Having a powerful help desk tool at hand empowers your business. But what metrics should you track in your help desk for BFSI (banking, financial services, and insurance)? In our article, you will find out about ten key customer support metrics that would help you track everything.
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1. Email conversations
The email conversations metric helps you track all the conversations with customers created directly on your help desk. Tracking it will also help you understand the scope of work that your agents are dealing with.
This metric can be handy when divided into segments and tracked according to such filters as a certain period, the agent who worked on the task, or issues related to a specific tag or topic. The data segmentation would help you improve your support service like nothing else.
2. Volume via channel
The volume via the channel is similar to ticket volume but deals with specific channels. It helps identify the customers’ requests. Is it phone or chat? Email or social media? This valuable data can help you adjust your support strategy and prioritize the most critical channels.
3. Open vs. resolved conversations
How to check the performance of your support team? It is simple. You just need to identify the open ticket rate versus the closed conversations.
This data can also help you understand the trends that happen week over week. For example, does this metric remain the same for an extended period? Or does the resolved conversation rate decrease? This data may tell you you need to hire extra staff or increase your team’s productivity. On the contrary, the sudden increase in the number of conversations may indicate that something is wrong with your service or product, and you need to take care of this.
4. Conversations per agent
It is essential to balance your agents’ maximum capacity so that your customers get enough attention while your agents remain productive and burnout-free. The conversations per agent metric help you understand how many conversations each agent handles.
If you have an automated ticketing system, this metric will help you understand how many tickets should be optimally assigned per each agent. Besides, during the onboarding stage, it would also help you see how many tickets to assign to the newbies so they can handle them efficiently.
5. Response time
The response time is a metric that tracks how long customers wait to get an answer from your support team. This time includes both the first response and subsequent response times. Modern help desks only track response time if your agent answers a customer. So, if there is no answer, it won’t track the response time.
The response time is an excellent measurement of your support agents’ performance if there is a queue. Besides, it directly influences and indicates customer happiness and loyalty changes. It also shows that when your support team experiences some problems with handling tickets, the longer the response time is, the higher the chances that customer satisfaction becomes lower.
6. First response time
The main difference between response and first response metrics is that first response one concerns the time a customer waits for the first reply. It is an excellent indicator of your team’s habits if tracked monthly. If the first response time is down, your team performs well, but if not — you have to take care of any issues that arise.
Of course, you can use an automated response to customers who have submitted tickets; however, live agents can do wonders and go a long way.
7. Resolution time
Like response time, the resolution time is an excellent way to measure the performance of your agents. This metric means the time it takes from the creation of the ticket till its resolution. If your team has too many tasks to complete or your customers are unhappy, this metric goes up. Besides, suppose the resolution time is extended. In that case, this may mean that your agents do not provide enough information for customers, or the discussion is growing complex and takes more time than usual. To understand the real reason for the high metric, you need to look at the tags and content of the messages sent by your agents.
8. Handle time
Handle time is the metric that indicates the time needed from opening the conversation with a customer to pressing the send button for a reply. The combo of high handle time and negative satisfaction of your customers may indicate that you need to adjust your support strategy to cope with this issue.
Saved replies and an extended internal knowledge base can help decrease this metric. Just review the tags of the tickets with high response times to find out how you can better this situation. However, do not take into account the time only, but try to figure out the trends behind it.
9. Customer survey responses
CSAT or customer satisfaction, CES or Customer Effort Score, and NPS or Net Promoter Score are different types of surveys sent to customers to rate the level of satisfaction of your customers. While CSAT and CES surveys are sent after interacting with a customer, NPS surveys aim to understand the customers’ attitudes towards your services or products and how they perceive them.
These surveys are great for understanding how the adjustments in your support strategy have affected your customers over a certain period, unlike single surveys after conversations with agents. They also indicate your success in improving your products or services, so you’d better keep an eye on the changes in these metrics.
10. Resolved
The resolved metric is the number of tickets or conversations determined by your agents over a certain period. Note that most modern help desks treat a discussion as fixed only if there is even a single reply and the ticket is marked as closed. Besides, the ticket can be resolved only once, so if a customer replies to an already completed conversation, it won’t be automatically closed again till the agent closes it once more. So, if the number of tickets increases while the resolved metric is down, there are some complex issues to solve.
Wrapping Up
Choosing the right help desk metrics can significantly improve your support strategy because not every metric will suit your needs. So, you aim to identify which one will work from the start and then successfully add it to your help desk.
