. Periodically offering training sessions that highlight potential changes and suitable responses. Lead by example: show resilience and adaptability in the face of changes, as this projects a positive attitude that can trickle down to your team members.

10) Collaborative spirit

Teamwork makes the dream work, especially in a call center. If you foster a collaborative spirit at your call center, the team members will be supportive of each other. They’ll be willing to assist each other and share knowledge and positive energy, which will get passed on to your customers.

How to improve

Fostering collaboration requires a strategic yet human-centric approach. Begin team meetings with intros and celebrations for one’s achievements. It can help others discover other’s contributions and how they fit into the larger company objectives. Ensure all team members know who to ask for help and how everyone works together to achieve the mission.

11) Bias toward action

Proactive agents who take an action-oriented approach to problem-solving can address customer issues before they escalate and spot opportunities to enhance CX.

How to improve

Encourage team members to make decisions proactively and support them if they’ve shown care in making a tough decision. This builds autonomy in your team and helps resolve customer concerns faster. When supplemented with real-time feedback and prompt action, you will create an atmosphere that has a bias toward taking action.

12) Ability to simplify complex issues

Turning complex issues into simple solutions is an art. Customer service agents who can distill complicated situations are powerful communicators who can help callers understand problematic issues and embrace the solutions they propose.

How to improve

Dedicate time in weekly meetings to role-play scenarios to convey complicated ideas in simple, understandable language. This approach will not only build the agent’s confidence but also allows others to learn their techniques and analogies. 

Related: Customer Service Call Centers: Top Features & Best Practices

The Benefits of Growing Call Center Soft Skills

• Enhanced customer service: By improving your team’s soft skills, you can transform impersonal and adversarial customer service into a warm, individualized experience.
• Increased customer loyalty: Better soft skills result in deeper interactions that lead to a strong relationship of trust. This helps build customer loyalty and increases the likelihood that customers will do business with your company again and recommend your products or services to others.
• Improved career prospects: Increasing your team’s soft skills enhances their current performance and prepares them for growth and leadership roles within your organization. 
• Enhanced brand reputation: Stellar customer service, delivered using call center soft skills, improves your brand image and attracts new customers. Your company will gain a reputation for its commitment to customer service excellence.
• Increased AI leverage: According to Gartner, about 25% of organizations will use chatbots as their main customer service channel by 2027. These bots enhance CX by analyzing successful past interactions and applying learned soft skills. 
• Reduced agent turnover: Focusing on developing your team’s soft skills can increase job engagement and satisfaction and reduce agent turnover. This results in a stable work environment and an empowered customer service team.

How to Improve Customer Service Soft Skills

👉 Record customer service calls: Review past calls and customer interactions to establish successful strategies and pinpoint missteps. Listening to recorded customer calls and sales calls gives new and longtime agents a chance to evaluate their work and learn from their peers.

👉 Read customer service surveys: Customer feedback provides invaluable insights into how callers perceive your service and your interactions. Surveys provide clear direction about how your team’s approach might need further refinement.

👉 Calibrate on calls: Recurring calibration meetings maintain high-quality service and consistency. These sessions allow agents to share experiences, keep up with industry standards, share tips, and take part in scenario-based exercises.

👉 Reward exceptional customer service: Recognizing agents who offer customers exceptional moments of service can inspire other team members to follow their example. Build a culture of customer service excellence by spotlighting and rewarding superior team performance.

👉 Share helpful podcasts about customer service: Keep up with CX standards by tuning into top industry podcasts. Introducing agents to your favorite podcasts is another way to equip them with innovative strategies and fresh insights to elevate their service game. Top podcasts include:

• Forrester’s The CX Cast
• Walker’s The CX Leader Podcast
• Blake Morgan’s The Modern Customer Podcast

👉 Document the root causes of bad CX: Solving customer problems is an effective strategy, but preventing them is an even better one. By identifying and understanding the root causes of your customers’ frustration, your agents can proactively address and prevent similar issues in the future.

👉 Ask senior agents to train their colleagues: Leverage the wisdom of your veteran team members by having them mentor rookie agents in product knowledge. This approach builds a culture of continuous learning and skill development and creates product experts.

👉 Set a career path for every call center agent: By creating clear long-term career paths for your agents, you show them you’re invested in their growth and incentivize them to further develop their soft skills. You’re offering agents a motivational tool. Their personal development leads to their career success and enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Deliver the Ultimate Agent & Customer Experience

To achieve legendary customer service, always remember the power of human connection.

Soft skills such as empathy, adaptability, collaboration, and positivity empower agents to elevate AI and craft experiences that technology alone can’t replicate.

Nextiva is at the forefront of call center technology, merging AI-powered features and omnichannel capabilities across phone, email, chat, SMS, and more. Nextiva’s AI-powered contact center aligns perfectly with teams who excel in soft skills and affordably and effectively simplifies the integration of advanced AI capabilities.

Nextiva enables agents to harness the power of AI to work faster and smarter by: 

• Reducing agent note-taking with automated transcription
• Offering agents real-time insights with AI-powered summaries
• Improving compliance in each customer service call
• Making it possible for agents to help customers across multiple service channels
• Helping agents say the right thing with dynamic scripting