Glossary

Customer service metrics that measure outcomes, not activity

Customer service metrics show you whether your support is keeping customers coming back. They're also what you plan automation around: you watch the numbers, then tune your playbooks and docs as your products change. This glossary and our KPI guide help you pick the ones worth tracking.

What to measure

Customer service metrics worth tracking

Each of these tells you something about the customer's experience. If you're only going to track five, pick them from here. Our KPI guide covers how to measure every one.

Customer effort score (CES)

How easy it was for the customer to get their problem sorted.
CEB's research found it predicts loyalty better than delight does.
First contact resolution (FCR)

The share of issues fixed in one go. Only comparable if you pin down the time window and who gets to call it resolved.
Repeat contact rate

How often the same customer comes back about the same thing.
It catches the tickets marked resolved that weren't.
Escalation rate

How often a conversation gets passed up a level.
Lower isn't always better... a team that never escalates is usually guessing.
Containment rate

The share of conversations an AI agent finishes without a person stepping in.
Worthless if half of them come back.
Time to resolution

How long until the problem's fixed. Use the median and split it by complexity, or one ugly ticket wrecks the average.

Read these with care

Tickets per hour, handle time and agent utilisation measure how busy your team is.
They look great in a report but say little about whether customers come back.
Here's why they mislead.

A to Z

Every term in the glossary

The words that turn up in your dashboards and in vendor demos, defined in plain language. Need the reply rather than the definition? Our refund and order reply templates are ready to copy.