Top 15 Help Desk Metrics to Measure IT Support Performance

According to The Effortless Experience, 96% of high-effort customer experiences drive customer disloyalty. In other words, the amount of effort across your entire customer journey has a huge bearing on the success of your customer experience and, by extension, your brand’s revenue. The average ticket handline time includes the total talk time and total hold time for that caller. You can calculate the average for larger periods of time to get better insights, such as per week or per month.

To determine the customer effort score, ask your customer to rate their resolution experience on a scale from easy to difficult. You can collect feedback from customers right after they’ve had certain touchpoints or interactions with your company, like making a purchase or contacting the service team. Trader Joe’s are likely able to excel because they monitor critical metrics related to the service they provide. In this post, learn about critical customer service and service desk KPIs that will help you understand your support strategies and improve customer satisfaction. Net Promoter Score is the customers’ likelihood of recommending a company or its products/services to others. It is a widely used metric that helps organizations understand customer loyalty and satisfaction.

You can calculate this percentage by finding the difference between calls received and handled calls, then dividing that by the number of calls received. The “average service time” is nothing more than the average between the total duration of the calls received in a given period, from the initial contact to the delivery of the solution and closing. Good knowledge management, well-established procedures (playbook) and an effective prioritization system can make a difference in metrics of this type. It’s good to remember that data availability and visibility are not enough without leadership with an analytical vision and knowledge of the business plan. For this reason, customer experience doesn’t have the same cut and dried metrics as other business functions … but that doesn’t mean it’s not important to measure.

• The resulting score can range from -100 to 100, with a higher score indicating a greater likelihood of customer advocacy and loyalty.
• You gather the results from your surveys, add it all up, and find out what your customers are telling you when they’re anonymous.
• In that case, it may indicate that the team needs more resources to handle the workload or that there are underlying issues causing a higher-than-average number of incidents or requests.
• To calculate the AHT, you must divide the total time spent handling inquiries or requests by the total number of tickets.

In other words, there’s no need to transfer customers to other support agents or follow up later. You can calculate this metric by determining the average time to solve all tickets over a specified time range. For example, let’s say you’re calculating the average resolution time for an eight-hour shift.

For example, you can use default dashboards to track the number of support tickets created, solved, or closed, the average response time, or the number of escalations. As the name suggests, these KPIs give you deeper insights into your support team’s performance. Poor team performance can impact customer satisfaction and business goals, such as increasing customer retention and improving operation efficiency.

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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. Although their similarities, help desk metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have different purposes and goals. Help desk metrics are specific, measurable parameters that contribute to the overall KPIs and tend to remain static. On the other hand, KPIs are broader, strategic measures linked to business goals and objectives.

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. Monitoring this measurement closely can help you paint an accurate picture of your situation and find improvement opportunities to ensure you remain profitable. In other words, the performance of your customer support team (and overall customer experience) directly impacts your bottom line. Customer service metrics help you understand — and improve — the value that customer service brings to your business.

Every KPI that you set should tie back to a specific business outcome that can be quantified. So start by taking a look at your business’s goals and work forward from there. The solution to improving your CES can range from being more accessible on different channels, offering intuitive self-service options, providing multilingual support, and improving agent training. FinancesOnline is available for free for all business professionals interested in an efficient way to find top-notch SaaS solutions.

Tracking every KPI available is like highlighting every sentence in a textbook—it defeats the purpose, since the important things get buried in the clutter of less useful information. After you’ve set your goal, you’ll want to select three to five KPIs that will be most effective in measuring progress. Sales team conversion rates measure the average number of calls it takes to close a sale or deal.

Customer retention rate measures the number of customers that stay loyal to your business over time. Organizations should prioritize customer experience and a customer-first approach to improve retention. Well-performing customer service departments lead to happy customers, and happy customers are your best marketers.

However, you should consider using a solution with a built-in ticketing system to automate this process. You can measure ticket volume in terms of the total number of tickets per day, week, or month. This will give you a sense of whether your customer support team is keeping up with the queries. Ticket volume is a number of customer support requests that come in over a given period of time.

Ticket quality

Having to repeat the information across different departments is the number one pet peeve for about 21% of customers. The preferred communication channel isn’t as much a metric as it is an observation of how your customers prefer to contact you. Whether through email, live chat, social media, web form, or phone call, keep track of how your customers reach out to you to ask questions and share grievances.

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. Articles that hit your minimum number of relevant keywords and link to and from other content on the site are more likely to be successful. On the other hand, a design asset that only took half the normal amount of time to create is likely to be below average quality and not perform as well as a result.

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. Abandon rate, often referred to as call abandonment rate, is a call center KPI that reflects the number of customers that hang up while on hold with customer support.

Additionally, offering multiple communication channels, including phone, email, and live chat, ensures that customers can reach support promptly and through their preferred method. It doesn’t matter the form of communication; it could be via email, live chat, telephone, or in-person—as long as it’s standardized across your support operations (for a fair assessment). Total breaches measure the total support tickets that didn’t meet service level agreements (SLAs). For example, suppose your company policy is to respond to all customer complaints within 24 hours, and out of 100 complaints, you do this 60 times. At a very basic level, this is the question key performance indicators (KPIs) aim to answer. KPIs are measurements that track your company and departmental performance against specific goals and strategic objectives.

As a result we have a hard working team who aspire to a very high standard and who care deeply about their teammates and their customers. Once you’ve identified the business goals and team, you need to frame KPIs. Along with being meaningful and relating to business values and goals, KPIs must be selected and structured in ways that make them effective for your team. Gauging business performance isn’t as skin deep as simply viewing the results and then calling it a day.

Ratings and reviews on social media can be a powerful way to measure customer satisfaction. A high number of positive reviews and comments can be a good indicator that your customer service is performing well. Choose up to four customer service metrics, and make sure that your team members are aware of these goals and working towards them. When you get clear objectives right in the beginning, managing expectations and trying to improve your results will be much easier.

Various discounts and loyalty programs are proven ways to retain people who stick with your brand for a prolonged time frame. Without a doubt, customer service plays a crucial role in building trusting relationships. However, it’s virtually impossible to build an effective loyalty and retention strategy without a solid, reliable, and viable product or service. Let’s walk through some of the most essential metrics to measure the quality of customer service. It just might open your eyes to the areas for improvement and show how satisfied your customers are.

With the help of customer service metrics, you can get a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not. Here, the metric is obtained in a very similar way to the CSAT, as it is a survey of your customer’s explicit opinion. However, the Customer Effort Score (CES) seeks to measure how easy (or difficult) it was to get in touch and resolve the issue of a buying or service experience. As with the other metrics presented below, the average time can be analyzed by categories of calls or by agents, better addressing the understanding of the situation. According to Zendesk’s sense for 2020, the most important aspect of a good customer service experience is to be able to solve problems quickly (about 60% of respondents mentioned this point).

KPIs for support teams

Businesses that sell standalone products might find this more simple to track than customer churn rate, which is better geared toward subscription-based businesses. As mentioned previously, retaining customers is always less expensive than finding new customers. Templated responses save your agents a lot of time and, by extension, mean customers get answers faster.

The number of escalation requests is the number of times a customer inquiry is escalated to a higher level of support. Escalation usually happens when a customer service agent is not able to resolve an inquiry and needs to hand it off to someone with more knowledge or authority. Does your team struggle with addressing each and every customer’s problem within a reasonable time period? Consider adding knowledge base management and self-service tools, such as customer service chatbots, to your website.

Employee Turnover Rate (ETR)

Zendesk has long been committed to delivering trustworthy products to our customers and their users. We believe that trust is at the core of all our interactions with our customers. These are a few of the most popular ways to evaluate your customer satisfaction, but you can choose any method that’s most relevant to your business. Tickets handled per hour is a help desk metric that shows how many tickets an agent opens and interacts with over an hour. Calculate it by adding together the number of tickets an agent handles in an hour.

Some even provide insights to let users focus on improving their operations, not the nitty-gritty. When you’re working on more than one project with more than one team, the number of KPIs you’re tracking can start to add up quickly. It’s important to have a tracking system in place that ensures your data is recorded consistently and at regular intervals.

In the case of ecommerce, it is extremely hard to conclusively define a customer who has left. But in B2B churn is usually easy to measure by tracking events such as unsubscriptions or service cancellations. CES focuses on the ease of issue resolution, while CSAT focuses on kpi for support team satisfaction with the overall customer experience. It’s also a good idea to compare your ticket volumes against the total number of visitors or customers. If you’re seeing a high volume of tickets relative to your customer base, customers are experiencing a lot of problems.

In our example, we have visualized the monthly customer churn rate over the course of almost a year and, in this case, calculations include cancellations and downgrades. You can instantaneously spot which months performed best and which ones encountered issues. We can see that October is showing particularly higher churn rates and this information enables us to dig deeper and discover why. Measure the number of social media support tickets that you get every day, week, month, and quarter. It could mean that more of your customers are interacting with your social media profiles. However, it’s still important to pay attention to the benchmark metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).

It’s a straightforward metric that shows exactly how much money was brought in from sales in a month. A sales team might use other similar indicators to help paint a more complete portrait of its operations. Typically, the same customer contacts your center repeatedly when struggling with serious and/or unresolved issues. 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.

Average first response time (FRT) refers to the time between the chat made by the customer and agent responses. Higher scores from customer service evaluation indicate that your agents are enthusiastic about attending to customers. A delay in the response time might result in customers leaving your website. 59% of customers are likelier to buy when brands answer their queries in under a minute. Getting connected to an agent immediately definitely helps to improve the customer experience. Always try to ensure that your customer KPIs align with the broader business goals.

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. 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. One can customize the application’s ticketing system to suit business needs using the built-in field templates. The system also features notification alerts, service levels and escalations, and proactive notifications. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Also included is a plug-and-play ITIL, which eliminates the need for consultations as it adheres to best practices. A self-service portal, meanwhile, enables users to raise tickets, check older tickets, and browse the knowledge base.

To argue for more investment, you can communicate which projects have produced early improvements. For example, if you set up an FAQ page and see lower contact rates, you can expand the page to a fully-fledged help center. You can pay attention to brand mentions with a social listening and brand monitoring software. You can drive down customer contact rate with clearer self-service resources, like an FAQ page and shipping and returns policies.

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. A good help desk software will allow you to set up flexible automation rules with various triggers including keywords, time, and events or activities performed on a ticket. The software solution helps assess customer satisfaction through its detailed rating feature that can be enabled on chats, tickets, and even help articles. With the rating system alone, you will be able to get a general idea of your team’s and team members’ performance when it comes to how they handle the customers’ concerns. ProProfs Help Desk also enables you to create feedback forms and surveys to gather more information from your customers regarding the customer support they are getting. Salesforce Service Cloud can help companies deliver customer service in a fast, smart, and personalized way.

For example, if you sell software and a large percentage of your tickets are related to installation issues, it could be an indication that your installation process is too complicated. You can improve this by redesigning your onboarding process or providing additional documentation. This customer service KPI is the number of replies it takes for customer service agents to close a customer ticket. And regarding consumer interaction, the less back-and-forth, the better.