Eight KPIs to Optimize Your IT Service and Support

While it is a marker for efficiency, it can skew metrics as some issues are more complex and require more time to resolve. By monitoring and tracking these performance indicators, managers can gain insight into the success of their customer service teams and make educated decisions to boost customer experience. As the name suggests, these KPIs give you deeper insights into your support team’s performance. Poor team performance can impact customer satisfaction and business goals, such as increasing customer retention and improving operation efficiency.

Minimizing disruption in a person’s life and requiring minimal effort on their part are the cornerstones of good customer service. CES measures how much effort your customer had to put in to resolving a particular issue or answering a specific question. CES depends on a myriad of factors including time spent, total back-and-forth interactions, and the number of times a person has to reach out. First Contact Resolution is the ability of an IT support team to resolve customer issues or requests during the customer’s initial contact with the support team. It measures the percentage of customer issues that are resolved during the first contact without needing the customer to follow up or escalate it. First Response Time is the time it takes for an IT support team to respond to a customer’s initial request for assistance.

In addition to those already featured on this list, the following are additional metrics used to measure service desk performance. Part of offering excellent customer service is reducing friction for your customers. After all, customers shouldn’t feel like resolving their issue is a worse experience than what they were contacting the service team about in the first place.

#2 Average handle time (AHT)

It generally consists of two questions – how likely the customer is to recommend or promote (scored from 0 to 10), and why. By NPS yardstick, 0 to 6 are detractors, 7 to 8 passives, and 9 to 10 promoters. Knowing who your top performers enable you to build a strong and responsive customer service unit. Benchmarking agents or reps creates healthy competition and, conversely, lets you identify those that may need additional nurturing. Metrics and KPIs give you the facts and figures to work with and continually improve on.

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. As discussed, many of the leading customer support applications account for KPIs while streamlining their users’ workflows. This saves you a lot of time in measuring your workforce’s performance and ensures that your company is tracking the most beneficial pieces of information. For this to work, however, corresponding analyses and action plans have to be enacted, especially if your organization is trying to curb the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

• By monitoring this customer service KPI you can ensure you’re resolving customer problems as quickly as possible.
• A combination of realistic yet motivating KPIs plus a strong set of cultural values has helped us to strike this balance.
• Freshdesk immediately comes to mind with its granular approach to data and insights.
• In fact, the company had limited information on the software assets and the number and type of assets the organization actually needed.
• If at some point they reach an unusually high percentage, it might be good to dig deeper.

This technique not only helps you improve the FCRR levels, but also helps ensure that tickets are properly resolved, not just closed. While improving customer satisfaction requires a lot of moving parts, the ones in your control are employee behavior and knowledge, as well as the quality and speed of service. And like we’ve seen before, speed of service largely affects customer satisfaction. Here’s an analysis of the different types of customer service KPIs in detail and a list of the essential support metrics to track under each category. When you get low scores in a particular area, follow up to gain more in-depth customer feedback.

So be sure to constantly track and check in on your KPIs throughout the year to help you stay on track. While there are several ways to do this, most companies will typically measure and track KPIs through reporting tools and business analytics software. For example, if Jim was assigned 100 requests in a month and resolved 60, his resolution rate would be 60%.

Cost per ticket is a measure of how efficiently IT Support conducts its business. A higher-than-average cost per ticket is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if accompanied by higher-than-average customer satisfaction and service levels. Conversely, a low cost per ticket is not necessarily good, particularly if the low cost is achieved by sacrificing service levels or customer satisfaction. You’ll want to track and recognize your agents who have the lowest average handle time, highest first contact resolution, solve a large volume of tickets, deliver high CSAT and more. Ensure your agent desk platform allows you to drill down to specific agent performance, including both human and AI-powered virtual agents.

Manually assigning tickets can take up a lot of time and effort, and asking agents to take up tickets can lead to cherry-picking. So you need to opt for an efficient alternative system such as automatic ticket assignment. NPS is a 10,000 foot view metric that measures overall satisfaction with your brand or product over the entire customer journey.

For example, if 60% of customers are Promoters, 20% are Passives, and 20% are Detractors, the NPS would be 40 ( ). Find industry-standard metric definitions and choose from hundreds of pre-built metrics. Deliver a metric catalog with straightforward metric-centric analytics to your business users. To calculate Net Promoter Score, subtract the percentage of detractors (wouldn’t recommend you) from the percentage of promoters (would recommend you). A shared inbox provides a shared perspective of email and improves visibility, accountability, collaboration, and, ultimately, your KPIs. Your KPIs will likely take a hit if agents are constantly overloaded with work.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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%). In addition to resolution times, providing consistent resolutions is also an important metric.

How AI Image Misuse Made a World of Miscommunication [Willy’s Chocolate Experience]

Longer resolution times generally lead to customer dissatisfaction and vice versa. Average resolution time is the time it takes an agent to resolve a customer issue from when a ticket is opened. While financial KPIs like net profit margin are often in the driving seat when measuring company performance, many organizations realize customer support KPIs like customer satisfaction is just as important. Customer support KPIs help you assess overall team performance, hold agents accountable, keep everyone aligned, and improve your customer service.

For example, if an IT support team received 100 requests and resolved 80 of them during the initial contact, the FCR would be 80%. 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%. Support KPIs and Metrics gives your support team insight into their efforts and aids them in bringing their work to the next level, always knowing where they stand.

The resulting score can range from -100 to 100, with a higher score indicating a greater likelihood of customer advocacy and loyalty. It is calculated by dividing the total score received by the total number of responses and multiplying it by 100 to get a percentage score. FinancesOnline is available for free for all business professionals interested in an efficient way to find top-notch SaaS solutions. We are able to keep our service free of charge thanks to cooperation with some of the vendors, who are willing to pay us for traffic and sales opportunities provided by our website. Once you identify your top performers, you can not only reward their hard work but tap into their successful strategies to help improve the rest of the team. Adopting AI technology to help you respond to tickets can lower your cost per resolution.

This creates more work for agents that results in wait time and longer resolution times. Employee Turnover Rate is the percentage of employees who leave a company within a certain amount of time. If you run a large support team, make sure you have a close pulse on your ETR so you can address issues head-on.

A high average handle time can be traced back to poor product knowledge, inefficiencies in internal processes, and can go up to more significant business decisions such as investing in the wrong support tools. Each type contains a suite of metrics that evaluate either the team’s performance, customers’ satisfaction, or the subsequent business impact. While there might be different types, you’ll notice that the metrics for each kind are closely intertwined and influence each other. 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. So, look at your KPIs regularly, including the weeks and months after you implement a new policy or hold training sessions.

This way, you will be able to spot inefficiencies and stop them on the spot. Net Promoter Score is the customers’ likelihood of recommending a company or its products/services to others. It is a widely used metric that helps organizations understand customer loyalty and satisfaction. Moreover, organizations use it to compare the performance of different products or services and to evaluate the effectiveness of changes made to customer experience initiatives. Going through the LiveAgent details, we found it to be a powerful help desk platform suitable for every type of business.

You can collect data for customer support KPIs with tools like customer satisfaction surveys, customer journey mapping (PDF), and social media feedback. Additionally, psychometric testing and analyst scorecards are two underutilized tools that can have a significant positive impact on analyst engagement in the workplace. When I first started to work at Intercom as a Customer Support Representative (CSR), KPIs were completely foreign to me. I had previously worked in the television and film industry, where there was an entirely different metric – either I delivered high quality work on time or I didn’t, and I was out. Now, as one of the managers of a global support team that is quickly scaling, I can completely understand not only the necessity but the benefits of tracking KPIs. Seventy-seven percent of executives have already implemented conversational bots for after-sales and customer service.

Service Level

These metrics are in constant tension, and every IT Support organization grapples with how to strike an appropriate balance between the two. With no restraints on spending, it is relatively easy for a support organization to “spend its way” to high customer satisfaction. kpi for support team Conversely, if customer satisfaction is not an issue, a support organization can reduce its costs almost indefinitely. At Intercom we strive to have a world class support team who do whatever they can to help our customers and foster customer loyalty.

With Service Cloud, agents get a 360-degree view of the customer, which enables them to personalize their interactions. The guided mode helps you queue tickets more strategically for your agents to speed up response time. On the other hand, skill-based routing helps lineup tickets and relay them to the ‘most qualified’ agent. Most importantly, Zendesk provides the tools agents need to collaborate with their colleagues through add-ons like Slack.

This shows the percentage of issues actually resolved by your agents from the number of total tickets received. 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.

Organizations can collect this feedback through surveys and meetings to gauge employee morale and potentially gather suggestions for product or process improvements. Teams can then use the answers to these surveys to determine the state of their customer support. Check the total number of software installations vs. the total number of licenses purchased for every software application to identify over and under-licensed software.

Total number of tickets handled by the IT helpdesk and their patterns within a given time frame. If you’re offering support across channels and using different tools for managing conversations on different channels, then your agents are spending too much time juggling between tools than you think they are. Investing in these agent productivity boosters will help ensure that KPIs like resolution SLA, and first response resolution see a positive uptick. In that way, teams can continue things that move the KPI closer to the desired state and avoid the ones that move them further away from the desired state. After all, the real power of KPIs, the ones that matter, is their ability to provide insight that informs a team’s strategy and moves them toward success. Using a suite of metrics helps teams gain a holistic perspective, but avoid over-indexing on any one metric.

If you identify customer service as one of the reasons for high churn, you will need to make significant changes to your support setup. You may have to hire new managers with a diverse skill-set, invest in a full-fledged help desk system, and set better long-term goals. While retention is not strictly due to customer service – things like product quality, cost, speed, and brand image can also play a big role, it is still a vital metric for CX teams to track. They are often the last line of defense when a customer is about to cancel or churn, and can provide valuable data to other teams to help improve retention rates.

Watch out for trends and then work together to devise and implement improvements to get your metrics moving in the right direction. Customer service agents are on the front lines in terms of representing your brand and establishing a relationship with customers. Customer retention rate is a critical KPI to help you better understand how to encourage customer loyalty. You can find this rate by tracking the number of customers who make repeat purchases (or for SaaS or subscription models, the number of customers who renew). To track CES, send a post-resolution survey to customers asking them to rate how easy it was for them to resolve their issue (usually on a one to seven scale). Most CES surveys also ask for open-ended feedback about why the customer chose the rating they did.

Think of your customer service operation like McDonald’s where customers get consistent service across the board. No matter what agent they speak with — whether via chat, email or phone – they are providing consistent answers to customers reporting the same issue. To determine satisfaction levels, organizations will usually send surveys immediately after a customer interacts with an agent.

Teams can also measure these action items with details on time taken to initiate root cause analysis after problem identification and time taken to complete root cause analysis. The ratio of the number of successful changes to the total number of changes that were executed in a given time frame. The number of hours the business is down because IT services are unavailable.

As a result, though the ticket was resolved within the SLA, the cement had already hardened, which affected the business. Optimize the number of incidents and service requests, and prepare the IT team to handle the ticket load. Visualization can help make complex data more accessible for everyone, and good customer support tools will include these in their reporting features. For KPIs to be effective motivators, there needs to be widespread buy-in from the team.

Part of a customer experience is how easy it is to work with your company — from browsing your website to making a purchase to reaching out for help. Monitor the revenue churn not just as a bigger picture, but also on an individual (customer) level so that you can identify reasons for churn and improve in the future. Before taking any decision, track these support metrics over several months. Product improvement is the process of making meaningful product changes that result in new customers or increased benefits for existing customers.

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. A high number of touches per ticket can negatively affect the customer satisfaction rate. Let’s say your total operating costs are $20,000 per month and your team resolved 2,000 tickets. The handling time ends when the agent communicates the new shipping information to the customer and closes the ticket.

• KPIs are used at different levels to gauge the success of an organization in hitting its targets.
• A customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is a customer service report that measures how well a company’s products, services, and overall customer experience meet customer expectations.
• Applying these tactics will cause superior KPI results and more content customers.
• Data is presented in graphs or charts and is continuously updated, enabling leaders to understand exactly how their team is performing.
• Using KPIs for sales support, an organisation can build powerful reports to improve sales productivity and customer support metrics like call time, wait time, on-time delivery, and product order lifecycle.
• Then, divide the time spent by the total number of requests, and you’ll obtain the AHT.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for support teams are essential metrics that businesses use to evaluate and optimize their customer service operations. Using these handy indicators for your support team is vital in delivering superior service quality to customers every single time. Moreover, KPI measurements can not only be used to assess team performance, but also individual agents’ accomplishments. By doing so, customer service teams are able to understand objectively if they have met customers’ expectations or not.

Below are six simple steps to help you set the right KPIs for your customer service departments and arrive at the metrics you need to measure. CES is an important metric that businesses track to ensure they deliver a seamless experience to customers. The number of tickets resolved per month also acts as a fair judge of an agent’s productivity, if you follow a system where certain types of tickets are assigned to a particular agent. For instance, how-to tickets are mapped to agent 1, and tech support tickets to agent 2, and so on. Improving training, quality of support, and revising customer service policies can help with improving FCR.

Freshdesk immediately comes to mind with its granular approach to data and insights. Beyond that, it helps you plan out your workflow, meaning you can easily integrate the insights it generates into your operations. The agent can access all customer information from the console to get the context he/she needs for the interaction.

Calculate it by adding together the number of tickets an agent handles in an hour. Establish a well-defined process for continual improvement of first call resolution rate. Percentage of incidents resolved by the first level of support (first call or contact with the IT help desk).

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. The metric is most often measured monthly because a monthly timeframe is long enough to provide statistical significance. The net retention KPI for customer service goes deeper into evaluating your business growth by monitoring the number of lost and new customers, and calculating the product or service cancellations only. That way, you will have a clear picture of how well your retaining efforts and strategies work, and if there is a reason to adjust. In our example, we can see that October has brought a higher number of lost customers while December had quite a positive increase. The goal is, of course, to maintain net retention of 100% or more but, in practice, results can differ.

Fortunately, Freshdesk offers a free trial to help you examine the solution closely. This pertains to customer support requests that stay unresolved during a particular period or beyond the usual response time you set. This is crucial – studies revealed that customers don’t mind waiting as long as their issues are resolved. 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.

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 time tells you how fast a rep responds after a customer has contacted support. Utilizing these approaches, companies can confirm that their assistance teams are achieving the highest level of proficiency and meeting customer demands. Applying these tactics will cause superior KPI results and more content customers. It’s smart to pair this metric with first contact resolution as they often correlate.

Escalation Rate is the percentage of requests escalated to higher support or management levels. It measures the frequency at which issues are unable to be resolved by the initial support team and require further intervention. The software solution helps assess customer satisfaction through its detailed rating feature that can be enabled on chats, tickets, and https://chat.openai.com/ even help articles. With the rating system alone, you will be able to get a general idea of your team’s and team members’ performance when it comes to how they handle the customers’ concerns. ProProfs Help Desk also enables you to create feedback forms and surveys to gather more information from your customers regarding the customer support they are getting.

Did you manage their issue well enough for it to not rupture your relationship with the customer? This will require integrating into your CRM platform, and making sure all systems (agent desk, eCommerce, etc.) are feeding data in and out of your CRM for a 360-degree customer view. For example, companies generally have been de-prioritizing customer support email as a support channel in favor of social messaging and live chat. In a recent study, we found that customers prefer email support over all other digital channels. By tracking ticket volume per channel, you prioritize and shift resources to where your customers are.

You may find certain patterns emerge that might correlate with higher average CSAT scores among top-performing agents, while less experienced agents might hold a lower average CSAT score. Companies like AmplifAI leverage AI to spot these patterns and train call center agents to be more like their top-performing counterparts. Plus, don’t forget that you can also customize your ITSM dashboard to keep track of your service desk performance in real time.

That said, you need a way to track them efficiently—and the best way to do that is with a reliable CX partner. To calculate the standard customer churn rate, divide the number of customers lost during a period by the total number of customers at the start. Abandon rate, often referred to Chat PG as call abandonment rate, is a call center KPI that reflects the number of customers that hang up while on hold with customer support. You can calculate this percentage by finding the difference between calls received and handled calls, then dividing that by the number of calls received.

A good help desk software will allow you to set up flexible automation rules with various triggers including keywords, time, and events or activities performed on a ticket. 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. Today’s customers prefer getting quality, personalized, and seamless customer service, even if they have to wait for a bit.

Every KPI that you set should tie back to a specific business outcome that can be quantified. So start by taking a look at your business’s goals and work forward from there. The solution to improving your CES can range from being more accessible on different channels, offering intuitive self-service options, providing multilingual support, and improving agent training. Service Desks can improve their First Level Resolution Rates through training, and technologies such as remote diagnostic tools and knowledge-management processes. There are many more, and what works best for you will depend on the product or service you offer and the customers you have.

It goes without saying that the onus of doing that lies with the customer support team. Businesses work on improving this metric to increase customer satisfaction scores, boost team efficiency, and reduce support costs. The vast majority of IT support organizations are tracking too many metrics – oftentimes 20 or more! Unfortunately, this approach favors quantity over quality, resulting in wasted time and energy on a metrics bureaucracy that provides little insight and few tangible benefits. It is usually measured by dividing the number of customers doing repeated business/purchases by the total number of customers.

Instead, KPIs take the backseat with team leaders glancing at them once, if at all. 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. The resolution rate is the percentage of support tickets resolved from those assigned to a specific department or person. It provides a good indication of your team’s efficiency in resolving customer requests. However, some of the most important KPIs you should measure are customer satisfaction scores, first response time, and customer churn.

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. You know you’re going to get great service and your meal is going to taste the same as every time before. Like with their burgers, people also expect consistency when they reach out to a company – no matter the channel, the agent on the other end or time of day. For instance, if there is a high volume of troubleshooting questions for a particular product after three months, your company could proactively provide steps on how to keep a product working as expected. To calculate Ticket Backlog, you need to determine the number of open tickets at the beginning of a selected period and the number of closed tickets during the same period.

You may need to hire more agents or rebalance the workload among existing agents. By disregarding the passives and subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters, you get your NPS score (expressed as a number, not a percentage). It’s important to have open communication with your employees to ensure they are satisfied with their careers and performing to the best of their abilities.

This customer service KPI is the number of replies it takes for customer service agents to close a customer ticket. So, if your organization has fewer replies, that may indicate an effective and knowledgeable support team. The ultimate goal of tracking KPIs is to help you make changes that’ll actually make a difference to your customer support strategy. Regularly discuss your metrics with your entire team so everyone understands what they mean.