Metric of the Month
Each month MetricNet highlights one Key Performance Indicator for the Contact Center, Service Desk, or Desktop Support. We define the KPI, provide recent benchmarking data for the metric, and discuss key correlations and cause/effect relationships for the metric. The purpose of this column is to familiarize you with the Key Performance Indicators that really matter to your support organization, and to provide actionable insight on how to leverage these KPIs to improve your performance.
Eight KPIs to Optimize Your IT Service and Support
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....
Contact Center Balanced Scorecard
Today’s contact center technologies and reporting packages make it easy to capture copious amounts of performance data. Most contact center managers can tell you everything from last month’s average speed of answer to yesterday’s average handle time. But what does it all mean? If my abandonment r...
Service Desk Cost per Ticket
Cost per unit is a common metric throughout our economy. Many of you know the cost of a gallon of gas, or the cost for a cup of coffee, or the cost of your monthly cell phone plan. Yet surprisingly, many service and support managers do not know their own Cost per Ticket....
The Metrics of Problem Management
A problem in ITIL is defined as the cause of one or more incidents - there is a cause-and-effect relationship between an incident and a problem. The cause is the problem, and the effect is the incident. If a user reports that they cannot log into an application, this is the incident. When this is...
A Deep Dive into the Contact Center Metric of Cost per Contact
Cost per unit is a common metric throughout our economy. Many of you know the cost of a gallon of gas, or the cost for a cup of coffee, or the cost of a movie ticket. Yet surprisingly, many contact center managers do not know their own Cost per Contact....
What Are The Metrics of Artificial Intelligence in Service and Support?
The true test of any AI tool for service and support is the following: Without human intervention, will the tool reduce ticket volumes, resolve problems more quickly, decrease total cost of ownership (TCO), and improve the customer experience? If it checks all these boxes – and gets smarter over ...
Process Drives Performance
We’ve all heard the joke about insanity. It’s defined as doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. In IT support, it’s not hard to find organizations that behave this way. They get stuck in old habits, delivering services the same way they always have, and are sur...
Same Day/Next Day Resolution
As a service level metric, same day/next day resolution is increasingly favored over mean time to resolve (MTTR) because it is more intuitive to most people. If I tell you that the MTTR for all field service tickets is 32 hours, that probably doesn’t mean much to you. But if I tell you that 84% o...
Ticket Quality
Poor ticket quality is a serious problem in the service and support industry. Imagine being a desktop tech or a level 3 applications engineer and receiving a ticket in your queue that simply says, “computer broken,” and the ticket is categorized as “other.” While this may seem humorous, it is not...
Ticket Backlog
Ticket backlog is the number of open tickets at a given point in time. It is a general IT support metric that can be measured at any level of support. So, for example, ticket backlog at level 1, desktop support, field services, level 3 IT, and vendor support are all important metrics to track. Ad...
Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
ASA is one of the most widely tracked metrics in the technical support industry. It indicates how responsive a service desk is to incoming calls. Almost everyone who works in service and support can tell you their ASA off the top of their head. Since most service desks have an ASA target, ASA is ...
Customer Effort
Customer effort is both a service desk and a desktop support metric. It measures how easy it is for your customers to do business with you. The metric is captured by surveying your customers and asking them the following question: How easy was it to get the resolution you wanted today? Measured o...
Schedule Adherence
Schedule adherence is a service desk metric that measures whether analysts are in their seats ready to accept calls, chats, emails, or web tickets as scheduled. That is, it measures how well a service desk’s analysts are “adhering” to the work schedule. Schedule adherence is equal to the actual t...
Tickets Prevented
“The best ticket is the ticket that never happens!” I first heard this truism nearly 30 years ago when I got started in this industry. And today, it’s even more true than ever before! Preventing a ticket altogether is always better than handling a ticket that has been triggered by an incident or ...
The Agent Scorecard
An increasing number of progressive IT support organizations recognize that when it comes to performance metrics, driving agent accountability really matters! They have discovered that clear and quantifiable agent performance targets have enormous benefits for both agents and the service desk ove...
Customer Experience
As many of you know, I’ve been in the IT service and support industry for nearly 30 years. During that time, I’ve had the good fortune to work with more than half of the Global 2000 on countless performance measurement and management initiatives, including benchmarking, metrics maturation, and co...
The ROI of Support: Part 2
Last month I began this two-part series on Return on Investment (ROI) for service and support. In part 1, I defined how value is created in IT service and support. This month, in part 2, I will go through a case study that calculates the ROI for a particular support organization.
The ROI of Support: Part 1
Most IT departments can tell you how much they spend on support. But very few can quantify the economic impact of support. The result is that many IT service and support organizations are on the defensive when it comes to budgeting and spending and often struggle just to get the funding needed to...
Agent Training Hours
Most support organizations will tell you that they don’t do as much training as they would like. The most common reasons cited for the shortfall are budget and time constraints. But given the overwhelmingly positive impact that training can have on an organization, it’s no surprise that the staun...
Call Abandonment Rate
An abandoned call is one where the caller hangs up before being connected to a live agent in the service desk. Call abandonment rate is the number of abandoned calls divided by all calls offered to the service desk and is one of the most widely tracked metrics in the service desk industry. Virtua...
Ticket Handle Time
Ticket handle time is the average time that an agent spends on a service desk ticket, including talk time, chat time, wrap time, and after call or after chat work time (ACW). For non-live tickets, such as email and web submitted tickets, the ticket handle time is the average time that an agent sp...
Agent to Supervisor Ratio
Service desk managers and supervisors frequently ask me about the proper ratio of agents to supervisors. Should it be 5 to 1? 10 to 1? 20 to 1? Like most KPIs, there are tradeoffs involved with this metric. If the ratio is too high, the management span of control is too broad, and agents can be w...
Channel Mix
Channel mix at level 1 is rapidly evolving (illustrated in the figure below), and is considered one of the industry’s megatrends. In 2007 voice calls represented almost 80% of all ticket volume. Today, voice accounts for just over 50% of incoming ticket volume. There are two key drivers behind th...
User Self-Service
User self-service measures the percentage of incidents that are self-resolved by the user, without the assistance of a live agent. Let’s say, for example, that the agents on a particular service desk handle 4,000 incidents per month through voice, chat, and email. Another 1,000 incidents per mont...
Ratio of Agents to Total Headcount
There are a number of ways to measure the efficiency of a service desk or desktop support group. Metrics such as cost per ticket and agent utilization are the most common measures of efficiency. A less well-known metric that also drives cost per ticket is the ratio of agents to total headcount, a...
Introduction to Chat Metrics
If you are like most consumers, you have probably experienced a chat session. Perhaps you engaged in chat with an agent at your bank or insurance company to resolve a payment issue. Or you may have used chat to troubleshoot your new computer or a software application you installed. Why chat? One ...
Annual Agent Turnover
Some organizations make a distinction between good turnover and bad turnover. Bad turnover is when an agent leaves the company altogether because of performance issues or to pursue other job opportunities. So-called good turnover, by contrast, is when an agent who is otherwise performing well is ...
Cause-and-Effect for Desktop Support KPIs
The key to using KPIs diagnostically and prescriptively is to understand their cause-and-effect relationships. You can think of these relationships as a linkage where all of the KPIs are interconnected. When one KPI moves up or down, other KPIs invariably move with it. Understanding this linkage ...
Incident Mean Time to Resolve
Incident mean time to resolve (MTTR) is a service level metric for both service desk and desktop support that measures the average elapsed time from when an incident is opened until the incident is closed. It is typically measured in business hours, not clock hours. An incident that is reported a...
Net Promoter Score
Net promoter score (NPS) is based on the idea that every organization’s customers can be divided into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. By asking one question—How likely is it that you would recommend our service to a friend or colleague?—you can track these groups and get a ...
Percent Resolved Level 1 Capable
Percent resolved level 1 capable is a desktop support metric. It measures the percentage of tickets resolved by desktop support that could have been resolved by the level 1 service desk. This happens when the service desk dispatches or escalates a ticket to desktop support that could have been re...
Service Desk Balanced Scorecard
Today’s service desk technologies and reporting packages make it easy to capture copious amounts of performance data. Most service desk managers can tell you everything from last month’s average speed of answer to yesterday’s average handle time. But what does it all mean? If my abandonment rate ...
First Level Resolution Rate
First level resolution (FLR) is a measure of a service desk’s ability to resolve tickets at Level 1, without having to escalate the ticket to Level 2 (Desktop Support), Level 3 (internal IT professionals in applications, networking, the data center, or elsewhere), field support, or vendor support...
Desktop Support Cost per Ticket
Cost per ticket, along with customer satisfaction, are often referred to as the foundation metrics in desktop support. They are the two most important metrics because ultimately everything boils down to cost containment (as measured by cost per ticket) and quality of service (as measured by custo...
Agent Job Satisfaction
Agent Job Satisfaction Customer satisfaction is top-of-mind for virtually every service organization. and for good reason: it is the single most important measure of quality for a service desk or desktop support group. But what about agent job satisfaction? How important is that, and why don’t mo...
Agent Utilization
Agent Utilization One goal of every business is to achieve the highest possible quality at the lowest possible cost. It stands to reason, therefore, that cost and quality should be measured on an ongoing basis. In fact, many would argue that cost and quality are the only two things that really ma...
First Contact Resolution Rate
First Contact Resolution Rate Customers tend to be impatient when they want service. It doesn’t matter if they are calling their bank, their cable company, or their service desk. They want a resolution to their problem or an answer to their question right then and there! In fact, research across ...
Customer Satisfaction
Customer Satisfaction Customer satisfaction is by far the most common measure of quality. It is widely used, not just in IT service and support, but in all industries. It is so ubiquitous that most of us have probably been surveyed within the last week, by our bank, an airline, our insurance comp...
Key Relationships for Service Desk KPIs
Key Relationships for Service Desk KPIs In this Metric of the Month, instead of discussing a single metric, I will explore the cause-and-effect relationships for service desk KPIs. This will give us an overarching framework and roadmap for discussing future KPIs in this column.
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