The Ultimate Help Desk Analysis & Reporting Checklist for Success

Find the ultimate help desk analysis and reporting checklist for achieving success. Enhance your operations and performance with our detailed guide.

Aug 12, 2024

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The Ultimate Help Desk Analysis & Reporting Checklist for Success

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Your help desk is full of data on customer queries and support ticket resolution. But how much of this information do you analyze? Help Desk Analysis can help you better understand your data to improve customer support. It can reveal trends in customer issues and how quickly your team resolves them. This knowledge can help you optimize internal operations like customer support and improve customer service KPIs without additional workflows or costs.

ChatBee.ai's solution, AI customer support, can help you achieve your objectives with help desk analysis. By automating your help desk, ChatBee.ai will allow you to analyze customer support data better and optimize operations.

What Is Help Desk Analysis & Reporting?

Help desk analysis and reporting is collecting, evaluating, and interpreting data from customer service interactions to improve efficiency and the quality of support provided. This analysis involves:

Examining metrics to identify trends

Pinpoint areas of improvement

Make informed decisions about changes to support procedures or resource allocation.

How Reporting Helps Customer Support Operations

Reporting involves creating detailed reports that provide insights into the help desk's operations. These reports range from daily summaries to comprehensive monthly or annual reviews offering performance snapshots against key service level agreements (SLAs) and other benchmarks.

This helps maintain accountability and plays a pivotal role in strategic planning and helps stakeholders understand how the help desk contributes to the broader goals of customer engagement and retention.

How Help Desk Analysis Improves Customer Support

Thorough help desk analysis and reporting allows your business to:

Monitor support ticket creation volume and adjust staffing accordingly

Review agent performance to reward, train, or upskill them

Observe trends in customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores after support interactions

Share updates with other teams, executives, or key stakeholders looking for an overview of the support team’s performance

What Are Help Desk Metrics and KPIs?

Help desk metrics are quantifiable indicators that evaluate the performance and effectiveness of support teams. They can determine whether the teams achieve their goals and provide satisfactory customer support services.

Help desk KPI metrics can vary depending on the team's specific goals and the type of support delivered. While the purpose of a service desk is to provide IT support, some organizations use it more broadly to refer to:

Customer service

Customer support

Customer advocacy team

Help Desk Metrics vs. KPIs

Although their similarities, help desk metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have different purposes and goals. Help desk metrics are specific, measurable parameters that contribute to the overall KPIs and tend to remain static. KPIs are broader, strategic measures linked to business goals and objectives.

They focus on the organization's overall success, not just the support team's performance. Ticket resolution rate and average response time show whether the team is meeting its goal of increasing customer satisfaction for the quarter (KPI).

Ticket Resolution

Automated Ticketing System

Customer Service Knowledge Base

Slack for Customer Support

Ticket Triage

AI For IT Support

Ticket Handling Best Practices

Automated Email Response Customer Service

AI Ticketing System

Why Are Help Desk KPIs and Metrics Important?

Help desk KPIs, or key performance indicators, help businesses measure and track the performance of support teams and the quality of their services. IT support teams are typically the first point of contact for:

All requests

Issues

Problems

By collecting and analyzing data on KPIs, business leaders can identify areas for improvement, optimize teams' processes and services, and deliver better customer support.

Why Tracking Help Desk KPIs Is So Important

Monitoring help desk metrics benefits support teams and the organizations they serve. Some of these advantages include the following:

Increases responsibility

When organizations clearly define and track KPIs, team members are likelier to take ownership of their work and strive to meet or exceed their goals.

Improves customer satisfaction

By tracking help desk metrics such as:

First Response Time

Time to Resolution

Customer Satisfaction

Support teams can identify areas for improvement and take action to increase the customer experience. Improved customer satisfaction leads to higher customer loyalty and retention.

Optimizes resource management

Monitoring Ticket Volume and Agent Productivity metrics help support teams allocate resources more effectively. These resources can include:

Workforce levels

Training and development programs

Technology investments

Better resource utilization leads to improved efficiency and cost savings.

Aligns with business goals

Support teams can align their performance with the organizations' overall goals. By setting KPIs linked to business objectives, teams can demonstrate their value to the organization and contribute to its success.

Leads to data-driven decision-making

By keeping track of KPIs, support teams gain valuable information to make informed decisions about improving performance. They can identify trends, make predictions, and take action to optimize their processes and services.

How to Enhance Customer Support With ChatBees.ai

AI Agent with knowledge graphs from historical tickets and internal knowledge bases to automate and reduce ticket resolution time by up to 52%!

1. Build Knowledge Graphs from Your Tickets

Build knowledge graphs from popular ticket systems, such as HubSpot Tickets. With insights from historical tickets, resolve new tickets faster.

2. Train Private AI on Your Knowledge Base

Train your private AI using internal knowledge bases such as:

PDFs/DOCs

Web Help Center

Notion

Confluence

Google Drive

ChatBees periodically updates your AI to keep it current.

3. AI Customer Support Starts Working!

ChatBees takes care of the rest by automatically analyzing and researching incoming tickets, providing actionable insights directly in your ticket system, and Copilot, the support agent, to resolve the ticket quickly and efficiently.

Connectors and Integrations

ChatBees focuses on optimizing Real-Time Agent Guidance (RAG) for internal operations, such as customer and employee support. The software boasts accurate responses and easy workflow integration through a low-code, no-code approach.

ChatBees' agentic framework enhances response quality, enabling operations teams to handle higher query volumes without needing DevOps for deployment and maintenance.

Boosting Response Quality and Efficiency with ChatBees' Agentic Framework

This improves predictability and accuracy, enabling these operations teams to handle more queries. No DevOps is required to deploy and maintain the service.

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12 Help Desk Metrics and KPIs to Track

1. Ticket Volume: Getting a Grip on Incoming Requests

Your IT service management (ITSM) and customer service teams should monitor the volume of incoming service requests, aka support tickets. A ticket creation report in your customer support or help desk software should show you the ticket volume your ITSM or support team manages at the time.

Once you know how many tickets your team can handle in a day, week, or month, this help and service desk metric will be crucial for staffing.

2. Ticket Volume by Support Channel: Who Prefers What?

Whether it’s customer service or internal help desk management, we now live in a world where people want to be in charge of how they talk to you. Because your customers’ channel preferences may vary, each channel can require different staffing and skills.

Tracking the ticket volume for each support channel is important for optimizing the efficiency of your support team and the quality of each resolution. It also helps you determine where to move, train, or hire staff.

3. Support Tickets Opened vs. Solved: Keeping Up with Demand

Another help and service desk metric you should look at is the number of tickets solved. In a healthy help or service desk, your tickets are opened and tickets are solved, and trend lines should be parallel. By looking at these metrics weekly, you can ensure you’re keeping up with demand and identify trends in ticket volume.

If resolutions are consistently behind, you may need to add more staff or look at other ways to increase efficiency. If you see a sudden spike in new tickets opened, that can alert you to a service delivery issue or other disruption that needs attention.

4. Ticket Distribution: Are You Tracking the Right Problems?

If you’re using customer support software, you can add category tags to your tickets to help you identify certain topics or products that result in more tickets than others. A support manager must examine how support requests are distributed across different topic areas.

This can help you determine if there is any correlation between satisfaction scores and low first-time responses to support requests. Monitoring your distribution can alert you to a recurring problem with your product or service, which can illuminate where you might need to add or expand on existing knowledge base content.

5. Response Time: No One Likes to Wait

The first response time, or first reply time, is the time between creating a support request and the first documented action a service desk agent takes. The more you jeopardize customer or employee satisfaction. Most people want an acknowledgment that someone has started looking into the issue in a reasonable amount of time after submitting their service request.

Requester wait time is the cumulative time that a support request is unresolved while an agent is working on the issue. Managing expectations for your help desk and service desk customers during a ticket spike is a good idea. People usually understand if you’re transparent about longer-than-normal wait times instead of hiding them.

6. Resolution Time: How Long Will It Take to Fix the Problem?

Resolution time, also known as average handle time in call centers, is an important KPI for your help and service desks. This is a key service and help desk metric because it tells you how long an employee or customer must wait for their issue to be resolved—an important aspect of the overall customer experience (CX).

Resolution time includes the time it takes for an agent to first respond to the ticket, which is another reason to try to decrease response times.

7. First Contact Resolution: Get It Right the First Time

First-contact resolution (FCR) refers to tickets resolved after the first contact with a support agent or service desk staff. Your goal should be to increase the number of FCRs because this means customers get an answer quickly and painlessly, improving your CX.

Resolving tickets on the first try can improve efficiency because fewer agents must touch the ticket. This makes it a good help and service desk metric to target for improvement.

8. Backlogs and Predicted Backlogs: Preventing a Tidal Wave of Tickets

Another key metric a service desk manager or ITSM help desk manager should consider is the ticket backlog in their support queue. If more requests are coming than can be handled every week, you’re building a backlog. Providing a robust knowledge base or using automated help desk software are great ways to mitigate backlog issues.

You can also encourage support agents to tackle ticket backlogs proactively. Your predicted backlog can help you learn from the past and prepare for the future. Monitoring which teams or individuals need to catch up and the expected increase or decrease in ticket volume can help you plan and allocate resources accordingly.

9. Customer Satisfaction Ratings: The Bottom Line

Customer satisfaction is a very important customer service and IT service desk metric. Organizations can measure satisfaction with customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys.

Administer CSAT surveys following a ticket resolution. Once customers complete them, you can see successful interactions or drill into tickets where they weren’t happy. There’s also the Net Promoter ScoreⓇ (NPS), which asks customers to rate you on a scale of one to 10 based on how likely they are to recommend your company to friends or family.

10. Support Agent Performance: The Better They Do, the Better You Do

Your help and service desk employees are critical to the success of your support operation, so it’s important to track individual performance and agent utilization. Performance statistics can help you identify which support agents are top performers and illuminate opportunities for additional training.

Reviewing these metrics regularly also allows you to optimize your staffing allocation based on channels where agents perform well and ticket volumes are high. Playing to each individual’s strengths can help improve agent productivity and provide better service to employees and customers.

11. Customer Effort Score: Measuring How to Improve Support

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a customer service metric measuring the effort a customer must expend to resolve an issue, get an answer, or complete a task. To determine your CES rating, send a survey asking customers to rate the ease of their support interaction on a scale of very easy to very difficult. Calculate the average number based on all of your responses.

You can even include a comment section so customers can describe what made their experience a challenge or a breeze. Sending out CES surveys for various customer interactions helps companies identify what needs simplifying. CES surveys might reveal how hard it is for buyers to return an item or troubleshoot a software issue.

12. Transfer Rate: Are You Routing Customers Correctly?

The transfer rate is the percentage of tickets agents transfer to another team member or department. A high transfer rate could indicate employees or customers reaching the wrong first-touch agent. The help desk’s internal routing system may be the problem in this case.

Intelligent automation can help route employees or customers to the right agent based on their request type, language, or area of expertise. A chatbot can collect key customer information upfront and then route the conversation to the right person to help.

AI Customer Service Software

Ticketing System Workflow

Help Desk Process

Hubspot Ticketing System

AI Customer Service Agent

Real-Time Agent Assistance

Ticket Management System

Digital Customer Service Tools

Slack Ticketing System

Service Desk Automation

Customer Service Automation Software

Help Desk Automation

Automated Customer Support

4 Steps to Better Help Desk Analysis & Reporting

1. Financial ROI: More Than Just Your Cost Per Ticket

Financial ROI seems like a no-brainer: I invest X amount of money in the help desk and expect

Y return over some period. But how this works out with the help desk normally plays out like this:

Make this change

Buy this thing

Outsource my help desk

Our cost per ticket will be X percent less than it is now, so I will save Y. I will infer that the savings obtained is equal to my total ROI.

Justifying Help Desk Investments with Business Impact

Help desk leadership uses this simple model to justify its purchases. It needs help explaining its financial investment in language the rest of the business understands.

You suddenly find it easier to get buy-in when you show how your help desk relates to the business and its bottom line and prove how your desired changes can increase revenue or margin. A big part of this is knowing your audience and speaking their language.

2. Emotional ROI: Feelings, Not Just Finances

A key concept that most businesses don’t grasp is that IT is a service industry, just like hospitality or retail. The help desk has the most significant impact on the overall satisfaction of your IT group.

Users will judge all of IT by whether the help desk is:

Available

Responsive

Polite

Competent

Quick

The customer experience should be a priority. When making decisions about your help desk, consider emotional ROI.

Connecting Emotional ROI to Customer Analytics and Satisfaction

Emotional ROI can be tied to analytics, such as customer satisfaction and net promoter scores. These reflect your customers' happiness and whether they will continue doing business with you.

Most companies have some satisfaction surveys in place but don’t have any processes or programs to acknowledge or address the results. These programs are often considered a low priority, which can be shortsighted, lead to a schism between IT and the business, and drive negative perceptions of IT.

3. Time ROI: Because Today Was Tomorrow Yesterday

As the old saying goes, time is money. It takes three days to resolve tickets that leave the help desk and get escalated to another support group. Contrast this with the mere minutes it takes to resolve tickets at the help desk with First Contact Resolution (FCR).

This fact alone should drive most shift-left initiatives. But most companies don’t take the time to consider this basic logic: The better the FCR rate, the more capacity other support teams will have. When other support teams have increased capacity, there’s no need for additional headcount for:

Upcoming projects

Expansions

Mergers

Rollouts

These capacity savings can be factored into your ROI and business justifications.

4. Effort ROI: Because You Get Out What You Put In

Can your business quantify effort and energy and express the value in doing or not doing something? You can discover some of the hidden costs and gains of your help desk ROI.

You want to be able to answer the question, Do we want to be doing this? And show the benefits one way or another. Let’s look at a common scenario:

Talk with many companies about their support needs and plans, and you’ll hear about how they plan or implement self-service capabilities, specifically around password resets. Most companies achieve only a 30% or higher utilization rate without completely removing the help desk’s ability to reset passwords.

Taking away password resets from the help desk can result in angry mobs roaming the halls with torches and pitchforks, seeking out IT personnel.

Evaluating the True Costs of Incentivized Tool Adoption

Some companies offer users incentives to use a new tool like this, yet that only gets the customers in the system and doesn’t drive utilization. This is a good example of where effort and energy can be misplaced.

If you calculate the true cost of this type of program, you may discover that the return does not justify the investment. Setting up a self-service password management system requires investments in infrastructure, person-hours, the system itself, licenses, and maintenance.

Assessing ROI by Accounting for Full Resource Investment in Self-Service Tools

Companies often calculate these costs against the entire client community using the tool. You still have the added cost of manually resetting passwords for the other 60% of the client community at the help desk.

There is not much of an ROI there, especially when considering all the effort and energy that goes into such an endeavor. Stepping back to realistically account for the effort and energy to show the best use of resources always delivers an accurate picture of anticipated ROI. This helps you make the right decisions for you and your company.

13 Help Desk Analysis & Reporting Best Practices

1. Define Clear Metrics: The Starting Point for Help Desk Analysis

Begin by clearly defining the most important metrics for your service desk. Common metrics include:

First Response Time

Average Resolution Time

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Ticket Volume

2. Set Realistic Goals: Help Desk Analysis Doesn’t Have to Be Overwhelming

Once you’ve identified your key metrics, set realistic and achievable goals for each. Ensure these goals align with your overall business objectives and customer service standards.

3. Provide Adequate Training: Help Desk Analysis Isn’t a Replacement for Human Intelligence

Ensure your service desk team is well-trained and equipped with the knowledge and skills to handle customer inquiries efficiently. Regular training sessions and access to a knowledge base can help improve resolution times and customer satisfaction.

4. Offer a Self-Service Portal: Give Customers What They Want

Customers love processes that save time and fit into their workflows. A self-service portal can

empower users to create service tickets independently and free agents' time for more pressing tasks.

5. Implement a 24-Hour Customer Service Portal: Never Keep Your Customers Waiting

A 24-hour customer service portal ensures your customers can submit tickets anytime and will only have a short time for a response. Overnight agents, agents in different time zones, and automation tools like chatbots can make around-the-clock service possible.

6. Perform Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Talk to Your Customers

Customer satisfaction surveys determine if your business is helping customers accomplish their goals. If customers are unsatisfied, you'll feel it in your bottom line. Understanding customers' pain points through feedback is a tried and true method for improving your services and support.

7. Increase Customer Communication: Don’t Make Customers Feel Like They’re in a Game of Tetris

Use your help desk as an additional channel to communicate with customers and share important business happenings, such as upcoming events or product launches.

8. Use Real-Time Reporting: Get the Most Up-to-Date Information Available

Reporting tools are key to understanding business performance. Analyze metrics in real-time to ensure you have up-to-date information about your company. Real-time reporting helps you make high-level decisions that will strengthen your organization over time.

9. Ensure a Single Point of Contact: Streamline Customer Communication

Every call, email, chat, and social media message should pass through your help desk software. If different forms of communication go to different sources, your centralized help desk becomes useless. Help desks streamline all customer communication into a single point of contact for better organization and faster response times.

10. Build a Knowledge Base

A knowledge base is helpful for both agents and customers. It provides a resource guide for problem-solving. Steps can be copied and sent to customers to save time.

Knowledge bases function as self-service tools for customers, providing instructions for solving common problems without the need to loop in support.

11. Automate Processes

If you can automate something, you should. Automated workflows provide invaluable benefits to your organization.

Using chatbots to categorize and distribute incoming service requests, you can ensure quicker response times. Not only will customers find a faster solution, but you'll save money since manual labor is no longer needed.

12. Set up Integrations

You want your help desk to be an all-in-one hub product. A help desk that can support integrations for apps like social networking and productivity will ensure a more efficient experience for your team and customers. If your current help desk doesn't support integrations, check out this list of help desks that do.

13. Prioritize Customer Experience

Always prioritize the customer experience. Ensure that your service desk is focused on resolving issues effectively and providing a positive experience for your customers.

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Key Advantages of ChatBees

The agentic framework automatically selects the best strategy to enhance response quality across various use cases.

Improved predictability and accuracy, enabling operations teams to handle a higher volume of queries efficiently.

No DevOps support is required for deployment and maintenance, making it a hassle-free solution for customer support needs.

Benefits of Using ChatBees for AI Customer Support

Boosts response accuracy and reduces the burden on your teams.

Empowers operations teams to handle a higher volume of queries without compromising quality.

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Enhances customer support operations without the need for complex coding or maintenance.

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With ChatBees, you can expect a tenfold improvement in your customer support operations without needing a credit card. Simply sign in with Google and embark on your journey towards more innovative, efficient customer support with ChatBees. This opportunity will enhance your customer support operations and elevate your business.

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