10 IT Help Desk Statistics You Need to Track and Monitor
Customer experience and satisfaction are key to the growth of any business.
But, how do you guarantee a positive experience for your customers?
If you are in the technology space, your IT Help Desk is a key to discovering the answer.
But how do you know if your IT Help Desk is doing its job in boosting business? Below we look two ways you can gauge Help Desk performance. The article covers the following topics:
- A customer satisfaction formula
- Setting KPIs for your Help Desk
- Categories of business metrics
- Overview of Help Desk metrics
- Benchmarking Your IT Help Desk Statistics
Delivering Satisfied Customers: A Simple Formula
Today’s customers are more demanding than ever. So, customer satisfaction is everything. But keeping customers satisfied is easier said than done. Neil Patel, one of the web’s top marketing influencers, offers a simple formula for delivering satisfaction:
No customer satisfaction = no customer retention = shrinking customer base = poor word-of-mouth advertising = plummeting profits
Put another way, you can have a great product or service. And you can have a highly competitive price. But it means little if you don’t deliver epic customer experiences.
Fail to do that, and customers walk away unsatisfied. That could cost you business big time.
Recent research supports Patel’s formula. Walker Consulting, for example, predicts that customer experience will be the key differentiator between businesses by 2020. What’s more, customer service research shows 67% of customers say they’ll pay more for a great experience.
Setting KPIs for Your Help Desk
The first step in measuring Help Desk performance is setting key performance Indicators (KPI) on customer experience. They tell you how effectively a department or a company is achieving a key business target or objective. These can be anything from the speed or service to time in support queue—anything that affects the customer. So if you don’t have KPIs for your Help Desk, you need to set them now.
Here are seven steps that can help you set KPIs for your Help Desk:
- What is your Help Desk outcome?
- Why does this outcome matter to the company?
- What metrics are you going to measure progress?
- How can you influence the outcome of this metric?
- What employee is responsible for this business outcome?
- How will you know you’ve achieved your KPI?
- How often will you review progress towards the outcome?
KPIs are useful only if they inspire action. Providing concise, clear, and relevant information inspires workers to act. Also, KPIs are a form of communication with your workers and abide by the same rules. Treat them accordingly.
Categories of Business Metrics
The next step in evaluating your Help Desk is choosing metrics to gauge performance.
Metrics measure the result of something.
Managers use them to decide things, solve problems, and optimize processes. But not all metrics are the same. They differ depending on what they measure. Below are key categories of business metrics:
- Staffing and salary
- Employee retention
- Training and development
- Business operation
- Technology metrics
- Service desk metrics
- Customer satisfaction
The last two categories are key. They’ll help you gain a complete picture of Help Desk performance.
Service desk metrics include things like average speed to answer, the number of incidents logged, and average call abandonment rate. These are operational metrics. Customer satisfaction metrics include things like:
- customer satisfaction rate
- the quality of the service your team provides
- results from customer surveys.
These are more marketing-related statistics.
Assessing Help Desk Performance: Two Approaches
You have two approaches to gauging IT Help Desk performance. The first tracks team performance versus customer experience using business metrics. This approach captures your team’s progress toward achieving the customer-related KPIs you’ve set.
But every company is different. So, you need to choose what customer-related metrics work for you.
Zapier, for example, focuses on several areas to assess its impact on customers. A key customer-related area for them is response time. No one likes waiting for an answer.
Generally speaking, the faster your response time, the happier your customers will be. Let’s face it. No one likes slow responses to issues. Below are three ways Zapier tracks response time:
- Average response time — This metric tells you how quickly your team responds to customers’ requests. While speed is great, so is accuracy. A fast answer that’s wrong doesn’t help anyone.
- Time to first response — This statistic gauges the time your customers have to wait for the first replay from your agents. As with average response time, the faster time to respond the better.
- Response time bands — This metric measures the number of tickets replied to within defined time frames. It helps you analyze response time more in-depth. You can tell how many tickets your team analyzed in ten minutes, half an hour, and five hours.
Each metric has its good side and its bad side. Time to first response, for example, can drive your team to respond quickly but they may not be solving issues. Below are some additional metrics you may want to track to gauge Help Desk performance:
- Resolution time — Metrics in this category help you determine how long customers wait for agents to resolve issues. Long resolution times may mean your staff needs more training.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) — This metric tells you how happy customers are with your product, service, and/or brand. CSAT can also tell how satisfied customers are with a discrete action or aspect of your products
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) — NPS tells you how likely customers are to recommend your company to other buyers. NPS helps you anticipate churn, measure loyalty, and gauge satisfaction at key touch points
- Customer Expert Score (CES) — This metric reflects the effort customers put into interacting with your brand. High effort suggests low satisfaction due to less than epic customer service.
- Churn Rate — This metric tells you how many customers you lose over time. If customer experience is high, your churn rate should be down. If it’s low, start thinking about making changes.
- Backlog in support queue — This metric tells you how well your team is handling its workload. Creating a rich knowledge base and/or using business rules to automate tickets are two proven ways to reduce the backlog.
Other customer experience-related metrics include:
- net tickets
- ticket volume by support channel
- support tickets solved
- wait time
- ticket distribution
- individual agent performance
These are a sample of metrics that can help you gain a clear picture of the Help Desk performance.
Benchmarking Your IT Help Desk Statistics
The second way to gauge Help Desk performance is by benchmarking. This effort compares your information against others in your industry or your competitors’ metrics. It also tells you two things: how you’re doing within an industry and if your KPIs are achievable or unachievable.
Benchmarking helps you gain an independent view on your team’s performance, identify areas of improvement, and encourage continuous improvement.
Below are ten critical operational Help desk metrics you may want to use to benchmark your team. They’re recommended by MetricNet, which helps managers run organizations more efficiently and effectively.
- Service Desk Handle Time: Outbound Voice Handle Time (minutes) was as high as 10.14 in our US Insourced Service Desk benchmark.
- Service Desk Voice Quality: The average Call Quality for US Insourced Service Desks is 88.3%.
- Service Desk Voice Productivity: The average Voice Agent Utilization for US Insourced Service Desks is 45.1%.
- Service Desk Voice SLA: Call Abandonment Rate was as high as 9.6% in our US Insourced Service Desk Benchmark.
- Service Desk Technician: The average Daily Technician Absenteeism for US Insourced Service Desks is 5.1%.
- Technician training: New Technician Training Hours was as high as 246 in our US Insourced Service Desk benchmark.
- Service Desk Chat: The average % of Contacts Originating in Chat for US Insourced Service Desks is 9.0%.
- Service Desk Inbound Channel Mix: The average Self-Help percentage of Total Contacts for US Insourced Service Desks is 9.7%
- Service Desk Cost: The average Cost per Voice Minute for US Insourced Service Desks is $2.13.
- Service Desk Total Cost of Ownership: Net First Level Resolution Rate was as low as 68.8%.
Ultimately, benchmarking helps tell you if you’re getting a solid return on investment (ROI). The same holds true for comparing customer satisfaction metrics versus key performance indicators.
Savvy managers take advantage of existing tools to help boost ROI and customer experience. Using a help desk call center, for example, guarantees your customers can reach you any time and anywhere, boosting customer satisfaction.
But telling how well your Help Desk is doing that is a challenge.
Develop your own set of benchmarks, measure them against KPIs can be an effective way to judge your Help Desk.
Plus, it shows you what areas of customer experience you’re weakest in, so you can make improvements to satisfy customers. Creating a customer-oriented IT Help Desk boosts satisfaction and can take your business to the next level.
