Customer support is the backbone of any business. Given the competitive nature in almost every sector, making a continuous effort to enhance the support experiences for your customers are one of the biggest reasons why they’ll stick with your company longer, among many other benefits.

A great metric to sense the overall state of your support department, is the Customer Contact Index (CCI). The CCI will tell you how many times the average customer contacts you in a month. Put another way, it tells you how often customers need your help, on average.

The Customer Contact Index is calculated as follows:

CCI = Support cases / Total customers

For example, if your CCI is 2.7, that means that the average customer contacted you 2.7 times that month for support.

Generally, a lower CCI, means your customers are self-sufficient, which is a good thing. This is usually a good indicator that your app is easy-to-use, or have good online resources available to your clients.

At the same time however, a low CCI might not necessarily be the greatest. It could mean that many of your clients are simply not using your app, which is why they aren’t contacting you. Again, the CCI is great to be used as a general barometer of your support department at a given time.

A great use for CCI is forecasting how many support reps your company needs. By knowing your CCI, and how many tickets each support rep can handle, you can calculate how many support reps you would require as you scale.

Here is a an example, assuming we know the constant CCI (0.5) and the number of tickets a support rep can handle in a month (750).

We can calculate the number of tickets per month by:

CCI x Number of clients = Number of tickets per month

We can then calculate the number of support reps needed by:

Number of tickets per month / Number of tickets per agent = Agents Needed

The CCI is definitely one of my favourite metrics, and one of the most practical to use!