5 Important Customer Service Metrics For Utility Providers

December 8, 2022

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Customer service metrics help you understand just how successful your customer service strategy is. Without them you would have no idea whether the tactics you’re implementing are driving results.

That means you could be wasting time, money and other resources without even knowing it. Not to mention missing out on valuable opportunities to improve the customer experience and maximize ROI. 

So how exactly do you measure utility customer service success? Here are five important metrics that utility providers should be tracking. 

1 – Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) tracks how satisfied customers are with your utility company. To measure this metric, you need to ask your customers a survey question after they interact with a customer service agent or technician. The question could be something along the lines of “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the telephone assistance you received?”

Using a 5-point scale, customers will tell you how satisfied they were. You can then use this data to determine your CSAT score. 

Percentage of Satisfied Customers = (Number of satisfied customers / Number of survey responses) x 100

The number of satisfied customers generally includes those who answered with 4s and 5s. 

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2 – Customer effort score 

Customer effort score (CES) measures how much work your utility customers need to put in to engage with your company. This includes the effort it takes to: 

  • Fix a problem 
  • Process a refund 
  • Find information 
  • Contact customer service 

CES is also measured using a survey question sent out after an interaction. But in this case, you would ask customers to score how easy the interaction was from one to five.  You would then find the average of all your ratings to determine your CES. 

Tools like customer service portals can help reduce CES by making it easier for customers to get the answers they need without waiting to speak to a call center agent. 

3 – First call resolution 

First call resolution (FCR) is an important metric that looks at your customer service team and their ability to address your customer’s needs in a single interaction.

Successful FCR rate eliminates the need for the customer to follow up on their query. It also helps your utility save time and money, allowing more time for your customer service department to answer more complex questions and deliver higher value for your customers.

To calculate the FCR rate, you divide the number of cases resolved in one call by the total number of cases. 

4 – Response time 

Response time is the time it takes for your customer service to respond to a call, email or chat inquiry. This lets you know how much time customers spend waiting for a response, which plays a huge role in satisfaction. Your average response time will equal the total time taken to respond to communications on a specified channel divided by the total number of responses. 

5 – Self-service success rate 

While there are many self-service metrics your team can track, one incredibly illuminating number is the number of inquiries that were resolved using self-service channels without the customer having to contact an agent. 

A utility’s self-service success rate is usually determined by asking customers whether an article or tool was useful or unhelpful. Many companies use a thumbs up and thumbs down at the end of the article to collect this information. 

To calculate your self-service success rate, divide the number of helpful interactions by the total number of searches. These are just some of the many metrics you can use to measure the success of your customer service. If you are looking to improve these metrics and more, contact us today for a demo of the SilverBlaze Customer Portal for utilities.

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It’s time to stop worrying about all the issues that come with low customer engagement, and instead, transform your operations to become the leading utility company in your area.

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