Small or big — companies’ success relies upon IT service management. Simultaneously, the success of ITSM significantly depends upon tracking and working on IT service desk metrics — or, to essentially, measure service desk KPIs.

It is essential to track a variety of IT service desk KPIs or Key Performance Indicators to meet service desk KPIs and meet stakeholders' expectations or overall business goals.

A service desk allows you to implement effective steps to manage service delivery.

Conversely, capturing service desk metrics or KPIs helps you gauge IT support teams’ performance and implement best practices.

Let’s learn what these essential KPIs of Service Desk Metrics are.

This is a simple way to look at how your service desk performs.

To understand this, you would probably consider some attributes that contribute to elevating your service desk’s performance and user satisfaction.

A simple definition would be: help desk metrics are measuring attributes to examine the performance and effectiveness of the service desk towards customer service or employee support.

These KPIs provide efficiency and effectiveness metrics, allowing organizations to detect and improve performance gaps to optimize service desk operations.

They are indicators for service desk software to help IT managers determine how a service desk efficiently aligns with the business objectives by delivering services for users to solve problems and improve uptime.

Considering time to resolution (TTR) as a small example, it could act as a service desk metric or KPI for IT managers to understand what time a service desk takes to resolve an issue. Based on the outcomes, an IT manager can suggest improvements.

Help desk metrics or KPIs may sound similar but vary widely.

In a more specific way, service desk metrics involve performance metrics associated with service desks—that is, how well a service desk team is performing to assist the requesters.

Or how does a service desk contribute to resolving a particular user problem?

The other way around, service desk metrics connect dots to facilitate KPIs to help gain a bigger organizational goal.

In a nutshell, we can say — service desk metrics are integral to service desk KPIs that bring organizational resilience and growth through customer service delivery by adhering to user needs and meeting user expectations.

Say your service desk agents improve help desk responses by reducing ticket volume for a specific period. This metric depicts an organizational goal of resolving as many user problems as possible while ensuring user experience.

Service desk metrics or KPIs are essential to ensure you drive business success in several ways.

• Cost reduction: Real-time service delivery confirms that your users get what they want in time and helps reduce costs that are otherwise common in case problems are recurring and frequent.

• Improved team productivity: Service desk metrics exhibit the areas for improvement for your teams. IT managers can look into this and work on these areas to bring effective practice that helps boost the team’s performance.

• Elevated user experience: IT helps desk metrics can help you visualize what went wrong for your service desk while delivering a service. Eliminating these loopholes can improve service desk performance abilities and meet user experience.

• Improved service desk decisions: With service desk metrics, IT managers can improve decision-making and visualize the necessary resources needed to tackle some instances in different scenarios, helping the service desk improve its responses.

• Driving business growth: Based on IT help desk metrics, businesses can get to know where things are not working and implement the best way to tackle adversaries. This allows companies to meet business goals and drive success.

Incident management is crucial, as it combines several metric data points to address challenges and ensure an efficient service desk.

1. Ticket volume

The number of tickets or service requests a service desk handles in a particle period is known as ticket volume.

It signifies how efficiently a service desk team handles service requests. If the ticket volume grows, it can directly point to service desk inefficiency, indicating that a team may require adequate resources for a timely response.

How to calculate ticket volume:

This requires you to monitor a certain period, in which you must count how many tickets your service desks receive.

2. Ticket backlog

The term backlog is easier to understand, which means unresolved tickets are getting heaped over due to inattention.

This shows that a service desk has limited resources or skills to handle timely requests, causing ticket backlogs.

How to calculate ticket backlog:

Take a specific period for both tickets opened and closed. Subtract the open tickets at the beginning and closed tickets at the end of the week. This gives you the exact value of how many tickets got backlogged.

3. Escalation rate

With a percentage of tickets being escalated to the next tier without the proper resources or skills of the first contact, the transfer of tickets to the next tier is known as the escalation rate in the service desk ecosystem.

How to calculate escalation rate:

Take the number of tickets escalated to the next tier and divide it by the total number of tickets received. To get a percentage, multiply it by 100.

4. Incident prioritization

An incident could be of many types. However, not every case constitutes a severe incident for a service desk, and they can get immediate help.

Response and service delivery depend on the severity of a case. A service desk generally bases its priority on low, medium, high, and critical incidents.

Instead of doing it manually, an AI-based service desk can help you gauge incident prioritization and build a strategy for tackling incidents.

In determining service desk metrics, you can prefer capturing data through various attributes of service request metrics. They are stated below:

1. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

One of the best key performance indicators for IT service desk performance improvement is CSAT.

It is not at all rocket science. All it takes is to ask your customers or service desk users how they feel about the service responses they receive.

Usually, the CSAT metric is captured on a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, and the CSAT feedback survey can ask you to choose any options from very satisfied to very unsatisfied.

If your CSAT score is higher, your users will be happy with your service quality. The opposite is true if your CSAT score is low.

How to calculate the CSAT rate:

Calculate CSAT every quarter or month to have enough time to improve your customer satisfaction score with your service desk.

Divide the CSAT score you collected by the total customer responses and multiply it by 100.

2. Customer effort score or CES

The word ‘effort’ in CES says it all.

How much effort a user needs to exert while trying to solve a problem through a service desk is all that is a metric that defines customer effort score.

How to calculate CES:

Three simple ways constitute how CES must be measured —

• Word-based scale

• Numerical scale

• Sentiment scale

On a scale of ‘very easy’ or ‘very difficult’, the customer effort score can be measured.

So, you can choose any of these methods to calculate CES and divide the sum of CES scores by the total responses collected. To get a percentage, multiply it by 100.

3. Net promoter score (NPS)

This is another effective service desk KPI to measure the effectiveness of your IT help desk.

With ecommerce interactions, customers are more likely to ask, ‘How likely are you eager to recommend our service to others?’

On a scale of 0-10, which focuses primarily on two key metrics, highly and never, are used to know user loyalty and advocacy. In the language of NPS, users who recommend your service desk to others are recognized as promoters, and those who don’t are known as detractors.

How to calculate NPS:

It is easy to measure the NPS score. Just subtract the detractor percentage from the promoter percentage.

Let’s know one thing: the NPS survey also collects passive scores, but they are not measured.

4. Service level agreement or SLA

As per ITIL, SLA or service level agreement compliance thoroughly explains how to provide service and meet user expectations.

Service desks must maintain a specific timeframe based on SLA to address and resolve issues. If a service is denied within this timeframe, it is known as a violation of SLA, which also compromises user experience.

How to calculate the SLA rate:

Divide the number of tickets resolved by the number of tickets received by your service desk and multiply it by 100 to get a percentage. Forget not to pick the same period for the calculation.

Service desk KPIs or metrics comprise agent productivity and workload to determine how agents exert effort to manage tickets and deliver service in real time.

In this section, we have as many as five sub-categories to determine agent productivity and areas of improvement.

1. Agent utilization

In the service desk domain, an agent's time after service delivery out of his total available work time is known as agent utilization.

Agent utilization rates are essential service desk metrics. They can accurately indicate when to fix service desk problems or provide adequate resources for a high-performance service desk.

How to calculate the agent utilization rate:

Divide an agent's time for a request resolution by the total work time in a day. Multiply it by 100 to get a percentage.

2. First contact resolution (FCR)

As a service desk KPI, FCR is a crucial indicator of a service desk’s performance and success.

In this scenario, you must monitor how effectively your service desk resolves the number of requests in the first stage without escalating those issues to the next tier or causing them to recur.

How to calculate the FCR rate:

Divide the number of requests resolved in the initial stage by the number of requests received and multiply it by 100.

3. First Response Time (FRT)

For a service desk or IT help desk, it is mandatory to respond to user requests as early as possible.

Late response can impact a user’s experience.

As a critical service desk metric, FRT can depict a scenario in which the service desk must track the time between a request raised and a response made. This is known as FRT.

How to calculate FRT:

Calculating the FRT rate is easy. Just subtract the time a service desk attended a ticket from the time a user raised a request.

4. Time to Resolution (TTR)

As a service desk manager, considering the time to resolution or TTR is also very critical to determining the success of your service desk.

TTR is a service desk KPI that helps you gauge how long your service desk takes from ticket initiation to response and resolution.

How to calculate TTR:

Subtract the time your service desk receives a ticket from when it resolves the issue.

5. Average Time to Handle (ATH)

ATH refers to a service desk metric that helps detect the average time a service desk spends handling requests.

It can include communications, retrieving information, analysis, and everything necessary to address an issue.

How to calculate AHT:

Divide the time you spend handling the number of tickets your service desk receives in a specific timeframe.

Service desk metrics or KPIs are good for determining what you need to improve user response and service delivery.

As you check on these metrics frequently or quarterly, you will likely detect loopholes your service desk creates and make changes to fix them.

Prioritize what your users want:

Often, users ignore using service desk tools. Instead, they use legacy mediums to interact and get help. This usually does not help.

Users face challenges due to common workplace hurdles such as password resets, account unlocks, and user provisions.

Prioritize these service requests and implement an omnichannel mechanism to deliver an elevated user experience.

An occasional survey lets you collect data and know what your users prefer to solve their daily problems.

Implement self-service portal:

The self-service portal is a widely used tool for service desk users to raise queries and get resolutions effectively.

If you have none for your team, you can leverage this tool and allow effective automation that helps with common service desk problems.

Provide accurate knowledge resources:

A service desk or IT support always relies on rich knowledge articles to fetch accurate information to get help or provide help.

Ensure you update your knowledge articles whenever a new or unique solution arrives.

Use Generative AI or automation for user engagement and adoption:

Make it easy for your users to absorb information as quickly and accurately as possible so that they can efficiently find what they need to solve a problem.

Generative AI-based automation can help consolidate information and lessen the time to apply knowledge for problem resolution.

Regarding improving service desk metrics or IT help desk KPIs, Workativ meets business objectives in delivering user satisfaction and increasing engagement.

Overall, IT leaders can deliver customer services on time and ensure success.

Here’s how:

• Faster response to user queries through knowledge AI self-service:

Workativ embeds Knowledge AI an LLM-powered technology within its conversational AI platform to allow users to find information quickly and conveniently.

As a result, service desk managers can reduce wait times and consequently minimize the chance of ticket escalation to the agents.

• Custom automated workflows with domain-specific use cases

You can unlikely work with generic use cases that most IT ecosystems usually involve. Instead, Workativ allows you to create domain-specific workflows to adjust to your business needs and allow your users to seek the exemplary service desk help they need.

• Wider adoption of self-service portal to score more on CSAT

Workativ enables a seamless sync of its conversational AI platform with communication channels such as Slack or MS Teams.

This allows users to accelerate the pace of raising requests and get help without the need to learn a new tool — users already know how to use Teams or Slack as their preferred workspace platform.

• No-code platform to get started fast

Workativ is a no-code conversational AI platform. Unlike conventional ITSM platforms, which comprise several modules for different business operations, Workativ is easy to implement based on use cases.

Workativ requires no steep learning curve as it requires working with traditional ITSM platforms, thus reducing developer costs and encouraging faster time to market.

Want to improve your service desk metrics or KPIs? Workativ can help. Schedule a demo today.

1. What are IT help desk metrics?

Help desk metrics are measuring attributes for help desk support provided that helps find performance gaps and strategize to optimize IT support.

2. What is the difference between service desk metrics and KPIs?

Help desk metrics are specific performance measurements for help desk support provided, such as average ticket resolution time or average handle time. A KPI is a broader measure that aligns with organizational goals, such as improved customer satisfaction.

3. Why are IT service desk metrics important?

IT service desk metrics are crucial for understanding service desk performance, identifying areas for improvement, setting goals, and demonstrating the service desk's value to the organization.

4. How can I improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) for my service desk?

Implement a self-service portal and provide accurate knowledge resources to improve CSAT, reduce ticket resolution times, increase first-contact resolution rates, and ensure timely responses to user inquiries.

5. How can Workativ help improve service desk metrics?

Workativ's AI-powered platform can enhance service desk performance by automating routine tasks, improving knowledge management, and providing insights into user behavior. This can increase efficiency, reduce ticket volumes, and increase customer satisfaction.