Your customer support is paramount to your biz and let’s face it, with all the nifty technology out there it’s even more complicated to get through a shopping cart experience, master a SaaS product or get through an online payment without a little bit of hand holding. So what are the key customer support metrics you should look at when you’re assessing how good you are?

Phone wait times - If you’re a small business you may or may not have a phone system. If you do, you need to find out if they report on what your wait times are. For instance, if you’ve got a website outage you might have long wait times because your support team is getting hammered by phone calls. This should be just a few minutes!

Chat response times - Online businesses need to have online chat service to support customers. Bottom line is that customers don’t really want to talk to you, cuz guess what? They need to multi-task too! Even better? Your people can answer multiple chats at once vs. having to devote all attention to one phone call.

Email response times - If the issue that a customer has isn’t an “in the moment” issue than they are probably ok with sending you an email. But getting back to them in a timely manner (usually less than a few business hours) is paramount.

NPS - We’ve written about this before but asking people on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the best!) if they’d recommend your business to a friend is really the ultimate question.

FAQ/Portal Visits - You should be giving as much information about Frequently Asked Questions in a knowledgebase or online portal to your customers. Take it one step further and track what people are having issues with, then fix it and report back to them ASAP! What’s better then a customer telling you what they want to see your business do better at and seeing progress as it happens?

So start tracking these metrics now!