Essential metrics to measure for social media customer service

The average time to first response (or first reply time) is the average amount of time it takes for brands to respond to customers for the first time in a conversation, whether from an agent or an automated response. It’s common for enterprise companies to use an automated first response on social channels like Facebook, where they have a large presence and high volumes of inbound messages.

Tracking the average time to first response on social media channels helps you understand how well your team or auto-responses are performing and if there is room for improvement.

The average time to agent response is the average amount of time it takes for an agent to respond to a customer for the first time in a conversation. This differs from time to first response if a brand uses an automated first response.

Tracking the average time to an agent response helps you understand how agents perform, discover response time trends, and identify improvement areas. For example, you may notice that agent response time on X consistently increases on Tuesdays between 2-5 pm. This could indicate that your team is overloaded during those hours and needs more support in that time frame.

Average resolution time is the total time it takes to resolve a customer's request. When measuring this metric, it’s essential to keep a few things in mind.

1. Your service operation hours on that channel. Consider measuring the average resolution time within business hours versus outside of business hours. Often, brands set separate SLAs (service level agreements) for both inside and outside of business hours.

2. The complexity of the request. More complicated requests will take more time than the simple ones.

3. Peak seasons or brand crisis. During peak seasons or a brand crisis, agents may need more time to work through and resolve customer inquiries.

You might wonder what the difference is between handle time and resolution time.

While average resolution time is the total amount of time it takes to resolve a customer’s request from end to end, average handle time is the amount of time an agent spends with the customer, or in this case, the amount of time agents spend messaging a customer on social media. Keep in mind, that because social media is an asynchronous channel, fluctuations are normal. Handle time typically increases with conversation volume because conversations start, pause, and pick up again until resolved (different to synchronous channels where average handle time is absolutely critical).

For example, if a customer messages a brand on Facebook about an issue with their order, the agent would initially chat with the customer in Facebook Messenger and gather more information about their order and issue. Then, let’s say the agent needs to transfer the customer to the online order department. The online order department processes the request and resolves the customer’s issue. In this case, the handling time is calculated only for the time each agent spends interacting with the customer. The resolution time is calculated from when the customer sends the message on Facebook until their issue is resolved.

Resolution rate = (the number of inquiries resolved / the number received) x 100. Knowing what percentage of incoming customer care inquiries on social media are resolved helps you understand if your strategy needs improvement. For example, if your resolution rates are low, agents might spend too much time resolving requests. Your team may need more staff or better customer service software that enables them to efficiently handle large volumes of incoming social media messages.

Tags are set up using certain terms or keywords and automatically applied to incoming conversations. Measuring tags helps you understand what topics customers are inquiring about the most on social media channels. It can also indicate whether your customers can easily access documents related to certain topics or if you need to add topics to your help page or FAQs.

Measuring sentiment on social media channels helps you monitor customer satisfaction and provides valuable insights to inform your social media customer service strategy. For example, if customer sentiment is consistently negative on Facebook, what strategy changes can you make to improve it? Does your team need more training to serve customers on that channel? Should your marketing team adjust its content strategy? Is low sentiment correlated with a low-resolution rate?

You can also track customers who start with negative sentiment but end up positive. This is a good way to measure the impact your social media customer service team has on customer sentiment.

Once you establish which metrics to track for social media customer service, setting benchmarks for your Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is essential. Here are things to consider as you get started.

1. Customer expectations

   Customers generally have high expectations of brands on social media. Here are some data points for what customers expect on the top social media channels.

2. Your competitors

   Examine how companies in your industry and business size service social media channels. For example, industries like telecom generally have short response times on social media, driving customer expectations up. It’s important to get a sense of where you are compared to your competitors.

3. Be realistic

   Set reasonable benchmarks considering your team's capacity and resources.

4. Use existing channels similar to social

   Consider using benchmarks from one of your existing channels most similar to social media, like Apple Business Messages, to gauge a starting place for your social media customer service benchmarks.

5. Adjust over time

   Once you have established your social media customer service benchmarks, adjust them over time as you see fit.

Once you establish metrics and benchmarks, create a reporting process that is easy to refer to as needed. Precise reporting methods are essential to prove your team's value and regularly evaluate success. Working in a customer service tool like Khoros allows you to easily create dashboards showing only the metrics you want. You can also input your SLA benchmarks so that the dashboard widgets flag whether or not your team is meeting or exceeding SLAs.

Khoros Service is a solution that helps enterprise businesses scale their customer service operations quickly. It seamlessly blends synchronous and asynchronous modes of customer engagement. ​​

We are firm believers in the idea that every component, whether it is AI-powered bots or business applications, should work together to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of customer engagement strategies.

Our customer service software allows brands to serve customers on their digital channel of choice with unmatched operational insight to boost satisfaction and reduce costs. When you unify multiple channels in a single solution, you empower your agents with the ability to engage across all touchpoints, including but not limited to:

• Social networks like Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn and WeChat

• Messaging apps like WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, and Line

• Review sites, like Google Play Store, iOS App Store, Yelp, and Trustpilot

• Brand-owned channels, like web chat, in-app, Email, SMS, and Voice

• Owned communities, forums, and knowledge bases