Tracking the right metrics when managing a help desk is necessary if you want to improve performance over time, and boost customer satisfaction as a result.
If you’re not sure which KPIs to focus on, stick around as we go over the most vital measures of help desk success.
Typical time to resolution
By monitoring this help desk KPI, you’ll know the average lifespan of a support ticket. The quicker you can solve a customer’s conundrum, the better it will be for them and for your team.
Response speed
Breaking down the average resolution time further, you should scrutinize the response speed of agents so that you know roughly how long it takes them to get back to customers after they get in touch.
You can look specifically at the first interaction, and also get an average across an entire support ticket, to gauge responsiveness in several contexts. This can pinpoint otherwise unseen flaws, such as having a speedy first response when a query is made, only to find that subsequent responses are sluggish.
Number of interactions required
If a large number of interactions are involved in resolving a support ticket, then it could be that your processes for handling customer issues aren’t as optimized as they could be.
The only way to know whether you’ve got cause for concern is to track the average interactions needed to close the ticket, and see how this varies depending on the agent, the customer, and other mitigating factors.
Post-support customer satisfaction levels
It’s wise to be proactive when it comes to finding out whether or not customers were satisfied with their helpdesk experience, and carrying out a survey once a resolution has been found is the best way to do this.
This will let you gauge satisfaction levels in large volumes, and point to performance snafus as well as singling out success stories.
You can of course adjust how you put together satisfaction surveys depending on the information you want to glean. Simpler surveys tend to be more impactful in terms of actually getting responses, because few people have the time or the inclination to go through endless multiple choice questions once their issues have been dealt with.
Retention rates
Customers might not come out and tell you that they’re dissatisfied with their help desk experience, but they will show this if they fall off the radar and stop buying your products and services.
This is where you can use retention rates as a key performance indicator, not only of your help desk setup, but of your broader business as a whole.
Without a solid level of retention, it doesn’t matter if your team is responding to queries quickly and resolving tickets rapidly. Lower rates might suggest that there’s a more integral imperfection with what you’re offering in the first place, requiring deeper investigation.
Support ticket growth
If you are finding that more new tickets are being logged in a given working day than you are able to close, this could point towards the risk of the upward trajectory of support requests becoming overwhelming further down the line.
Unless you’re looking out for this metric, it might creep up on you, because it doesn’t always happen in a sudden spike.
Returning customers
In most other contexts, a returning customer is a good thing, but not when it comes to help desks. Seeing how many times a person has gotten in touch and opened a new ticket will let you see if you aren’t fielding their queries correctly the first time, and point you toward a brighter future for customer support.
