Growing in the 21st century’s fiercely competitive market, businesses need to be at the forefront in their customer acquisition strategy to continue thriving in their industry.
But there’s at least one thing that businesses can’t (or shouldn’t) ignore to survive in this ever-evolving digital world: Customer retention.
In fact, as Invespcro puts it, it’s between 5 and 25 times more difficult and expensive to invest in new customers than retaining existing ones.
Furthermore, 90% of Americans prioritizes customer experience as a key factor in determining if they will do business with a brand.
So what does this mean and how does it relate to the focus of this article?
The help desk plays an important role in ensuring customers leave with positive, reliable, and outstanding experiences, and as such, companies should use reasonable key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure their success.
People want prompt answers to their queries and also wants to be empowered to tackle issues independently through a self-service portal and a knowledge base
But unfortunately, there is so much data available, and knowing the metrics to track can be more like a living hell.
Below we narrow down on the most important help desk KPIs to track and why you should track them.
Why track help desk KPIs?
Remember we established at the very beginning of this article that customer satisfaction is an important element to the success of any brand.
Therefore, consider your help desk as “soldiers” securing your business and notifying you whenever war is ready to break out.
If your help desk agents are the ones responsible for guiding your business from crumbling, isn’t it quite important to measure their performance now and then?
That’s why 56% of service desks create service improvement plans with information gathered from customer surveys.
Since your help desk representatives are the ones responsible for resolving customer issues and answering their question, measuring their performance with relevant KPIs will allow you to:
- Know the various loopholes that may hinder the growth of your business
- Get insights on customers behavior and relationship with the help desk team
- Analyze the performance of your help desk agents
- And ultimately satisfy your customers, keeping them loyal to your brand so they promote your business with words of mouth.
Based on these KPIs, you can create individual and team performance goals to keep optimizing your help desk processes. With tools like Salesforce Service Cloud and Dynamic 365 Customer Service you can track and improve these important KPIs
3 Important KPIs to Track to Measure Your Help Desk Performance
The three important KPIs businesses should be tracking are:
- First Response Time
- Rate of Resolution
- Customer Satisfaction
Let’s explain each part further:
First Response Time
The average time a customer waits to hear a reply from your help desk agent matter a lot.
Whether you believe it or not, your first initial encounter with a new customer leaves a positive or negative impression on the customer’s end and will determine if the customer will continue to do business with your brand or not.
For instance, if a customer puts a complaint call through and it takes a couple of minutes before the help desk agent answers the call, then transfer the call to a more appropriate person.
Before you get to know what’s going on, there are long hold times and messy communication exchanges and the customer will most likely never come back. Even worst, he/she go about sharing their bad experience with your brand.
That’s why help desk teams should take this KPI very seriously and measure it using a first-time response tracker in their help desk dashboard.
The faster you approach customer’s issues at first contact, the more likely they will love your brand and stick around to do business with you.
Rate of Resolution
The rate of resolution is the percentage of issues that help desk agents can resolve from the total number of tickets received.
This is an important metric and should be the focus of your help desk agents. It’s also important to realize that the number of customer issues you can successfully resolve correlates with the confidence that the customer will have in your brand.
While it’s quite reasonable to want to attend to the buckets of ticket on your desk, it’s also important to ensure each ticket receive a timely and well-informed answer.
Although customers expect a prompt response from your brand, their ultimate goal for contacting your help desk agents is to get their issues resolved successfully.
And that’s why you should use help desk tools to track this KPI, finding out the number of issues resolved at the first exchange, the difficulties, and provide your help desk agents with advanced support or training if need be.
Customer Satisfaction
As you probably already know by now, customer retention should be the leading driver of your brand.
Behind tracking the rate of resolution and first response time, your main goal should be to ensure the customer is satisfied to the fullest.
You may likely be tempted to assume the customer finds your services helpful, only to realize later they are not. You can order an audit at a software development company. So it’s important to measure your customer satisfaction score regularly to ensure you’re in sync with your customer’s needs.
There are several ways to go about this. For instance, some brands send surveys out to customers as soon as their issues are being resolved or ask them to leave feedback on their experience with the help desk agents.
Additionally, it’s important to first analyze the overall value of this KPI by measuring the ratio of the numbers of surveys sent out vs the number of surveys completed.
On the other hand, if you have a large customer base, you should be able to quickly conclude the volume of feedback surveys completed by your customers.
Conclusion
Regularly measuring and monitoring the performance of your help desk team is important to improve your help desk efficiency and win the business of more clients.
The metrics outline is an exhaustive list of the important help desk KPIs to track, but it’s a great start.
If you need help establishing a help desk system supported by a tailored KPI set, kindly contact our expert at Fortyseven Software Professionals.
