Top 15 Help Desk Metrics to Measure IT Support Performance

Customer service KPIs and metrics will help you and your team level up everything from your daily tasks to your annual goals. If you’ve successfully lowered your ART, you’re potentially increasing the total number of solved tickets, too. There will, of course, be a cap based on the number of agents, but the overall amount should ideally be increasing if ART is improving. To determine this number, divide the total sum of all times to resolution by the total number of cases resolved. One of the most important aspects of measuring progress is monitoring and analyzing results. Here, we’ll explain the most important and common KPI metrics for customer service as well as how and when to use them.

As its name suggests, this customer service KPI tracks the costs of resolving an issue by different communication channels. Calculations of this indicator can include a variety of factors such as employee wages, license fees for software, equipment and technology expenses, and agent’s training just to name a few. An ideal situation would be to have low costs and high satisfaction rates for all your communication channels; however, this is not always the case.

That said, you need a way to track them efficiently—and the best way to do that is with a reliable CX partner. Businesses need a strategic approach when tracking and achieving the customer service KPIs listed above. And, while every operation is different, organizations should follow a few universal principles to best achieve their goals. Volume by channel refers to the amount of support tickets that come in by call, email, chat, and any other support mediums you engage in. Businesses today opt for omnichannel experiences, and volume by channel can help you keep track of where your customers are contacting you.

Customers who find it easy to resolve their issues are more likely to remain loyal and have a positive perception of the brand, which will result in lower churn and a higher chance of repeat purchases. Tracking metrics is always useful, but identifying which ones deserve to be your core customer service KPIs is crucial if you want to improve your level of service. After all, we already have an article listing the customer service metrics you should be tracking. With that as an outline plan, you can start to think about all the customer service metrics you already measure and pick out the ones that directly relate to or inform it. As mentioned, there are likely many more customer service KPIs that may be crucial for your customer service teams. At the end of the day, it’s all about listening to your customer and doing whatever you can to assist them.

Your KPIs will likely take a hit if agents are constantly overloaded with work. You may need to hire more agents or rebalance the workload among existing agents. By disregarding the passives and subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters, you get your NPS score (expressed as a number, not a percentage).

Another major indication of stability is the recurrence of major incidents on the IT infrastructure, which can lead to service disruptions or service level deterioration. A major incident, by definition, is a high-impact, high-urgency incident that affects a large number of users, depriving the business of one or two key services. Only the KPIs and metrics that are critical to your IT help desk need to be measured to improve service delivery. Even if you can’t solve their problem during your first response, just letting the customer know that you have acknowledged the problem builds trust. Over time, as your organization becomes more and more efficient, this number should continue to trend down.

Performance metrics

When measuring the service desk, you need productivity, quality, and performance metrics. In addition, we recommend adding financial metrics to have an overview of the economic impact of your IT support operations. The two most important metrics to measure for a support team will depend on the specific goals and objectives of the organization. Still, Customer Satisfaction and First Contact Resolution Rate are considered the most important metrics for a support team. For example, suppose an organization invests in InvGate Service Desk software that improves efficiency and reduces the Average Handle Time for support tickets. If the investment results in cost savings and increased productivity, these financial benefits can be quantified and compared to the initial investment cost to calculate the ROI.

• Moreover, organizations use it to compare the performance of different products or services and to evaluate the effectiveness of changes made to customer experience initiatives.
• As differentiated from AFRT, ART shows whether your customers’ issues, requests, or queries get followed up promptly.
• For instance, you can redirect or reassign tickets of overloaded agents to others with more capacity.
• If the investment results in cost savings and increased productivity, these financial benefits can be quantified and compared to the initial investment cost to calculate the ROI.

It relies on the right mix of tools, training and processes to help your customer support team feel empowered enough to solve issues in the moment. Additional tools and strategies like building a comprehensive knowledge base, fostering collaboration across teams, and implementing AI-driven automation solutions can all help streamline issue resolution. Customer service KPIs (Key performance indicators) are means of tracking improvement over time when Chat PG it comes to your business’s customer support and customer service offerings. In practice, that means monitoring a specific set of metrics that work together to paint an overall picture of service performance. This is important not only to reduce your ticket backlog, but it also helps with customer satisfaction and retention. If you can identify your customers and how many tickets they have, you may be able to answer multiple questions at once.

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With an all-encompassing view of the key figures that shape success, businesses can provide customers with exceptional satisfaction at any given time. There are many different customer support metrics you can track, but you’ll want to choose your KPIs wisely. Base them on your customer service and company goals and you’ll be able to identify the most important ones. In other words, metrics and key performance indicators are the lingua franca of the customer service industry.

Zendesk reports that 73% of consumers will switch to a competitor after several bad experiences, while almost the same number will choose to spend more with a brand that excels in CX. The IT help desk was unaware of this, and SLAs were set without considering these factors. As a result, though the ticket was resolved within the SLA, the cement had already hardened, which affected the business. Optimize the number of incidents and service requests, and prepare the IT team to handle the ticket load.

A high backlog can indicate that the IT support team is overwhelmed, leading to delayed resolution times and poor customer satisfaction. On the other hand, a low backlog can mean the support team is efficient, leading to faster resolution times and higher customer satisfaction. Your entire support team can view the same inbox and see a complete history of client interaction. Agents don’t need to spend time searching for information and can see who’s handling a customer support request at any given time.

Organizations can collect this feedback through surveys and meetings to gauge employee morale and potentially gather suggestions for product or process improvements. While definitions vary, agent touches generally refer to when an employee actively makes a change on a ticket. With all the insight gained from step I and II, redesign your software purchases to optimize compliance and attain a 100 percent license compliance rate. Find industry-standard metric definitions and choose from hundreds of pre-built metrics. Deliver a metric catalog with straightforward metric-centric analytics to your business users. NPS can be an indicator of growth potential for a company because peer recommendations carry so much weight in our society that is social media-obsessed.

Click here and learn to elevate your customer service with a robust complaint management system. Explore the world of customer support software and delve into various facets of customer support through Freshworks Customer Service Suite, with a treasure trove https://chat.openai.com/ of linked articles waiting for you below. If you’re offering support across channels and using different tools for managing conversations on different channels, then your agents are spending too much time juggling between tools than you think they are.

Customer retention can boost your revenue by increasing the lifetime value of your customers. Additionally, your chance of selling to an existing customer is between 60–70%, compared to 5–20% for a new customer. Customers answer this question in retrospect of their entire experience with your brand. So, the customer service department needs to focus on keeping the other KPIs in check, and creating consistent and effortless customer service experiences can help improve your NPS. Manually assigning tickets can take a lot of time and effort, and asking agents to take up tickets can lead to cherry-picking.

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The disparity between customer expectations and the actual service provided can impact KPIs related to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Realistic goals come from accurate historical data, industry benchmarks, and an understanding of the team’s capabilities. They should also be flexible enough to adjust as the business grows and market conditions change.

Companies are starting to bring AI into their workforce to automate and augment support. The companies that leverage AI-powered virtual assistants are seeing upticks in customer satisfaction and other KPIs. To determine CES, you’ll ask your customers, On a scale from “Very Easy” to “Very Difficult”, how was your experience? If you find that you have a low CES score, identify how to remove obstacles and friction. The agent can access all customer information from the console to get the context he/she needs for the interaction.

Why are customer service KPIs important?

For instance, they should know how to use the system to route messages and escalate requests if they cannot resolve them. To determine satisfaction levels, organizations will usually send surveys immediately after a customer interacts with an agent. Similarly, high ticket volumes around a specific topic are worth keeping tabs on and investigating.

In fact, managers have to be selective on which areas have to be measured to avoid unnecessary expenses and costly distractions. Analysis is required in both identifying and extracting insights from KPIs to truly make them work for critical departments like customer support and marketing. Thankfully, these identifiers are already accounted for by customer support software and other relevant solutions as part of their built-in reporting and analytics features.

Free Customer Service Metrics Calculator

It goes without saying that the onus of doing that lies with the customer support team. Customer satisfaction measures how pleased your customers are with the quality of service provided. Businesses use A common method to determine this by sending surveys to customers after every support interaction. By analyzing the responses on the surveys and gathering feedback, you can spot what’s working and what needs to be improved to provide better service experiences. First, you need to decide what you want to achieve with your IT support team, and then choose the right metrics to measure success. In doing so, make sure to mix productivity, quality, performance, and financial KPIs to have a complete overview.

We are able to keep our service free of charge thanks to cooperation with some of the vendors, who are willing to pay us for traffic and sales opportunities provided by our website. Monitor the revenue churn not just as a bigger picture, but also on an individual (customer) level so that you can identify reasons for churn and improve in the future. Tracking this metric on a weekly basis and for the different communication channels will help you stay on top of any issues or anomalies as soon as they occur. In that way, teams can continue things that move the KPI closer to the desired state and avoid the ones that move them further away from the desired state.

The first call resolution rate is one of the most important customer service performance metrics to track. It is an indicator used to know how good your agents are at understanding and addressing a problem without needing to transfer or return the call. There are several ways to optimize this customer service KPI, starting with training your agents in their communication skills.

Analyzing KPIs for the customer service teams is an essential initiative that provides businesses with valuable insights into how employees are interacting with customers and addressing questions quickly. With this data, decision-makers can make wise decisions to ensure improved client satisfaction rates, extended retention levels, and heightened profitability. Whether you lead a team of two support agents or 20, understanding how quickly they’re able to respond to customers is essential. Use these customer service metrics to identify lag times, rate of responses, or resolve rates to boost the customer experience. Customer service key performance indicators (KPIs) are important metrics that help customer support teams track and optimize performance.

Often that means implementing robust training programs, building a comprehensive knowledge base, and using AI tools that can provide agents with insights and next steps during each support query.. Transfers and escalations measurements monitor the frequency with which customer service representatives need to send customer issues to other departments or higher-tier support. Hold time is measured by calculating the average time customers spend on hold during a specific period. This can be tracked in real-time or over a set timeframe using contact center management software. Reducing hold time stops customers from getting frustrated, giving up, and taking their business elsewhere.

To measure consistency, use AI to analyze how agents respond to different people reaching out with the same query and flag discrepancies. For instance, if there is a high volume of troubleshooting questions for a particular product after three months, your company could proactively provide steps on how to keep a product working as expected. Track where your customers are reaching out from in order to optimize staffing and prioritize channels that would benefit most from technologies like automation. In your InvGate Service Desk reports, you can select “Priority” to see how many tickets are critical, high, medium, and low. For example, if 60% of customers are Promoters, 20% are Passives, and 20% are Detractors, the NPS would be 40 ( ). For example, if an agent spends 6 hours out of an 8-hour workday on support-related activities, their agent utilization rate would be 75%.

It provides insights into the current demand placed on your support team, trends, and other underlying issues. For instance, if ticket volumes continuously increase month-on-month with your team feeling swamped, it may be time to hire new agents. Using this metric helps a company measure the effectiveness of its team when it comes to the promptness of support staff and whether teams have enough resources to respond to requests on time. Delays in response time can negatively affect a customer’s interaction with a business, making it one of the most monitored customer service KPIs. From response times to satisfaction rates and agent performance, these metrics and KPIs provide actionable insights to deliver stellar support experiences.

On the other hand, skill-based routing helps lineup tickets and relay them to the ‘most qualified’ agent. Most importantly, Zendesk provides the tools agents need to collaborate with their colleagues through add-ons like Slack. In addition to setting the right KPIs, it’s important to objectively assess team performance, understand how different activities impact their goals, and identify ways to improve.

The fix to a poor resolution SLA lies in equipping agents with better training and resources to handle complex customer issues. As a last resort, you can revisit your SLA strategy and ensure the deadlines are achievable. Customer support KPIs are crucial for assessing overall team performance, holding agents accountable, keeping everyone aligned, and improving your customer service. They need to know how to communicate professionally with customers, have intricate product knowledge, and understand how to efficiently use your customer support software.

• Visualization can help make complex data more accessible for everyone, and good customer support tools will include these in their reporting features.
• For instance, they should know how to use the system to route messages and escalate requests if they cannot resolve them.
• This can be measured over specific time frames in order to see how things are improving.
• To determine satisfaction levels, organizations will usually send surveys immediately after a customer interacts with an agent.
• In your InvGate Service Desk report, select the metrics “Requests” and “Spent Time” and add “Agent” to a column.

However, more and more customers have now turned to contact forms, e-mail, and chat consoles. Knowing where your customer service team should invest more resources helps address customer issues quickly leading to happier customers. For example, you can look at overall CSAT scores (lagging) and the first contact resolution rates (leading) to determine if customer service quality is affecting the company’s overall goals. A metric is the data that helps you and your team understand where you are, where you want to go, and how you’ll get there and align with your company’s goals. Your customer service KPIs should provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making, and help focus attention on what matters most. Going through the LiveAgent details, we found it to be a powerful help desk platform suitable for every type of business.

If you have a high number of tickets resolved per month and a high first response time, then you need to work on easing agent bandwidth. Each type contains a suite of metrics that evaluate the team’s performance, customer satisfaction, or the subsequent business impact. While there might be different types, you’ll notice that the metrics for each kind support kpis are closely intertwined and influence each other. The best way to get these insights is by measuring customer service key performance indicators or customer service KPIs. However, only if you have quantifiable data on how well your support team is doing can you improve existing processes, make better staffing decisions, and ensure customer happiness.

KPIs are usually initiated by high-level decision-makers in the organization based on metrics extracted and organized by activity or process. Also, metrics apply only to past performance and not future action, which is best handled by forecasting or predictive analysis. Just like the net promoter score, the customer effort score is directly linked to satisfaction rates and business growth, hence the need to lower this figure as much as you can. Dig deeper into weeks with high resolution times and identify roadblocks such as a lack of agent training or not enough staff to cover demand. Businesses should review their customer service KPIs regularly, ideally monthly, to stay on track and identify improvement areas.

For instance, you can measure a KPI like service time and match it with the rate of satisfied customers within a given timeframe. This way, you can adjust your workforce’s workflow if the customer satisfaction rate is low. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Automating these workflows can free agents from these repetitive tasks and also positively impact KPIs such as average handle time, and the number of tickets resolved.

Plus, don’t forget that you can also customize your ITSM dashboard to keep track of your service desk performance in real time. The InvGate Service Desk reporting feature is a powerful way to slice, dice, visualize, and store your most crucial performance information. What’s more, service desk KPI reports can be set up to be automatically generated and distributed regularly, eliminating the need for manual reporting by agents and managers. It is especially useful when tracked over time, as it can provide insights into the effectiveness of process changes or technology investments.

So, if your organization has fewer replies, that may indicate an effective and knowledgeable support team. First contact resolution (FCR), sometimes known as one-touch resolution, is the percentage of customer tickets that agents resolve on the first interaction with that customer. In other words, there’s no need to transfer customers to other support agents or follow up later. Alongside the ability to help alleviate time-consuming post-call work, AI can also help agents deliver empathy while also driving down average resolution time and other key metrics thanks to real-time prompts.

While certain issues that your team is facing could be unique, here are four ways in which you can help your team achieve their KPIS. This lack of cohesion between different departments (such as sales, marketing, and product development) can lead to inconsistencies in customer interactions and a fragmented customer experience. Breaking down these silos through better communication channels and integrated CRM systems will improve service outcomes and KPI performance.

Identify the key metrics that relate most to your company and team goals so you can track and improve the right activities. From there, you can see all the progress you’ve made and where you can improve. Getting these numbers may sound daunting, but when you can track your customer service KPIs in real-time with little effort, you can focus on more important things. That’s why we built Kaizo Scorecards to help you track progress, pinpoint outliers, and streamline capacity planning to get actionable team insights. If you’re looking to get everything from individual results to team forecasting in one place, Scorecards will help you get the full picture. Tracking the number of hours or minutes an agent spends using their helpdesk will help you understand where your agents spend most of their time.

Your business needs and priorities are different from those of other organizations. So, we’ve included 21 different statistics to ensure you’ll find something of value. This KPI is measured by calculating the percentage of calls that require transfers or escalations out of the total number of customer interactions. So that’s the number of transfers, divided by total calls or contact interactions, multiplied by 100.

It lets you streamline your support by identifying bottlenecks and examining problematic tickets right from the report. Fortunately, Freshdesk offers a free trial to help you examine the solution closely. This pertains to customer support requests that stay unresolved during a particular period or beyond the usual response time you set. This is crucial – studies revealed that customers don’t mind waiting as long as their issues are resolved.

For example, you may find that someone with a high resolution rate has subsequently reopened many of the closed tickets. These KPIs provide valuable insights into your team’s effectiveness and are also useful from a financial standpoint because they impact your revenue and profits. Once you identify your top performers, you can not only reward their hard work but tap into their successful strategies to help improve the rest of the team. Adopting AI technology to help you respond to tickets can lower your cost per resolution. Customer service is the backbone of every business, as its relationship with its customers directly affects its success. Customer analytics helps businesses deeply understand their audience to make smarter business decisions and improve CX.