If your global business is looking to gain a competitive edge on the global sales market to build a long-term brand legacy, it’s vital to ensure your help desk / service desk team(s) offer(s) top-tier service & support that exceeds customers’/end-users’ service expectations so they may continue to trust your brand and henceforth share their positive customer experiences (CX) with others, leading to strong brand ambassadorship that builds unparalleled customer acquisition / long-term brand loyalty. According to Callnovo’s article on customer service principles CSRs should follow to ensure fantastic customer engagement:

• “Strong, positive CX heavily-impacts word-of-mouth advertising — leading 94% of all customers/end users with such customer satisfaction experiences to recommend your brand to others.”

Furthermore, as mentioned in an article on the best customer service practices to build customer loyalty:

• “Stellar customer service (CS) that goes beyond customer expectations is crucial to retention, leading to a stronger brand reputation, securing global sales success.”

If your help desk / service desk department wants to provide stellar service & troubleshooting support that builds long-term customer acquisition & retention, it’s critical to be equipped with the right key performance metrics (KPIs) that offer your global business a strong understanding of the efficiency & quality of their currently-provided service — and let your company continually-improve support services to fortify stronger engagement that leads to great customer satisfaction / CX.

Recently, Callnovo went through key help desk best practices to foster top-quality troubleshooting support, mentioning: global corporations can foster stellar customer engagement that greatly-enhances CX, turning customers/end-users into long-term brand ambassadors; let’s expand upon that by looking at:

• help desk metrics & help desk performance metrics to ensure stellar customer engagement, and
• how Callnovo’s professional, customer-centric CS / technical support (TS) outsourcing solutions help take brand success to the next level.

Help Desk Metrics & Help Desk Performance Metrics

Ticket Volume

A vital 1st performance metric within this list of help desk metrics & help desk performance metrics is ticket volume — referring to the total count of support requests coming in to your support team; this metric informs you on your business’ support quality performance, showing you numbers on how many customers are content — and how many aren’t satisfied. Additionally, knowing how many tickets your team can handle helps recruitment & hiring over time.

Volume per Channel

No matter the industry and/or customer need, customer contact preferences are very particular — as consumers want to be in charge of how and when they contact your brand. It’s highly-important to have omnichannel communication available — and, each channel requires particular types of staffing and skills. On that note, being able to track channel usage is crucial to optimizing your support team(s)’ efficiency, ticket resolution quality, and the details on where & how you move, train, and/or hire your staff — as well as how to best allocate resources to meet each particular channel’s service demand.

Open vs. Resolved Support Tickets

Another key KPI is the number of resolved support tickets in contrast to the number of open tickets. A properly-working help desk / service desk / support desk ensures their open & solved tickets’ trend lines are parallel. By checking these metrics weekly, your global corporation can ensure service demand is kept up with while identifying trends in ticket volume. An example: if ticket resolution is consistently-falling behind, higher head counts (HCs) may be needed — or, you may need to look at different ways to improve increase efficiency. Subsequently, if you see a sudden spike in newly-opened tickets, you may have a service delivery issue or some other disruption attend.

Ticket Distro

If your business is utilizing customer support software, you can add category tags to tickets which help identify specific topics/products/services that result in more tickets than others. This allows your CS / TS team(s) the opportunity to look at how support requests are distributed across your varied topic areas. Furthermore, you can determine if there’s correlations between satisfaction scores and low first-time responses. Monitoring ticket distribution offers you insight into recurring issues with your products/services, alerting you to where you might have to add and/or expand on existing knowledge base content.

Ticket Response Time

First response time — or average response time — is the amount of time between the creation of support requests and the 1st documented actions taken by help desk agents / service desk agents. As such, the longer response times are, the more customer satisfaction is jeopardized. Generally-speaking, global consumers / end users look for at least an acknowledgement that your support reps have started handling their product/service issues in a reasonable amount of time after the service request has been submitted. It’s important to keep in mind the total amount of requester wait time — which is the cumulative time that tickets remain unresolved while issues are being handled. If there’s a spike in tickets, successfully-managing expectations for your help desk / service desk / support desk customers is key; by being transparent regarding longer wait times, your customers will remain calm and understanding — which maintains feelings of being valued until an effective solution is provided.

Ticket Resolution Time

Resolution time (average handle time) is also a key performance metric within this list of help desk metrics & help desk performance metrics since such a KPI tracks the amount of time global end-users have to wait for issues to be resolved — a very important aspect of overall CX. Resolution time / average handle time includes the amount of time agents take to provide a first response to tickets — which means decreasing response times is a high priority.

First Contact Resolution

First contact resolution refers to the percentage / number of tickets resolved on 1st contact. The goal is to increase first-contact resolution numbers — as it’s an indicator of how quickly & smoothly customers get their customer issues resolved, improving CX. Furthermore, higher first-contact resolution of service tickets improves service efficiency since tickets aren’t being passed around as much.

Actual and Predicted Backlogs

Another baller metric to consider is the ticket backlog of support queues; if the weekly number of requests received is higher than number of requests handled, then a backlog builds. Both robust knowledge bases & automated workflows are wonderful in dealing with backlog problems. Furthermore, your company can encourage support team specialists to tackle ticket backlogs proactively. Additionally, by predicting backlog, you can learn from the past to prepare for the future. By seeing who’s falling behind — as well as an expected increase/decrease in ticket volume — you can plan accordingly, allocating resources as needed.

Customer Satisfaction Ratings

Customer satisfaction is crucial; the means of measuring such satisfaction is via customer satisfaction surveys — referred to as CSAT surveys. CSAT surveys are normally issued after tickets are resolved — and, you can see successful interactions or look into tickets where end-users weren’t satisfied. Additionally — mostly concerned with CS — the Net Promoter Score (NPS) can be measured, asking customers to rate your business on a scale of 1-to-10 based on how likely they are to recommend you to others.

Agent Performance

Your CS /TS team’s CSRs’ performance — no need for a rocket scientist to figure this out — is crucially-important for securing customer engagement that leads to long-term brand loyalty and success. It’s vital to track individual agent performance & utilization. Performance stats help identify which CSRs are top-performers — as well as illuminate additional training opportunities. Reviewing agent performance — along with the other help desk metrics / help desk performance metrics — regularly gives you the opportunity to optimize staffing allocation based on telecom. channels where CSRs perform superbly and where high ticket volumes are. Playing to individual CSRs’ strengths ensures better efficiency, leading to better service.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES measures the amount of effort customers expend to have their product/service tickets taken care of. To determine the rate, send a survey asking customers to rate support interactions on a scale of “very easy” to “very difficult.” Include comment sections so customers can describe their experiences — specifically, when it comes to the degree of ease or difficulty of service. You’ll be able to calculate the average number based on all survey responses. CES surveys help identify which processes need simplifying or streamlining, revealing the difficulty consumers go through to perform certain tasks — such as: returning products, cancelling or updating services, updating payment info., troubleshooting software issues, etc.

Transfer Rate

As the percentage of tickets CSRs end up transferring to others, the transfer rate — when high — indicates end users are reaching the wrong first-contact CSRs. In this case, the help desk’s / service desk’s internal routing system could be the issue. Automation reduces such transfer rate numbers — as they route customers to the right agent based on request types, languages, and/or expertise areas. A viable example: a chatbot collects key customer data upfront, routing the customer conversation to the right CSR.

Callnovo’s Stellar Help Desk Outsourcing Solutions

Callnovo Contact Center — having worked with 1,200+ global corporations / Fortune 500 companies for 17+ years — supports global businesses with top-quality outsourced troubleshooting/help desk support solutions, enhancing CX, leading to a permanently-increasing competitive drive in your specific market niche(s).

Some key advantages:

• High-quality Expertise — quality service via personnel skilled in such areas as:
  • customer-centric enthusiasm/service attitude,
  • strong communication skills,
  • customer service soft-skills,
  • intuitive logical thinking skills,
  • complex product/service/troubleshooting knowledge/skills, and
  • acute management/operations skills.
• Always-available Service — maximizing customer satisfaction/CX by continually-meeting customers’ needs without limits.
• Omnichannel Support — accessible, rapid contact solutions through all comm. channels — guaranteeing always-ready support, leading to enhanced CX, influencing long-term customer brand ambassadorship/customer loyalty.
• Native Language Support — meeting customers’ needs efficiently, conforming to cultural expectations, improving customer loyalty.

Conclusion

With the above guide on help desk & service desk performance metrics, you can orient yourself on your CS / TS team(s)’ efficiency & service performance — as well improve upon them — to effectively-ensure customer-centric service that leads to long-term customer base growth, customer retention, and brand loyalty. For additional support, Callnovo offers comprehensive outsourced multilingual, omnichannel service desk support solutions to help you successfully-meet consumers’ high service expectations, increasing your long-term global sales success.