If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of bad customer service, you know how much it can impact a person’s perception of a business. At best, it brings the brand image down. At worst, it breaks relationships and loses customers.

As a business owner, you want to prevent bad customer experiences from happening as much as possible. But how do you ensure you’re always offering the best service to your customers? The answer lies in help desk metrics, objective measures you can use to evaluate service quality and overall performance.

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So, what are help desk metrics and how do you measure them? Read on to find out!

Article Roadmap:

• What Are Help Desk Metrics?
• Essential Metrics and KPIs
• How To Measure Metrics
• Using Metrics To Improve Customer Service
• Next Steps

What Are Help Desk Metrics?

Help desk metrics are quantifiable data points that relate to the overall operations and performance of your customer help and support desk. They’re used to measure, compare and assess different areas of performance, helping you make business decisions and create strategies for better customer relationship management.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a subset of metrics, the ones most essential to your business. KPIs focus on the aspects of your help desk that directly influence customer service quality. For example, if you’re looking to reduce costs and increase efficiency, cost per ticket will be an important KPI for you. If you’re looking to enhance customer experience, then customer effort score is a KPI to prioritize.

Essential Metrics and KPIs

With so many potential metrics to consider, how do you choose which are the most important to track? While every company has its own unique requirements and goals, here’s a list of some of the most common help desk metrics and KPIs that any business can track to evaluate and improve their customer service.

1. Ticket Volume

Ticket volume refers to the total number of tickets received by your help desk during any given time period. This metric can help you make staffing decisions. For example, if you find you’re receiving higher ticket volumes than your staff can handle, you may need to hire more agents.

Ticket volume can also help you create staff schedules. If your ticket volumes are higher during a certain time frame, like during the morning hours, you can schedule more agents during the morning and fewer at night.

2. Ticket Volume by Channel

Ticket volume by channel is a metric that tells you which channels your customers prefer most when submitting tickets. Multi-channel support is a rising trend in customer service. A Zendesk report found that 93% of customers prefer companies that offer support through the communication channel of their choice.

Determining which channels receive more traffic allows you to allocate resources accordingly. For example, if you’re receiving more support requests through phone calls, you can set up a call center to handle them.

3. Ticket Distribution

This metric measures how customer support requests are distributed across topics and channels, reflecting the issues customers contact you about most frequently. Do customers struggle with your billing process? Is there a specific product you sell that customers have problems using? Ticket distribution uses custom tags and categories to track tickets as they’re processed, helping you identify these issues and take appropriate action.

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4. Cost per Ticket

This metric measures how much money you spend in the process of resolving each ticket. You calculate it by dividing the total money spent on customer service, including salaries, infrastructure and office space, by ticket volume.

Cost per ticket can be compared with other service metrics, like customer satisfaction and backlogs, to see how efficiently your resources are being used. If your cost per ticket is high, but customer satisfaction is low, that points to a problem.

5. First Response Time

First response time measures how quickly a customer is routed to an agent after contacting your help desk. In 2022, Salesforce found that 83% of customers expect to engage with someone immediately after contacting a company. They also found that 48% of customers had switched brands due to bad customer service in the past year.

If you want to improve your customer retention rates, quick first response times are crucial. Investing in automation tools, like auto attendants, and high-quality staff can help you achieve faster rates.

6. First Contact Resolution

First contact resolution measures how many customer issues get resolved within the first instance of a customer contacting your help desk, with no follow-up needed.

In 2022, Hubspot found that 90% of customers expect an immediate resolution for their queries when contacting customer service. For 60% of people surveyed, “immediate” meant resolutions within 10 minutes or less. Customer expectations are rising. If you want to keep up, resolving issues on first contact can definitely help you stay competitive.

7. Average Resolution Time

Average resolution time tells you how long your agents take to resolve customer queries on average. You can measure this metric across your entire team as well as for agents individually.

High resolution times indicate performance issues, which can be addressed with additional agent training, better incentives, hiring more staff, streamlining workflows or a combination of measures.

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8. Customer Effort Score

Customer effort score is a qualitative help desk metric that measures how much effort a customer has to put in to contact an agent and get their issue resolved. It reflects how user-friendly and accessible your customer support processes are.

Low customer effort scores tend to correlate to high customer satisfaction. A PWC report found that around 43% of customers are willing to pay a premium for a more convenient and effortless customer experience.

Lowering wait times through automated routing, or enabling customer self-service options through tools like knowledge bases, are measures you can use to reduce your customer effort score.

9. Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is another qualitative metric that allows you to measure how happy customers are with the service you provide. It can be measured through CSAT surveys, short surveys that customers can take after they’ve finished talking to an agent.

This is arguably the most important help desk KPI to track. The primary purpose of your customer help desk is, after all, to help customers and resolve issues to their satisfaction. If CSAT surveys indicate low customer satisfaction, investing in agent training or even tools like call center scripting software might help bring it up.

10. Net Promoter Score

Net promoter score (NPS) measures how likely a customer is to recommend your company to others based on their customer service experience. NPS is not just a measure of customer satisfaction, though customer satisfaction might play a role. What it concerns is whether a customer is happy enough with your service to not only use it again but also recommend it to others.

Like customer satisfaction, NPS is also measured through surveys taken at the end of customer service interactions. But unlike the CSAT survey, the NPS survey consists of only one question — the likelihood of the customer recommending your brand.

11. Agent Utilization

Agent utilization tells you how well your human resources are being used. It’s calculated by dividing the total time spent by agents on ticket handling, customer interactions and other customer service tasks by your total business hours.

This metric is basically a measure of agent productivity and how they’re using their work hours. It’s not possible to have 100% agent utilization, and the industry average is around 48%. But a good agent utilization rate is associated with many benefits, like reducing your cost per ticket.

12. Transfer Rates

Transfer rates tell you how often agents have to transfer a customer to another agent or department. High transfer rates may indicate that customers are unsure of which channel to contact for the right support, or that agents are unsure of how to help them. For example, a customer who needs information on billing may end up contacting an agent who handles refunds, resulting in a transfer.

You can reduce transfer rates by investing in a better automatic call routing system. You can also use an auto attendant system that acts similarly to a phone operator or receptionist in routing calls to the right extensions.

13. Agent Performance

Agent performance measures the overall performance of your help desk agents. This very comprehensive KPI takes both qualitative and quantitative metrics into account, including agent utilization, first contact resolution rates, average resolution time, customer satisfaction scores and total number of tickets resolved, among others.

This metric allows you to see how well your agents are performing individually and as a team, which in turn can reflect how well your training programs and staffing structure work.

14. Agent Attrition Rates

This metric measures the overall attrition in your help desk, monitoring how long agents work for your company and how frequently they quit.

High attrition is a major issue in the customer service industry. Recent reports by McKinsey suggest that business leaders are increasingly sensitive to the need to retain talent. Investing in hiring, training and incentivizing talented agents can be a major step towards reducing attrition rates.

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How To Measure Metrics

These might seem like a lot of metrics to track. Luckily, technology exists to do it for you.

Help desk software comes with built-in data gathering and reporting tools that not only measure various metrics but also create reports to help you analyze them. While this is adequate for most businesses, if you need something more advanced, special data analytics and reporting tools are also available. Experts at McKinsey recommend combining data about customer interactions with predictive analytics to design better customer experiences.

Measuring your help desk metrics regularly and over a long period of time accounts for seasonal variations and other trends. You can use the data you gather to identify patterns, specific problem areas and opportunities for growth. For the most comprehensive view of your business, you should measure both quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Once you have the relevant metrics in hand, the next step is to use them strategically to improve customer service.

Using Metrics To Improve Customer Service

We’ve talked about some essential help desk metrics and how to measure them — now let’s talk about how to use them. Try following a step-by-step approach:

Step 1. Identify Your Goals

It’s easier to plan for success when you have a clear understanding of what you are trying to accomplish. To that end, you should have proper internal discussions with your team to determine both short-term and long-term customer service goals.

Your priorities could range from reducing costs and retaining talent to maximizing efficiency and enhancing customer experiences. Once you have a list of objectives, assign them each a priority level so that you know what to focus on first.

Step 2. Determine Which Metrics Are KPIs

All KPIs are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs. What metrics are KPIs for your business really depend on your unique needs and goals.

For example, if your number one goal is to improve customer experience, then metrics like customer effort score, customer satisfaction, first contact resolution and transfer rates are important KPIs to track and improve. If resource efficiency is the goal, metrics like agent utilization, cost per ticket and agent performance are your KPIs to focus on.

Step 3. Track Relevant KPIs Over a Period of Time

Data is most helpful when you have a lot of it from a long period of time. For example, having an average resolution time of 30 minutes in a given week doesn’t tell you much. But if your average resolution time in January was 10 minutes, and then it increased to 30 minutes in April, you know there’s something to investigate. Tracking your KPIs over a period of time also allows you to account for seasonal variations and other abnormalities.

Some KPIs, like first response time, are better tracked in the short term (weeks or months). Others, like agent attrition, need to be tracked over the long term (quarterly or annually) to give you a clear picture of where you stand. And still others, like ticket volume and ticket distribution, need to be tracked both over the short and long term to provide the most valuable information.

Step 4. Analyze Data To Reveal Areas of Improvement

Both qualitative and quantitative metrics need to be weighed and evaluated properly to provide actionable insights. Reporting tools that come with your help desk platform, or a standalone data analysis and reporting programs, can analyze them for you. These tools create easily readable reports to use in your strategic planning.

Analyze each metric both individually as well as in comparison to other metrics. For example, high average resolution times might seem to be a problem on their own, but if your customer satisfaction scores and NPS are also high, it likely means that the extra time spent by agents on issue resolution is good for your customers. Always consider the overall picture of your help desk metrics instead of the individual measures in isolation.

Step 5. Generate Strategies for Growth

The final step is to use your help desk metrics and analysis to create strategies for improvement. When used properly, data can help you bridge the gap between customer expectations and what you’re providing. A data-first approach also helps you keep up with the constantly changing customer service landscape.

Combining your analysis with insights from your customer service, sales, marketing, and research and development teams can help you give your customers more of what they want, and less of what they don’t.

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Next Steps

Data-driven business planning can make or break success in a digital era. Help desk metrics can help you understand where your customer service is falling short, and how you can improve.

Just having the data on its own doesn’t help much. If you want to make the most of your metrics, you need a help desk platform to track, consolidate and analyze them for you.To learn more about help desk tools you could use, check out our comparison report.

Did you find this article helpful? Which help desk metrics make the biggest difference in your business? Let us know in the comments!