The social media customer service metrics that experts measure
When you think about social media customer service, there are probably two encounters that come to mind: the best experience a brand ever provided…and the worst.
Maybe you’re completely loyal to the airline whose customer service rep found you the perfect flight. Even in the face of price increases and flight cancellations, you’ll never book with another airline again. That’s the power of customer care: turning a great customer service experience into lifelong loyalty.
On the other hand, you’ve stayed furious at the furniture company that delivered the wrong items to your home and refused to refund you. Even after five years, your brand boycott persists..
These contrasting experiences leave a lasting impact, even if most interactions with the brand were average. Responsive customer service can be a major differentiator: The 2025 Sprout Social Index™ found that 73% of social users will buy from a competitor if a brand doesn’t respond on social.
Brands that go above and beyond for customers receive enviable brand loyalty. In this article, we're breaking down essential metrics to track so you can deliver exceptional customer service and care. Your customer service approach is more reactive, covering the basics and helping customers when they need it. Customer care dials this up a notch—being proactive and personalizing your approach to specific customer situations. You need a comprehensive set of metrics to understand and improve both.
As customer service inquiries continue to increase on social networks, tracking and fine tuning your efforts will help you future-proof your business and stand out from your competition.
What are social media customer service metrics?
Social media customer service metrics are data points that help you tell the story of how well your customer service and care efforts are satisfying your customers. These metrics uncover what your social customer care team is doing well, where there are opportunities to improve and what tools are needed to fill those gaps. Social customer service metrics can be grouped into three categories: speed and efficiency, volume and team productivity and sentiment.
Social customer service data also reveals how your service and care strategies on social fits into the omnichannel customer experience your brand provides. Using data empowers you to answer questions like:
Where are our customers most likely to make service inquiries?How satisfied are our customers with the support we provide on social? How does it compare to other channels?What are our customers’ most common questions?Where in the funnel are our customers most likely to get stuck?How to use customer service metrics to improve performance
Tapping into customer service metrics will help evolve your approach to customer care. With these insights, you’ll be better equipped to cultivate an emotional connection with your audience, build brand loyalty and foster customer retention and advocacy.
But the use of these metrics goes beyond improving customer satisfaction and experience. Social media customer service metrics have the power to transform the way you do business—from refining product development to improving your team’s efficiency.
Papa Johns, for example, manages 600+ customer service cases a week. Using Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox, Papa Johns consolidated multiple communication channels into one space. This allows the team to better monitor individual cases and respond faster. This has saved 2 days worth of work per week for the Papa Johns team—830 hours a year. Thanks to streamlined workflows and the time saved, the company has seen improvements in customer satisfaction scores. To see how features like Sprout’s Smart Inbox can strengthen your own customer service strategies, check out a free 30 day trial of Sprout Social.
Papa Johns is not alone in applying social data to customer care strategies. 2025 Index data shows over half of marketing leaders use social interactions as a KPI to gauge success.
Let’s get into the top social customer service metrics you need to monitor, and how you can track them with Sprout Social.
Average first reply time
Average first reply time (or first response time) refers to the time it takes for your team to send out the first reply to an inbound customer message within business hours.
How to calculate average first reply time
You’ll need two pieces of data to calculate your team’s average first response time: the time taken to respond to open and respond to a customer’s request during a set period, and the total number of responses sent during that period.
You can use the following formula to calculate based on seconds or minutes. For example, if your platform tracks interactions in minutes, you can add all the response times together in an hour long period to get a total number of minutes for all cases.
Sum of First Response Times / Total Number of Cases = Average First Response Time
Sprout Social makes this even easier with a built-in chart in the Inbox Activity Report called “Time to Action.” This shows you your average first reply time for each day of the week. Sprout used our own platform to improve our customer service strategy, and this metric played a key role. In conjunction with the heatmap of incoming messages in the report, we were able to understand how to adjust our approach to better meet our customers where they are. Based on the data, we identified specific, knowledgeable support team members working overnight hours who could tackle customer inquiries during surges.
