Article Summary: The Top 5 Service Desk Metrics
1.Average First Response Time
2.Average Resolution Time
3.Customer Satisfaction
4.Ticket Distribution
5. Individual Agent Performance
Keeping on top of your core performance metrics is fundamental for the successful execution of any Service Desk operation. We have outlined below what we here at Halo have identified as the top 5 service desk metrics for measuring your support team’s success.
1. Average First Response Time
The length of time it takes for your support agents to engage in their first public reply on a support ticket is the first benchmark to look at for any Service Desk manager. The agent first response time can be measured in several ways.
You could for instance send a simple acknowledgement email, informing the end-user that their request has been received. You can consider automating this process to save resources. Alternatively, you could instead go further by beginning to triage the issue and asking the end-user for more details or escalating to another agent.
Either way, end-users like to at least know their request has been received by the support team and the Average First Response Time is the first step on the customer journey to a happy resolution.
2. Average Resolution Time
Once responding to and triaging a support issue has been achieved, the next step is to provide a satisfactory resolution. While we’d love Level One Support agents to be able answer all issues, sometimes a deeper technical issue requires a little bit more investigation which may require escalation up to higher levels of Support.
The resolution time of support issues are generally governed and measured by a Service Level Agreements (SLA), which is a committed agreement by the service provider and the client. Achieving target SLA by cutting your average resolution time fundamental so the success of your Service Desk team.
3. Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction measured by feedback ratings derived from ticket resolutions is arguably one of the most well-known Service Desk performance indicators. Once a ticket has been closed/resolved, asking your end-users to rate their support experience can ensure you gain an understanding how your team’s work is being viewed by your clients. Hopefully, most of your team’s hard work will be rated with good feedback, although occasionally some bad customer experiences will inevitably lead to bad feedback.
You can use these bad feedback to raise your team’s performance by identifying where customer experience is not being rated highly. You can segment your feedback and rank them into levels of satisfaction to ensure a more granular analysis. For example, here at Halo we rank our feedback as Awesome, Good, OK and Bad.
4.Ticket Distribution
Gaining visibility of the distribution of tickets across your support levels is key in identifying bottlenecks and providing clarity on where your teams are under/over staffed. The distribution of tickets over your support levels ranging from first line support up to your escalation-level engineers can be measured by a simple UI view on your Service Desk software.
Additionally, the rate of escalations by team or agent can an additional metric to understand how tickets are being progressing throughout your Service Desk team. An optimised escalation process built through dynamic workflows can ensure the right tickets reach the appropriate agents to ensure the customer experience is a positive one.
5. Individual Agent Performance
Understanding your individual agent’s performance is not a standalone metric like the rest we have mentioned here, but rather it can be ranked by a combination of core benchmarks. Average response and resolution, in addition to customer satisfaction ratings would allow a support team manger to identify the high achievers and possibly under performers on their Service Desk team.
You could for example choose to visualise this data in a dashboard, or in a regular automated report that compiles this data into an easy to read format. Even enforcing the logging of time against support tickets can help you measure how much of an agent’s time is being utilised in the right areas.
Key points to takeaway
Identifying your Service Desk performance key metrics will ensure a higher quality customer support experience for your end-users. Ensuring you have the right systems in place to track, measure and optimise these performance benchmarks is crucial for any help desk manager looking to execute a successful help desk operation.
Integrating powerful reporting functionality and data visualisation dashboards will increase your ability to identify which metrics you need to improve upon and facilitate the optimisation of your operations.
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