It is common knowledge that to improve something, we must first have the right tools to measure it quantitatively and quantitatively. This will help us identify opportunities for improvement from customers’ issues and understand if our IT help desk is adding or reducing the net value of the organization.
The nature of IT customer support is fast-paced, so it is easy to overlook the importance of monitoring and acting on data that arises from the numerous support channels. However, with the developments in reporting and analytics capabilities of the IT support industry, numerous key performance indicators and metrics can help you measure your performance. That leads us to the question: What should be measured?
Benefits of IT Support Metrics
Customer support metrics or KPIs in IT functions bring immense accountability and efficiency to the customer service teams and propel them to improve the communication channel between the organization and the customers. To provide timely, accurate, and reliable service that hits the industry benchmarks, it is essential to monitor metrics with people, process, and technology as the parameters. These areas can be measured along the following verticals:
• Quantity
This vector can help us measure volume and output. Eg: Ticket volume.
• Quality
User satisfaction rates are heavily reliant on the quality of service provided. This vector measures the quality of the service and how accurately or well the process was executed. Eg: Satisfaction survey reports.
• Timeline
It is necessary to have a vast and extensive data sample. Therefore, a time-based vertical that deals with the amount of time, time frames, and wait time is important. Eg: Average response time
IT Support Metrics That You Need to Track
Choosing user-centric performance metrics will not only help you provide better IT service and align yourselves with your employee’s expectations but will also help you achieve sustained business improvements and higher levels of customer satisfaction.
1. Ticket volume
There are several metrics that you can use to measure the volume of incoming tickets. Ticket inflow is the primary metric. It measures the number of tickets that your help desk receives from all channels over a particular time.
You can also determine the ticket distribution by subtypes, for example, per channel and department over time. This segmentation helps you analyze where a majority of support requests come from and eventually introduce changes that will deflect the repetitive tickets and reduce your ticket backlogs. It will also give you direction on what areas need the most investment in terms of time and attention.
2. Average resolution time
First response time is an important metric that measures the duration between the initiation of a ticket and the initial communication made by a support agent. We know that time is money and hence, quick first replies are important to establish trust with the customer. This metric, with complementary metrics like first call resolution (FCR), will help you understand what types of tickets are not being replied to on time and how you can eliminate such occurrences by improving your resolution rate, reply time, and average handle time.
3. Agent activity reports
Tracking agent activity and performance can be of great importance. Using agent dashboards, you can identify and reward top-performing customer support team members and help those who need additional training to achieve their optimum performance. You can also compare an agent’s performance over time based on sub-metrics like replies and support ticket closures across categories and observe trends. While boosting your support team’s performance, this will also enhance your overall rates of end-user satisfaction and give you insights on your staffing needs.
4. Measure SLA performance
Adhering to service level agreements (SLAs) is essential to the ongoing compliance of internal operations. SLA reports will help you track issues that are nearing SLA violations and remedy them. Analyzing these reports will lead you to understand your worst-performing SLAs so you can act on them and provide a consistently good service experience to your customers and prevent churn.
5. Custom fields reports
While most IT help desks provide a pre-set catalog of metrics that can be used to measure the performance of their IT service efforts, the help desks that stand apart are the ones that give you extended features like custom field reports. You can review and actively fix popular request types and incidents amongst other fields that you can personalize according to your needs to facilitate a better support experience.
6. Automation reports
Workflow automation tools within IT help desks are said to be a huge time and effort saver. But how do you know what you should automate and which ones of your existing automated tasks are helping you? A reporting metric that measures and compares the performance of your automated tasks will help you eliminate smart rules that do not offer much value and also help you identify areas to introduce automated workflows into, to allow an efficient support process.
7. Customer satisfaction survey reports
The ultimate goal of all the support efforts of any organization is to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction and customer retention. They can also help you address any follow-up questions your customers may have. Therefore, we require metrics like NPS (Net Promoter Score) that measure and work to optimize your user satisfaction trends per agent and contact across categories and time. This will help you identify which agents of your are underperforming and assist them to produce higher CSAT (customer satisfaction scores) and further develop your business’s support offerings from the perspective of each customer touchpoint.
Leverage metrics to optimize IT support operations
Tracking your IT support metrics is of immense importance if you want to offer consistent and speedy, yet efficient IT support that works for your support team, improves customer experience, and drives customer loyalty.
To learn more about how HappyFox can help you monitor and improve your reporting and analytics efforts, you can book a one-on-one demo with our product specialists.
