13 Most Important Help Desk KPIs to Track and Measure Help Desk Performance

If you’re just setting up your business, ensure you prioritize customer service KPIs that resonate the most with your industry. If your team is already up and running, revisit your KPIs today and check if they align with your long-term support targets. By setting realistic and focussed KPIs, you can extract the best from your support team and provide stellar customer service. To add on, you can get insights about agent brandwidth by taking a look at this metric against the total number of tickets (more on this later). 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. So you can use these metrics to increase accountability among your support agents, motivate them to perform better, and also evaluate the performance of new tools and processes introduced to up your customer support game.

However, you need to be sure you’re measuring only the key performance indicators that will help you reach your business goals. The strategic focus is one of the most important aspects of the KPI definition. This is the measure of the number of repeated calls or support tickets from a customer within seven days from their first contact. The customer callback KPI encourages agents to resolve current as well as future (anticipated) issues. FCR is calculated by dividing the number of issues resolved by the customer service department on the first contact by the total number of customer contacts with the department.

Segregate metrics based on support channels

Users are presented with common issues and help content for their contextual area in the application, or they can use an open-ended search to find the specific help content they’re looking for. These help support cards often prompt in-app guidance, walking users through the specific workflow they need help on. Escalation rate refers to the percentage of tickets that have to be escalated to a higher support tier, such as a team lead, a specialist, or a product manager. AHT can be calculated for your entire support workforce, specific agents, channels (email, phone, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc.), or specific periods of time (e.g., BFCM, May Day, etc.). But when the rubber actually meets the road, you quickly realize that tracking and benchmarking customer support and growth metrics is much more complex than in theory. Another key metric a service desk manager or ITSM help desk manager should consider is the ticket backlog in their support queue.

Discover how other companies improved their most business-critical customer support KPIs. You should track the retention rate of your customers who reached out with an issue. Did you manage their issue well enough for it to not rupture your relationship with the customer?

Average First Response Time (AFRT)

Lagging response times can sometimes benefit from a redistribution of your team to different shifts to effectively tackle those specific periods when performance dips. It can also guide your hiring process if increasing headcount is required to guarantee 24/7 coverage for customers. Collecting concise metrics creates a rich tapestry of data to interpret and empathize with customer behavior.

This is a better resolution time measurement than average resolution time (ART). While first contact resolution results in a solution being provided in the initial outreach, average resolution time measures the amount of time it takes to completely close a case. If you are in a service industry where issues escalate or move to other departments, measuring ART takes the true view of your performance out of your hands. You don’t want your customers to have to reach out to you multiple times to resolve a single issue. That’s why measuring first contact resolution, or whether or not you resolved an issue in a single chat session, phone call or email response, is a good indicator of how your team is performing. If your customer needs to reach back out or be escalated to another source for support, it does not count as first contact resolution.

Number of Resolved Tickets

Also, repeat purchasers are more likely to spend more or purchase an upgrade. Determining your top-performing agents will likely depend on what you value in a customer support representative, like the number of tickets resolved or how fast your agents resolve tickets on average. You can get employees to fill out a quick survey at the end of the month in which they can rate their job satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10. Calculate how many customers have not fully canceled their interactions with the company per month, trimester, quarter, year, or longer to define your customer retention rate.

This is a customer service KPI you’ll likely need to calculate by observing random customer interactions, averaging the time taken by the agent to realize why a user is contacting the company. Your messaging app or phone system will usually be able to calculate how long it takes for each interaction to start and will average this according to your needs. If it can’t, you can think about setting up a VoIP number and system for your business. Making your customer support metrics visible to your support team is just step one of making them stakeholders in improving these KPIs.

Product/Service Knowledge

With Service Cloud, agents get a 360-degree view of the customer, which enables them to personalize their interactions. The guided mode helps you queue tickets more strategically for your agents to speed up response time. On support kpis 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.

A high number of touches per ticket can negatively affect the customer satisfaction rate. A necessary part of customer service is anticipating how many issues can arise. This metric indicates whether the team is equipped and available to handle the number of tickets. The handling time ends when the agent communicates the new shipping information to the customer and closes the ticket. For instance, reducing first response time could be mapped to a customer service admin since it involves improving queue management while keeping resolution SLA in check is every agent’s responsibility.

Not Measuring the Right Customer Service KPI Goals

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. 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. Customer satisfaction is a measure of how pleased your customers are with the quality of service provided. A common method that businesses use to determine this is by sending surveys to customers after every support interaction.

We also have a set of team KPIs, which our global support team works towards achieving. Not only does this help to align performance across multiple offices, but it also unites the team in their efforts and means that reps around the world very much feel part of the same team. 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.

Customer Retention Rate

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). Although harder to calculate than other customer support KPIs, you can track this by measuring the time it takes the agent from the moment the query or problem is identified to the moment it’s resolved. A support agent might have a high first response benchmark but a below-average CSAT score.

You could make the case a helpdesk that unifies all your customer support channels and store data in one platform. The number of support tickets your customer support team converts into a purchase shows the value of your customer support team in cold, hard cash. We count a ticket as converted whenever a customer places an order within five days of contacting customer support.

• These, in turn, will go on to influence things like your sales and your customer retention.
• You can use your ticketing software and CRM to track how often a customer has to call to resolve an issue, and how often a problem is permanently fixed after one interaction.
• This is actually a major cause of client resentment and dissatisfaction across the globe.
• Klipfolio reports that a good NRR is anywhere between 90% and 125%, depending on your brand’s niche, product, and total addressable market (TAM).
• Customer service leaders should track progress related to customers, employees and finances.