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

However, KPIs identify more specific goals that can be adjusted based on performance. For example, you might identify patterns in your attrition rates (metric), indicating whether or not your intention to increase customer satisfaction rates for the quarter (KPI) is on track. The key to effectively measuring customer service performance is not to measure all industry-recognized metrics. You need to track a set of customer service KPIs that align with your business goals and team objectives.

It’s just not a big enough sample to show whether the team is truly succeeding or not. When reviewing this metric, remember to consider the nature of the conversations being held. Could they be resolved more effectively through a self-serve option like a knowledge base, are they immediately triggering ticket closure, or are they more valuable conversations that require a human touch? Not all conversations are born equal, and understanding this will allow you to prioritize them effectively based on context.

Revenue-related metrics

Multi-channel integration allows you to meet your customers in the right place and at the right time. With Intercom, Team Inbox can offer seamless support across multiple touchpoints – in-app, website, email, social channels – so customers won’t lose their place in line while tending to their priorities. By creating separate inboxes for other departments like support and sales, you can collaborate on more complex queries to appropriately resolve them for the customer.

By assessing the efficiency and quality of your service, these metrics enable you to continually optimize for customer and employee satisfaction. To prove you’re delivering on that promise for customers (in the case of a help desk) and employees (in the case of a service desk), you need to establish help and service desk metrics. But with so much data to consider, it can be difficult to narrow in on the metrics that matter most. If they’re dependent on a manager, trainer, or product specialist, it’ll likely take longer to get back to customers with answers and solutions. Also, make sure your team is handling and resolving the proper number of tickets at once — whether that’s one, five, or 10. If they’re too overwhelmed, it could slow down your customer service process.

Angry Customers

In any of these cases, that metric can help you solve the underlying problem, reduce resolution times, and fix issues quickly without tying down multiple agents. Brands like Intercom, Hiver, Klaus, Freshworks, Storyblok, and LiveChat publish annual customer experience performance benchmarks sourced from customer data. On their own, customer support KPIs and metrics serve as a pulse for tracking your customer support performance so you can better understand where you might need to make changes, if any. Here are some best practices that can help you convert your metrics into actionable customer support improvements. FRT is the period of time it takes an agent to first respond to a customer’s ticket.

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. 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. When you’re tracking the right KPIs, you get an undoctored, objective view of your team’s performance, which increasingly, has an impact on a company’s bottom line. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are targets that help you measure progress against your most strategic objectives. While organizations can have many types of metrics, KPIs are targets that are “key” to the success of your business.

Sales KPI Examples

This is where automation can be a game-changer for your team and broader business. Reducing the number of tickets you create can save on support costs and time. The number of tickets logged can highlight the areas of your customer experience that leave much to be desired. Customers look to have their problems solved quickly, so they typically dislike the constant back and forth to solve a problem. Agent touches per ticket is the number of times an agent communicates with a customer before resolving an issue.

It can help you identify peak times for support requests and ticket creation which can guide your hiring and tech stack decisions to ensure you continue to meet customer demands. A metric reserved for phone calls, call abandonment rate measures how many callers hang up before speaking to a service agent. Talkdesk reported that the three industries with the highest average abandonment ratewere the government and public sector (7.44%), transportation and logistics (7.4%), and healthcare (6.91%). Customer retention measures a company’s ability to retain customers over time.

Every metric like agent response time, resolution SLA, or ticket created can be analyzed based on ticket variables like status, agent group, type, and more. It lets you streamline your support by identifying bottlenecks and examining problematic tickets right from the report. Fortunately, Freshdesk offers a free trial to help you examine the solution closely. It provides insights into the current demand placed on your support team, trends, and other underlying issues. For instance, if ticket volumes continuously increase month-on-month with your team feeling swamped, it may be time to hire new agents.

Its extensive reporting possibilities enable you to keep tabs on support agent performance. You can take advantage of the LiveAgent free trial and get to know the features firsthand at no cost and without commitment. Salesforce Service Cloud is a leading customer support software that helps you provide outstanding customer service from anywhere you are.

For others, a dedicated tool like a helpdesk or survey automation tool will save tons of time. Grant Aldrich of Online Degree says, “By measuring CSAT scores, you can assess how customers feel after every interaction with an agent. Compare the number of sessions in your knowledge base against the number of support ticket issues within the same period. The percentage of users solving their queries by their own means, without contacting customer support. How much it costs to process the return of a product measured by an average per product or by a total number. One of them is keeping track of the KPIs you want to affect with training to see whether or not they improve after training, averaging them to get one solid number.

The NPS, or Net Promoter Score, can be called the simplest measure of customer loyalty. First introduced in 2003, this reach-focused KPI paints a picture of company performance from the customer perspective – support kpis specifically, the likelihood that said customer will independently recommend your services. Readings can prove inconsistent at best, and sample sizes often fail to represent the genuine customer experience.

Best practices for achieving customer service KPIs

Having a large volume of tickets may look good on the surface, but underneath it may be indicative of a problem. You may be having issues with your products or services; hence, many customers are complaining and reaching out to you. Useful as KPIs are, organizations are not advised to measure anything and everything that moves. In fact, managers have to be selective on which areas have to be measured to avoid unnecessary expenses and costly distractions. Analysis is required in both identifying and extracting insights from KPIs to truly make them work for critical departments like customer support and marketing. Thankfully, these identifiers are already accounted for by customer support software and other relevant solutions as part of their built-in reporting and analytics features.

Take the number of solved tickets and divide them by the tickets received during any given time. You can calculate your product adoption rate by dividing the number of new users by the total number of users to get the right percentage. How long it takes between a customer raising a ticket and an agent responding to it, regardless of whether the ticket gets resolved or not. How often agents can permanently resolve an issue within a single interaction. You’ll have to track user behavior throughout an interaction and after it has ended to determine how many users each agent has been able to convert into paying customers. This customer service KPI should easily be calculated within your ticketing system where each return is flagged.

Take the total number of replies on resolved support tickets and divide them by the number of resolved conversations with one or more replies within the specified date range. How well your customer service team is doing when communicating through email or live chats. Detailed customer service performance indicators as to why your customer left positive or negative feedback.

• While organizations can have many types of metrics, KPIs are targets that are “key” to the success of your business.
• This metric is especially for ecommerce brands with a subscription-based model.
• No matter what agent they speak with — whether via chat, email or phone – they are providing consistent answers to customers reporting the same issue.
• Let’s say your total operating costs are $20,000 per month and your team resolved 2,000 tickets.
• If you received the message at 8 AM on Monday and respond at 8 AM on Tuesday, your first response time is one day.
• Just like the net promoter score, the customer effort score is directly linked to satisfaction rates and business growth, hence the need to lower this figure as much as you can.

Customer service metrics help you understand — and improve — the value that customer service brings to your business. “According to HubSpot, 54% of customers expect a response within 10 minutes or less.. Monitoring time to first response and number of open tickets will give you a good idea of your capacity and whether you are keeping up.

The graph also includes trend lines for both types of requests so you can easily understand when a value is higher than it is supposed to be and can dig deeper into the reasons. Customer support software ProProfs Help Desk is an award-winning ticketing system designed to help support teams provide fast, efficient, and quality customer service for free. On the backend, this help desk solution is equipped with the right tools to help team managers keep track of their teams’ performance to ensure that they consistently deliver excellent customer service. Going through the LiveAgent details, we found it to be a powerful help desk platform suitable for every type of business.