12 help desk metrics to measure support performance

For the most part, compounded metrics can give you a quick overview of the state of your customer support experience. But if you want finer data points that can help you identify patterns and issues better, you’ll need to filter your call center metrics by channel, date, individual, length, resolution status, etc. In that case, this helps you isolate problematic conversations, understand what caused the issue, and create a roadmap for resolving such problems in the future. Customer churn rate refers to the number of customers who stop paying for or using your product, usually over a specific period of time. Your issue resolution rate measures how many tickets are fully resolved in comparison to those that haven’t yet been resolved. This metric is also measured based on a period of time, like daily, weekly, or monthly.

Likewise, you can assign high-ticket customers to your best agents exclusively, prioritize their requests when you have a larger ticket volume, and grant them access to exclusive support channels. Customer satisfaction is a very important customer service and IT service desk metric. Organizations can measure satisfaction with customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys.

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This data is accessible via customizable analytics reports you can use to make crucial decisions like when to hire, whether training is needed, and how many staff to have on shift. This creates more work for agents that results in wait time and longer resolution times. If your key performance indicators aren’t delivering the results you expect, it’s time to adjust your strategy. Here are three things you can do to ensure that people across the organization know what your KPIs mean, and how to use them to make data-driven decisions that impact your business. Many times customer retention depends on the quality of service and products offered.

Tracking tickets per customer can help inform resource allocation through the lens of long-term vs. short-term needs. Customers who are very satisfied or even delighted with your customer service will often go a step further and recommend your business to their friends and contacts. This post is a small supplement to that series, which provides 12 of the most common customer service KPIs, we also include a brief description of why you may want to use each.

Total Tickets and Tickets Per Customer

Meeting modern customer expectations is getting harder to do; people expect quick, convenient high-quality resolutions on their terms. Twenty-three percent have reported that customer service has grown slightly or significantly worse. You’ll also be able to identify opportunities to proactively communicate throughout the customer journey and create ways to surprise customers and catch them before a problem becomes a pain point. To calculate cost per resolution, take your total monthly operating expense (salaries, technology, training, licenses, overhead, office supplies, etc.) and divide it by the total number of tickets. If you have a high cost per ticket, or notice that it is increasing, you’ll need to look for ways to bring efficiency to your group.

The software provides a KPI dashboard and reports that allow you to view critical data at a glance without manually compiling information. 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. A combination of realistic yet motivating KPIs plus a strong set of cultural values has helped us to strike this balance. 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. A Customer Service KPI is a measurable value used by Customer Service Teams to track and determine their progress on specific business objectives.

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. Your ticket resolution rate answers the question, “How many of the tickets we receive get resolved?

• Count the hours your agents spend on training and divide them into the kind of training they’re getting to further contextualize them.
• Lagging response times can sometimes benefit from a redistribution of your team to different shifts to effectively tackle those specific periods when performance dips.
• According to Gorgias research, repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time customers of ecommerce brands.
• Ecommerce companies in particular have an average CRR of about 30%, according to Omniconvert, so if your company’s CRR is lower than that, it could be a sign that your customer support isn’t as effective as it could be.
• Your issue resolution rate measures how many tickets are fully resolved in comparison to those that haven’t yet been resolved.

A service level agreement (SLA) helps teams prioritize incoming tickets based on their importance and any pressing time constraints. They’re typically made between a business and its customer to ensure agents deliver on expectations. HubSpot’s State of Service Report found this metric to be the second-highest metric for performance measurement in 2021. The service level calculates your capacity to complete the standards set in the service level agreement provided to your customers.

Like I said above, speed isn’t everything in customer service, but it sure provides a positive, enjoyable experience. This metric communicates how fast your team is reaching, responding to, and resolving your tickets as well as how support kpis quickly tickets are coming in from customers. If your post-service survey doesn’t ask open-ended questions, consider following up with those who reported a negative (or thumbs down) experience and ask them for specific feedback.

Many organizations use KPI dashboards to help them visualize, review and analyze their performance metrics all in one place. Here are a few KPI examples by department, including a dashboard view of each. KPIs are an important way to ensure your teams are supporting the overall goals of the organization. Here are some of the biggest reasons why you need key performance indicators. Conversion is one of the most important aspects of any business, both online and offline. This helps you to find out how likely a customer is to take a specific ‘favorable’ action after interacting with your customer service agents.

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While there might be different types, you’ll notice that the metrics for each kind 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. For example, say your agents often ask customers to repeat information or lose time copy/pasting order information from your ecommerce platform to customer support conversations.

Take note that there is no one approach for evaluating all your different KPIs. You’ll be using various metrics and assessment methods specific to the KPI and the goals you set. The operative word is “key,” which means you’ll be concentrating on indicators that impact your customer service performance and which help you reach your goals. “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it,” said Scottish scientist William Thomson. This adage underscores the relevance of establishing and applying KPIs in any organization regardless of its nature. These identifiers are flexible enough to encapsulate many of the major areas of a department like customer support.

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. 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 drive down customer contact rate with clearer self-service resources, like an FAQ page and shipping and returns policies. Count the hours your agents spend on training and divide them into the kind of training they’re getting to further contextualize them. Divide the number of points that did not get spent by the total number of points issued during a period. Calculate the logistics of handling returns in both material cost and work hours, then divide this by the number of products that were returned during that period.

The result is that teams don’t track performance, can’t keep agents accountable, and cannot improve their customer service, which affects their bottom line. A customer service KPI dashboard is a place where managers can access data in real-time – whether it’s CSAT, resolution time or effort score. Data is presented in graphs or charts and is continuously updated, enabling leaders to understand exactly how their team is performing. And if you make new hires, change policies or procedures, or adopt technology like AI, you can easily see how performance is affected.

In addition to those already featured on this list, the following are additional metrics used to measure service desk performance. The escalation rate is a percentage that represents the number of support tickets that escalate to a person with more experience or specialized knowledge. The person receiving the escalated ticket is typically a supervisor or manager. This KPI refers to the number of tickets an individual agent or team as a whole has received and resolved within a given period.