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5 KPIs to Track Your Help Desk Performance in 2020

KPI - Key Performance Indicator- Word Drawn on Old Poster. Business Concept in Flat Design.Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the most important measurable outcomes that not only keep your help desk outsourcing team on track to achieve its goals, but can also indicate the success and failure of your overall help desk.

How will you measure the performance of your help desk in 2020? In the world of help desk support, the number of KPIs can be endless and it is quite difficult to know exactly what you should be measuring. So we've put together 5 key performance indicators you should be using to measure your help desk performance in 2020.

1. Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is the reason for maintaining a help desk support team, making this is the ultimate KPI. Measuring customer satisfaction is not always easy, so one of the most direct means of measurement is to send out a survey for your customers to rate and review your help desk support services, then compare the number of completed feedback forms with what you actually sent out. It's best practice to include different questions in the forms that you will need your customers to fill.
 

Some customer satisfaction questions you may include, but aren't limited to:
- How satisfied were you with the agents understanding of your business requirements?
- How satisfied were you with the time it took to resolve your support request?
- Was the help desk able to resolve your problem?

If you can't think of the right survey questions to ask your customers, you can schedule a help desk consultation with one of our experts and we can help you determine the right questions.

2. Rate of Resolution
The faster incidents are resolved the more satisfied and productive users are. This is why the help desk is the greatest factor affecting customer satisfaction by a ratio of 2:1 over the next closest IT support group. According to a SQM Group study, “The satisfaction of the end user could drop by 15% for every subsequent exchange (call, email, etc.)”

How efficiently does your help desk support team handle requests? Are they resolved within the first contact, or do tickets remain open for unspecified amounts of time? Or do most of your tickets get reassigned to another IT support group?

Get the Results: State of Help Desk 2020 Survey

3. Resource Utilization
In today’s IT environment, it is not uncommon for IT leadership to evaluate what capacity opportunities exist within all teams such as the help desk, tier two desktop, infrastructure/networking, application development, systems, IT security, and a variety of other IT resources and resolver groups. What can you look at within the help desk to evaluate resource utilization?

You can look at each agent’s workload such as call time, after-call time, and outbound call time total against their overall work time for a set period (i.e. month) to determine their utilization. You can compare each agent’s utilization against the help desk average as a whole and put into place action plans to raise each agent’s utilization closer to the average. As you improve each agents’ utilization the help desk average will improve. You can also look at ticket counts by agent versus average tickets per agent for the team and develop action plans to help bring each agent closer to the average and subsequently bring the help desk average up. You can do the same thing with a quality assurance measurement system for each agent versus the team average and develop action plans that improve individual agents' scores and as a result, increase the help desk average quality score.

Help desk utilization KPIs allow service management to communicate opportunities to take on more work. Identifying help desk utilization and any excess capacity that can be used to resolve more at the help desk translates into capacity gains in other support groups within IT.

If you would like assistance in identifying your help desk's resource utilization, please connect with one of our help desk experts to walk you through our Help Desk ROI Calculator, which will help provide a foundation of potential available capacity.

4. Response and Wait Times
We all know how frustrating it is to sit at the other end of a phone call or online chat, wondering if anybody is there or anything is being accomplished. Response time is the period elapsed between the initial request and first contact. In telephone terms, Average Speed of Answer (ASA) measures the average time your team takes to answer calls in queue. Another metric is Abandoned Rate (ABR) which measures the number of calls that are disconnected as a percentage of the total volume during that day or month.

It’s important to set service levels for KPIs like these because how you set, measure, and meet them, affect people’s willingness not just to contact the help desk but their satisfaction once they do. Remember, the faster you can respond to people and the more issues your help desk support team can solve with the first customer exchange, the better the customer satisfaction results you will see.

5. Cost Per Ticket
In today's competitive environment, organizations have to make the most cost-effective use of their resources, and help desk support is no exception. The Cost per Ticket is found by dividing service desk operating expenses by total ticket volume during a given time period. As you evaluate the cost per ticket of your help desk support team, it's important to remember that your overall goal is to support the organization, so you must find that crucial balance between quality and cost.

Sometimes, your cost per ticket could be higher than the industry average. While this could mean that your internal help desk or your help desk outsourcing team is offering better quality, it could also mean that they aren't utilizing resources as efficiently as you'd like.

If you'd like to get a clearer picture of the costs that impact your help desk, you can try our Help Desk Cost of Support ROI Calculator.


If you're looking for help in determining the best KPIs to measure the performance of your help desk in 2020, w
e invite you to schedule a help desk consultation with our team today!

Schedule a Help Desk Consultation