Top 15 Help Desk Metrics to Measure IT Support Performance

At first glance, it seems that customer service KPI scores take a backseat to traditional business KPIs, like profits, costs and regional sales. However, key customer support metrics may paint a more complete picture of success for the long-term viability of a business. First contact resolution rate is different from the average resolution time as it measures the percentage of tickets solved during initial content. While it is a marker for efficiency, it can skew metrics as some issues are more complex and require more time to resolve. 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.

Not only does it save a lot of time, but it also makes them more trained to answer all kinds of tricky questions. That’s why the first response time is one of the most important KPIs for customer service. Keep an eye on how long people have to wait on hold before someone greets them. If you don’t measure any KPIs and metrics in your company, you can never say how your business performs.

How to Implement a Hybrid Customer Service Strategy That Works [Expert Tips]

A powerful customer service team is the building block of a successful order management system. Helpdesks like Gorgias help centralize the communication of tracking requests via apps into one place. From there, customer service teams can respond/automate responses related to tracking and order statuses. These tools optimize the response time and increase the instances of a positive customer experience. You can improve your response times by providing reliable customer support tools for communication.

Keep in mind that the most relevant information will come from companies similar to your own and that KPIs can vary based on company stage, business goals, and other factors. Industry benchmarks are most helpful in the early stages of choosing customer support KPIs for your team. Once you’ve started collecting data for each metric, you can use your own past performance to set improvement goals rather than solely looking at performance data from other companies.

As such, in the case of employee onboarding, a study by SilkRoad indicates that 70% of organizations regard employee retention as their top onboarding KPI. This means prioritizing employee retention for onboarding is the industry standard, and improving it, along with employee engagement, will likely earn your company dividends. The same rationale of applying KPIs follows for other company departments and activities. To obtain it, divide the number of support requests that are escalated by the total number of support requests received and multiply by 100 to get a percentage.

Consistently let your customers know that you’re available on quick messaging channels

Of these, the SMS channel is one of the most powerful options for businesses that want to reach customers directly where they are. In 2021, brands using the Gorgias chat widget generated an average of $38,702 from conversations involving chat. We have a whole post on live chat statistics that can help illustrate the impact our chat widget can have on your business.

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. Reducing hold time stops customers from getting frustrated, giving up, and taking their business elsewhere. Most customers today expect a near-instant response, so leaving them languishing on hold will only foster dissatisfaction, negatively impacting the overall perception of your customer experience. Metrics are the whole chess book, here – everything you can track to measure customer service performance – while customer service KPIs are the specific moves to focus on.

From a customer service perspective, this means having easy access to your customer support team or getting the answers they need. You should send these surveys after key interactions with your support team to get more in-depth insights into users’ experience with customer service. This is the percentage of support costs of your total number of customer support conversations. You can measure this metric by dividing the total support costs by the total number of issues.

Some customer service messaging platforms offer SMS support natively, while others integrate a third-party SMS integration tool to add this functionality. Order confirmation messages simply confirm that your business has received and is processing a customer order. These don’t typically take place during an active one-to-one customer service interaction. Instead, they’re sent automatically and asynchronously, whenever the order confirms. By the way, if around-the-clock coverage is a goal of yours, you might be interested in introducing contact forms into your live chat widget. These forms let you keep your live chat on 24/7 and, when nobody’s available to answer, they ask customers for contact information so you can be sure to follow up.

Prepare your internal knowledge content for AI

Along with in-app messages, you can even trigger experience flows at the right time to further enhance the user experience. A high CES score for customer service indicates that users find it difficult to get support. Therefore, you must make the necessary improvements and reach out to them with solutions. Customer service KPIs help you measure your team’s effectiveness in dealing with service requests. They need to provide prompt support whenever users encounter problems so they don’t leave out of frustration. As it was mentioned before, customer service KPIs are the key to a successful business.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The customer service team found themselves overwhelmed with customer questions and unable to respond as quickly as desired. While live chat support may not offer the same consistency as chatbots, human support agents do tend to be more accurate when determining the intent of the customer they are assisting. Unlike live chat software, chatbot software doesn’t connect customers with human agents. Instead, chatbot software connects customers with a chatbot that utilizes AI and machine learning to provide natural language answers to common questions. Chatbots rely completely on automation and artificial intelligence (AI) while live chat software connects customers with human agents via a real-time chatbox. Every channel where you communicate with customers — from your main phone line and website to messaging platforms like social media and live chat support — should include customer support options.

Key help desk metrics and KPIs

Striving to provide consistent resolutions is something that is becoming increasingly critical – especially as people are more than eager to loudly share their negative experiences. You need to understand if you are getting more service requests because your product/service is broken or because you are getting more customers. Tracking tickets per customer can help inform resource allocation through the lens of long-term vs. short-term needs. Part of offering excellent customer service is reducing friction for your customers.

Here’s a list of 35 more customer experience statistics to share with your team. Employee engagement surveys can help measure how happy your support team members are in their roles and with your business. It can refer to how confident they feel in their job title, how supported they feel regarding development and promotions, their work-life balance, and more. 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. It’s important that your business puts on a unified front and deals with all customer resolutions in the same manner, without bias.

Having all of your social metrics in one place will make them much easier to analyze than pulling them one-by-one out of several different spreadsheets. Customers’ issues do not only exist in your desired support channels like email and chat. Rather than fight against this trend and attempt to ask customers to submit a ticket via chat, you should respond and help them.

When implemented well, conversational messaging allows customers to reach your CS team and get answers quickly — within 42 seconds, most of the time. For example, a customer may first be connected with a chatbot that provides instant responses to their query and assists with gathering initial information. If the chatbot determines the customer’s question or issue is too complex to resolve, the customer is then connected to a support agent via live chat. This allows businesses to offer both immediate responses, as well as more in-depth support for complex issues. At Gorgias, we’re proud to offer a number of different customer service software solutions, from live-chat solutions to chatbot solutions, to email auto-responders.

If agents need to frequently transfer customers to resolve issues, it can point to a number of problems. Perhaps your agents need more training, or need more effective knowledge bases and information from which to handle customer concerns. You may also need more effective automation systems to direct callers to the appropriate agent or department in the first place, rather than having to transfer them manually after.

The survey comprises fewer questions (not more than 10) to get the information quickly. These can be administered at regular intervals (monthly/weekly/quarterly). Implementing a writing-box can also be a good way to receive qualitative feedback that helps you know what is working.

Monitor this KPI closely for your different support channels to keep it from going up. If you are able to solve them quickly and in a satisfying manner, it is a sign of good service. Metrics and KPIs give you the facts and figures to work with and continually improve on.

As such, measuring your customer service KPIs is crucial to successful customer interactions. Trader Joe’s customers love the company so much that the chain has the highest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) score. You get different types of KPIs, including financial ratios (e.g., net profit), process metrics (e.g., % of defective products), and customer support KPIs (e.g., average first response time).

Searching and educating new workers on a regular basis is quite expensive and time-consuming. Geckoboard is the easiest way to make key information visible for your team. Chris is obsessed with pushing Idiomatic to move faster in providing value to customers. Prior to Idiomatic, he co-founded Glow (15+ Million users, 40 countries). He has a BS in Math and Computer Science, a JD, and an MBA from Stanford. Outside of work, he can typically be found cooking, playing basketball (or really any other sport), or traveling with his wife and three children.

Because they can only handle one thing at a time, it can take forever before you get all of your questions resolved. Support agents then use live chat messaging to address customer inquiries and walk customers through the solution to their problem. Having your customer service team type out a custom response to every new email they receive from a customer is inefficient.

Also, remember to set realistic time goals for the agents and monitor their progress. The goal is to answer as many questions as possible before people even ask. Use common questions from your support experience, track niche communities, and Quora.

Self-service order management

1) Customer Distress (CD) or Customer Happiness – Customers are the lifeblood of a business and keeping them happy is a top priority. Leverage software that can easily tell if you if a customer is distressed or getting there based on factors such as their ticket volume and the tone of their messages. Some solutions have a Customer Distress Index (CDI) built in for quick information, and sentiment analysis to identify potential dissatisfaction. You can even factor in customer value and longevity as well to understand exactly how much attention a support team should pay to a specific customer.

If your company isn’t responding to customer queries at least this fast, you risk falling short of expectations your competitors may be meeting. This metric is most common among SaaS companies and subscription-based ecommerce companies, but it can absolutely apply to all types of ecommerce brands and even other industries. You can get statistics on the utilization of your Macros in any given time period. For example, if the tag “Cancel Order” was used 100 times in one week, but the Macro was only used 50 times, then that means that your reps only used the Macro half the time. The questionnaire should ask the customer how much effort they had to exert in order to get their question answered.

Reaction time is the time it takes an agent to take any action on a new message, whether tagging, reassigning, escalating, or responding to it. Average first response time or first reply https://chat.openai.com/ time tells you how fast a rep responds after a customer has contacted support. Over 50 percent of customers will switch to a competitor after a single unsatisfactory customer experience.

Top 10 KPIs and success metrics for Customer Support

Beyond prioritizing tickets, it’s also helpful to categorize them if they share similarities. For example, your team can come up with one main solution (create a new discount code because the previous one is buggy) and easily resolve the entire group of tickets in a single pass. This tactic lets your customer know that you received their request, and it gives your human agents a small buffer of time to finish up their current encounter before starting the new one. You can also include a link to your help center in case they want to look for their answer on their own. You can put your messaging app information in the same spots, and make sure to say you accept support requests via DM in your social media bios so customers know they can shoot you a message. You can also use a contact form which turns a chat into an emailed ticket.

In addition, we recommend adding financial metrics to have an overview of the economic impact of your IT support operations. It is especially useful when tracked over time, as it can provide insights into the effectiveness of process changes or technology investments. For example, if a new support tool or process is implemented and the cost per ticket decreases over time, it can be seen as a sign that the investment was successful. Incident Severity measures the impact of an IT incident on the organization’s operations, services, or customers. It categorizes incidents based on the level of disruption or impact they have on the business.

But they don’t do a great job measuring customer support performance, usually because they don’t understand the link between customer experience and revenue. Businesses can also determine customer satisfaction by looking at “live agent” ratios. Steve Noone O’Connor, of point-of-sale service Vend, places serious focus on his CES. “Our customer effort score asks, “How easy was it for you to resolve your issue today? ” We use this score as it separates the support experience from the product experience. We then have a rolling average, and we track it across all conversations.

You have to maintain a healthy balance between fast response and fast resolution. But then not all issues are the same, and some are resolved quicker than others. Ticket Backlog measures the total number of tickets that agents have not resolved in a given period. It provides insights into the IT support staff’s workload, the support system’s efficiency, and customer satisfaction. When the COVID-19 pandemic crept across the world, customer service teams were dealing with a surge in volume, evolving policies and new remote work environments.

Plus it increases customer loyalty, ROI, and helps recruit new customers. Calculating how much it costs to resolve each ticket is critical to determining staffing and operating costs. To find your cost per resolution, take your total service department costs for a given time period and divide them by the number of tickets resolved for the same time period.

It asks the customer to rate their support experience on a scale ranging from good to bad. When you can identify potential improvement areas, you can create strategies that minimize churn, and deliver a more positive customer experience. A higher total number of customers, a stronger brand reputation, and a better bottom line. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an important metric for your business because it measures loyalty. This KPI works by asking your current customers to rate how willing they are to recommend your product or service to other people on a scale of one to 10. When you get low scores in a particular area, follow up to gain more in-depth customer feedback.

If you’re experiencing rising abandonment rates within your call center, working with a customer experience partner like Global Response can help. At Global Response, our experts can help you analyze, track and understand what your key metrics mean, and create actionable plans to improve them. To find your average time in queue, divide the total time spent in the queue for answered calls by the total number of calls.

With Gorgias, you can measure your converted tickets and other revenue statistics in a convenient dashboard. Converted tickets can be from self-service, or automated, and manual responses. How frequently your brand is mentioned on social media is a critical metric to track if you want to provide incredible support and get on top of PR disasters. You should have a good benchmark for how often your brand is mentioned per day and per week.

This will help you understand where you have gaps (or unhelpful Macros) and can make tweaks to improve your agent workflow and customer experience. Let’s get started with why it’s important for businesses to offer SMS customer service. That’s why customer service messaging is one of many recent customer service trends shaking up how ecommerce and D2C businesses offer support. Plus, you can manage both live chat and chatbot conversations in the same dashboard that you use for all your other channels, including phone, email and major social media platforms. Our algorithms are trained on hundreds of millions of ecommerce tickets, so you can be sure your customers are getting the right responses every time. Self-service chat options make it clear to your customers that they are receiving automated help.

It assesses the customer’s effort to resolve an issue or complete a transaction. When setting up a help desk KPI program for your IT support team, the most important thing to remember is that you’re trying to improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, and output quality. Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in a customer service department is like having a pulse on the heart of your organization. Customer service is where your business interacts with its most valuable asset – your customers. By monitoring and tracking KPIs, an organization can gain valuable insights into how well their customer service department is performing, and in turn, how satisfied their customers are.

The first step toward choosing the best customer support KPIs for your business is to look at your current customer support strategy. Until you know what your goals are, you can’t select specific indicators of your progress.Identify your most important objectives for your support team. For example, if one of your organization’s goals is to increase customer retention, you might want to focus on indicators of customer happiness, like Customer Satisfaction or Customer Effort Score.

Take frequent employee surveys, have 1-on-1 check-ins and encourage open communication to understand your employee satisfaction. A service desk, often automated, is a program that manages the communication between a company and its customers. Most platforms give businesses a collaborative system with features that include a shared inbox, canned responses and actions, app integrations, and advanced Chat GPT metrics reporting. They need to know how to communicate professionally with customers, have intricate product knowledge, and understand how to efficiently use your customer support software. For instance, they should know how to use the system to route messages and escalate requests if they cannot resolve them. CSAT measures a customer’s happiness with a company’s products or services.

Therefore, organizations should ensure the average call wait time for support is within an acceptable range. As a result of this information, you can narrow down to issues that aren’t being resolved on the first contact and address the root cause. A Customer Service KPI is a measurable value used by Customer Service Teams to track and determine their progress on specific business objectives. These KPIs help determine how well Customer Service Teams are performing. I have been frequently asked how as a CIO I developed KPIs for Information Technology (IT) support staff.

• If you’re on a mission to measure how your customer service team performs (and stacks up against the rest of your industry), check out our benchmark report.
• Finally, with FreeAgent’s advanced automation and workflow technology, you can turn your insights into actionable processes that are followed every single time.
• This is why world-class support organizations pay so much attention to this metric.
• First, you can set up your business hours to correspond with when you have live chat available.

Plecto is an engagement and motivation platform that enables companies to build custom KPIs while providing real-time reports, contests, and achievements for their staff. While they offer solutions for customer service, the all-encompassing platform has assistance for other departments like sales, marketing, and development. Average reply time measures how long it takes agents to respond to customer queries across all communication with a customer, not just how long it takes to respond to initial outreach. For example, the amount of time it takes the agent to respond to each chat message sent by a customer. The escalation rate is a percentage that represents the number of support tickets that escalate to a person with more experience or specialized knowledge.

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). Sudden changes could represent an issue with your product or shipping speeds.

We strongly recommend omnichannel platforms, like HelpCrunch, that can handle any ticket volumes and keep all user inquiries in the same inbox for easy management. Choose a solution that offers automation options like a chatbot, saved responses, and a knowledge base to reduce response time metrics. The most straightforward KPI for customer service teams is tallying the total number of customers submitting support tickets. In addition to tracking the top-line figure, you’ll want to analyze to identify how volume fluctuates based on times of day, day of the week, or based on seasons. Contact resolution rate (CRR), also known as first-contact resolution (FCR rate), is a customer service critical metric that measures the percentage of customer issues resolved on the first contact.

A “good” FRT depends on the channel—for example, over email, customers may not expect an initial response for 6 hours. However, on social media or via phone, the expected response time is much faster. Here are 8 key KPIs to track for your customer service team, and which metrics to track alongside them. Too many companies make the mistake of tracking one or two data points and then think they’re understanding the full story. Data can’t be tracked in a vacuum—you need to track relevant KPIs in tandem.

They’re best addressed with B2B customer support software that provides for a collaborative, integrated working environment. To understand the efficiency of your support organization, consider the cost per ticket – that is, the total cost of running customer support divided by the number of tickets. Each business must determine for itself the appropriate cost per ticket, especially in relation to the quality of support agents provide.

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. They’re a set of standard measurements that allow you to compare your operation’s performance against others. You can establish mechanisms for collecting and analyzing customer feedback. Utilize surveys, feedback forms, and social media channels to understand customer sentiments. This feedback not only provides insights into customer satisfaction but also helps in identifying specific areas where improvements can be made.

You need to acknowledge the factors that contribute to prolonged resolution times. Often, lengthy interactions stem from a lack of self-service tools (never tired of highlighting their importance!), insufficient agent training, or poor case management systems. It’s essential to measure average handle time to improve customer service efficiency. Just imagine that by reducing this figure, companies can save money on cost per ticket and enhance satisfaction. In any service delivery organization, cost, or more accurately unit cost, is critically important. Cost per ticket is a measure of how efficiently IT Support conducts its business.

There are reasons beyond “I’m just curious” that consumers need to know an order is on its way and when it will arrive. For example, if a product is expensive, customers won’t want it to sit on their front porch all day. If a signature is required, they might have to work from home to accept the package. Revisit the list of features we compiled earlier in this article to help determine which are the most important to you, then vet these four tools against your customized list. As you consider the available options, make sure the one you choose offers the features you need.

It tells you, on average, how responsive and quick you are in getting back to your customers. By tracking ROI over time, the organization can determine whether the investment was successful and whether further investments in similar technology are warranted. To calculate TTR, subtract the time at which the customer made the request from the time at which the issue was resolved. It is calculated support kpis by dividing the total score received by the total number of responses and multiplying it by 100 to get a percentage score. Customer Satisfaction Score measures how satisfied customers are with the IT support they receive. For instance, if you had 50 open tickets at the beginning of the week and agents resolved 30 tickets, the backlog at the end of the week would be 20 tickets.

For example, if users made 100 requests in a month and agents resolved 90 of them within the specified timeframe, the SLA compliance rate would be 90%. Low agent utilization rates may indicate that the support team needs to be more efficient. On the other hand, high agent utilization rates may tell that support staff is overworked, leading to burnout and decreased quality of work. Now that we understand what customer service KPIs are, let’s look at the key reasons tracking them should be a priority. In fact, In our own consumer research, we found that consistency in a company’s service and experience is one of the most important factors in creating satisfied customers.

That’s why we also try to incorporate a KPI based on conversation reviews – to ensure quality, our support reps and engineers hold each other accountable through our custom built conversation review tool. Constructive feedback is extremely important in our team and we encourage teammates to practice it with each other daily. If you can find a way to measure more than just the numbers, you will have a more holistic and smarter indication of performance. 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. Use these 17 omni-purpose examples of customer service canned responses and see how much time you’ll save yourself.

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. The more interactions your agents get through, the more customers they can help. Discover FreeAgent for yourself with our free trial, and start leading the way to a better work day for your customer support team.