Understanding which metrics to measure in Help Desk software is essential for any support team aiming to improve efficiency, streamline service, and offer a positive end-user experience.
These metrics help understand how requests are managed, their resolution times, and in which areas resources or processes can be optimized, becoming a key foundation for driving productivity and service quality.
Table of Contents
Introduction to Help Desk Metrics
Why measure Help Desk performance?
Evaluating Help Desk performance metrics is fundamental to ensuring that customer service is delivered with quality, speed, and effectiveness.
By analyzing indicators such as response times, ticket resolution, or user satisfaction, organizations can identify bottlenecks, improve processes, and optimize the customer support experience.
Measuring performance not only helps improve internal efficiency but also allows anticipating problems, minimizing recurrent incidents, and ensuring the team works aligned with business objectives.
Difference between operational metrics and productivity metrics
The 10 most common metrics in a Help Desk can be grouped into two categories: operational metrics and productivity metrics:
- Operational metrics measure daily service activity, such as the volume of tickets registered in the Help Desk software, entry channels, or SLA compliance. They are essential for understanding what happens in real-time and how customer service demand behaves.
- Productivity metrics, on the other hand, analyze team performance: how many tickets each agent resolves, the average time invested in each action within the ticket, or the efficiency with which requests are managed. These metrics allow evaluating the support team’s performance and detecting improvement opportunities at both individual and global levels.
In addition to these two categories, it is important to consider performance metrics, a broader concept encompassing all indicators used to evaluate Help Desk operations. These performance metrics include both operational and productivity metrics.
Thus, all metrics analyzing team efficiency, service quality, or ticket management form part of the Help Desk’s overall performance, although only some are directly related to support team productivity.
How to choose relevant Help Desk metrics for your organization
Selecting the right Help Desk metrics depends on each organization’s objectives and the type of customer service desired. It is advisable to start with those operational metrics that provide direct information on efficiency and quality, such as first response time, resolution time, user satisfaction, or the percentage of reopened tickets.
From there, more specific productivity metrics can be incorporated to identify optimization areas within the support team, as well as metrics oriented towards ticket volume and behavior.
The important thing is to choose metrics that are useful, easy to interpret, and truly help improve customer service, rather than accumulating data that serves no purpose and only complicates daily work.
Operational Help Desk Metrics
With ServiceTonic Help Desk software, the operational metrics that can be evaluated are:
1. SLA Compliance
With ServiceTonic, it is possible to measure resolution time and response time regarding SLAs. SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are contracts describing the level of service a customer expects from their provider.
The availability of Help Desk software capable of defining Service Level Agreements (SLAs) offers the company the possibility to establish a commitment with its customers, which in turn guarantees support service renewal and contributes to better problem resolution.
Therefore, with ServiceTonic, it is possible to define both the response time of the SLAs and the resolution time to work with, to subsequently apply them to support tickets created by the user or the customer.
Thanks to the incorporation of this field in tickets, it is possible to measure which tickets comply with established SLAs and which are about to reach the time limit, allowing the agent to prioritize these tickets.
Furthermore, it is possible to generate reports using these results. These reports allow measuring both resolution times and response times in the Help Desk software. Through these reports, valuable conclusions are obtained that facilitate decision-making to improve offered services.
2. Customer Satisfaction Level (CSAT)
Unlike SLA response and resolution times, which are real, tangible values, the customer satisfaction metric with help desk software is more abstract. There are no gauges to know the degree of customer or user satisfaction, so the best way to measure it is by asking them directly.
For this, ServiceTonic features surveys of various types of satisfaction surveys: personalized ones or created through templates, and star-rating surveys that allow service valuation.
3. Tickets created outside a User Portal
If the help desk software features a User Portal, it is easy to centralize the management of every support ticket, both from users and customers, in addition to obtaining metrics directly from the platform itself.
However, not all users have access to the Portal at all times, so it is fundamental to have a multichannel Help Desk that allows generating tickets via email, telephone, web chat, or other available channels.
Being able to measure the total number of tickets created through these channels external to the User Portal offers the company a complete view of the flow of incidents and requests. This facilitates the implementation of actions to streamline management and improve service efficiency.
Thanks to ServiceTonic’s custom views, it is possible to identify how many support tickets or requests have been registered in each channel and generate reports in formats like Excel, PDF, or HTML. This information allows analyzing behaviors, optimizing resources, and improving the quality of the service offered.
4. New Tickets
One of the most important metrics in Help Desk software is knowing the quantity of incoming tickets or support requests.
With ServiceTonic, it is possible to measure the volume of new tickets either through reports and queries configured by the user, or from the customizable dashboard, which allows each agent to visualize new daily tickets, those in a specific status, those assigned to a specific agent, and many other custom configurations.
Controlling this metric helps identify ticket backlog situations, demand peaks, or workload increases that can affect the service.
Thanks to this information, the company can accurately evaluate how many agents are needed to efficiently manage that ticket volume and guarantee fast, quality attention.
5. Requests associated with a contract
Help desk software must also be able to measure hours imputed to a project. ServiceTonic allows managing hours linked to a contract and generating reports, both for the user and the agents themselves, to know how many hours remain to be used in a contract or if renewal is necessary.
6. Tickets in Process
Knowing the status of each request or support ticket helps identify which requests are lagging, whether because they are pending customer response, additional confirmation has been requested, information is missing to proceed, or support agents haven’t been able to give it the necessary priority.
This tracking also allows detecting delays that can affect the average response time, a key indicator in service quality.
Measuring tickets in one status or another within the Help Desk software facilitates planning future work, balancing the load among agents, and better coordinating tasks with customers.
This contributes to more efficient management and improving the overall support experience.
Support Team Productivity Metrics
7. Resolution Time
Ticket management time, or resolution time—that is, the period an agent takes to provide a solution to a request—is a fundamental metric within Help Desk software.
This indicator allows evaluating not only speed of attention but also the efficiency of support offered to the user.
Resolution time is calculated from the creation of the support request until its final closure. To better control response time, ServiceTonic allows registering the time spent on each action performed within the ticket. Once the request is closed, the system automatically sums all dedicated times in each action, allowing precise knowledge of each ticket’s resolution time.
By combining this value with the identifier of the agent who managed the incident, it is possible to analyze the time invested by each team member and obtain key information to improve support efficiency and service productivity.
8. Number of Resolved Tickets
The next metric that provides value is knowing the number of tickets resolved in a day, week, or month. It is indispensable that this metric can be compared with ticket creation in a day, week, and month, as this allows measuring the volume of tickets agents are capable of resolving.
For performance to be effective, the number of open requests cannot be higher than the number of resolved requests.
Thanks to the creation of custom views, ServiceTonic can measure the number of open tickets vs. the number of resolved tickets. Once the view is created, all that remains is to generate the report and take pertinent decisions.
9. Tickets Requiring Training
Often, users or customers open requests that could be easily resolved through training or by consulting a well-structured knowledge base. In many cases, they haven’t completely assimilated certain concepts and generate tickets that aren’t real incidents, but doubts that can be solved with better learning.
To identify these situations, it is possible to create a custom field in the Help Desk software indicating if a ticket requires training. At the end of a specific period, these results can be measured to analyze if there is a significant volume of requests that could have been avoided with additional training or a more complete knowledge base.
If this trend is detected, the team can propose training sessions to the customer.
The objective is twofold: improve user experience, as they feel more secure and autonomous with the tool, and optimize agent time, allowing them to dedicate efforts to tickets that provide greater value or truly require technical intervention.
10. Agent Assignment
An indispensable metric to measure in Help Desk software is the number of tickets assigned to agents.
Knowing how support requests are distributed will allow improving the immediate response time offered to the customer, as new tickets can be managed by the agent(s) with the lowest assigned workload.
With ServiceTonic, it is easy to measure and identify agents with fewer tasks: thanks to dashboard customization, a panel can be created showing tickets assigned to agents:
If more detailed knowledge of the status of tickets being managed by one of these agents is desired, one only needs to click on them, and ServiceTonic opens a custom view with the requests assigned to that specific agent.
At the same time, this also allows measuring performance by agent with the help desk software: knowing which agent has resolved more or fewer requests, the time dedicated to them, if they have complied with established SLAs, and how many of these requests have received better ratings.
Finally, from these views, reports are generated to draw conclusions from Excel or PDF formats of all these values.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are metrics in a Help Desk?
Help Desk metrics are indicators that allow evaluating how a support service functions, measuring both team efficiency and the quality of attention offered to users.
These metrics measured in Help Desk software include data such as response times, ticket volume, SLA compliance, or agent productivity, and help improve management and customer experience.
What are good metrics for a technical support service?
Good metrics for a technical support service are those allowing evaluation of both service quality and team efficiency.
Among the most useful are:
- SLA Compliance
- Customer Satisfaction Level (CSAT)
- Number of tickets created
- New tickets
- Tickets associated with a contract
- Tickets in process
- Management time per ticket
- Number of resolved tickets
- Tickets requiring training
- Agent assignment
What are performance metrics?
Performance metrics are indicators allowing evaluation of how a service, process, or team is functioning in terms of efficiency, quality, and effectiveness. In a Help Desk, these metrics show if support is responding on time, resolving requests correctly, and offering a good user experience.
Why are KPIs and metrics important for Help Desk and Service Desk?
KPIs and metrics for Help Desk and Service Desk are important because they allow evaluating support quality, detecting problems, improving team efficiency, and taking data-driven decisions.
Thanks to these indicators, it is possible to optimize response times, balance workload, and offer a better experience to users, driving continuous service improvement.
How is Help Desk success measured?
Help Desk success is measured through metrics such as response and resolution times, customer satisfaction, SLA compliance, and team productivity. These indicators allow evaluating the quality of support operations and verifying if the service offers efficient, user-oriented attention.
Does Help Desk software improve management and response time?
Yes. Help Desk software improves management and reduces response time because it centralizes requests, automates tasks, and organizes workflows. This allows attending to tickets faster, more efficiently, and with better coordination among agents.
Conclusions on measuring Help Desk software metrics
With these 10 metrics that can be measured in Help Desk software, reports and statistics can be obtained to improve the service offered to the customer.
The objective of drawing conclusions with these metrics is to improve the service offered to the customer, the cornerstone for company survival, especially today where the Everything As a Service model has prevailed.
ServiceTonic enables measurement of all these metrics
As seen in each of these metrics, ServiceTonic, as help desk software, allows measuring these values. But many more exist, and thanks to the tool’s high customization, it is capable of covering any other metric not described in this article but indispensable for a company.