21 Helpdesk Best Practices To Drive Exceptional Support Results

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Your helpdesk team has just received a spike in tickets. To make matters worse, this increase in inquiries is due to a recent product update. Customers need clarification and help quickly. As your team scrambles to respond, a manager looks to see how many tickets are solved and how quickly. They discover that the team is stuck on a ticket about a previous software version. Instead of focusing on resolving issues with the latest update, they are having to sort through the helpdesk documentation to find content related to the old version. This type of situation is not only stressful for the customer and your team, but it also highlights poor helpdesk operations. Implementing helpdesk best practices can improve these operations to enhance the customer experience and reduce stress for 24/7 Customer Support agents. This article will explore several proven strategies for enhancing helpdesk operations to boost customer satisfaction and team performance.

One effective way to implement best practices in the helpdesk is to use AI customer support software like ChatBee's solution. This type of technology can help your helpdesk get organized to improve ticket resolution times and enhance the overall customer experience.

What is a Help Desk & Its Importance to Modern Businesses

Help desks are central support systems designed to assist customers and internal teams in resolving technical or service-related issues. They serve as a frontline tool for customer support, ensuring quick and efficient issue resolution. Help desks are key in modern businesses as they enhance customer satisfaction, increase productivity, and build brand loyalty. A well-organized help desk fosters smoother operations, supports IT teams in managing requests, and reduces downtime, ultimately contributing to improved business outcomes.

Modern help desks are where customer inquiries, requests, and issues come together. But what exactly is a help desk, and how does it work? From troubleshooting technical glitches to answering product-related questions and offering general guidance, a help desk is a dedicated team (or even a single person) responsible for fielding and resolving customer support issues.

Traditionally, help desks focused on internal IT support, but now they serve internal employees and external customers with a centralized point of contact for all support needs. A help desk functions with several moving parts, including:

The Ticketing System: The Cornerstone Of A Help Desk

A ticketing system is the cornerstone of a help desk. This software captures and organizes customer inquiries, allowing agents to:

Track progress

Prioritize issues

Collaborate effectively

Multichannel Support: Meeting Customers On Their Preferred Platform

Modern help desks offer support across various channels:

Phone

Chat

Social media

This ensures customers can reach you on their preferred platform.

Knowledge Base: Empowering Customers With Self-Service Resources

A comprehensive knowledge base empowers customers to find solutions independently through:

Articles

FAQs

Other self-service resources

Reporting and Analytics: Using Data To Enhance Support Processes

Help desks provide valuable data on customer interactions, resolution times, and other key metrics. This data allows for continuous improvement and optimization of support processes.

Beyond Troubleshooting!

Even if a help desk lacks many features, it can still improve customer service. That's because, at their core, help desks are designed to organize and manage customer conversations.

Omnichannel Support

Customers expect to connect with support on their preferred channel, email, phone, chat, or social media. A well-equipped help desk provides seamless omnichannel support, ensuring customers can easily reach help.

Personalized Interactions

A good help desk experience feels personalized. Help desk agents strive to understand individual customer needs and tailor their interactions accordingly.

Proactive Problem Solving

The best help desks don't just wait for issues to arise. They use data and customer insights to anticipate problems and proactively address them, preventing customer frustration in the first place.

Why Use Help Desk Software?

The transition to using help desk software can seem nerve-wracking. You must train your whole team on a new tool and build new help desk procedures to fit it. Yet, there are some real benefits to transitioning to software designed to help you help customers.

Create Structure For Your Team

Most help desk software has the functionality to help create a structure for your team. For instance, you can organize and prioritize incoming conversations rather than have everyone have a free-for-all in a shared inbox. Some help desks also allow you to create automatic assignments that take even more guesswork from team members' day-to-day workings.

Improve Your Quality Of Service

The additional functionality of help desks makes it easier for team members to focus on their work rather than worrying about finding the right conversations and responses. Most help desks offer:

In-app saved replies

Ability to access knowledge bases

Automatic ticket assignments

With fewer extraneous things to focus on, your team can spend more time and energy writing the best responses to your customers.

Use Surveys To Understand Your Customers Better

One vital ticket-handling best practice is allowing your customers to tell you how they felt about their interaction. While you can find third-party tools to do this when using a personal inbox, the functionality is built-in to most help desks.

Integrate Self-Service

When you purchase a help desk, you will most often get access to a built-in knowledge base. The best help desks will allow you to search through knowledge-base articles directly in the editor you use to write responses. Sending additional documentation and information to your customers proactively helps them understand more about your product.

Automate Routine Tasks

Many help desks have built-in functionality to help automatically or manually route conversations based on the content of the conversation or where your team members believe they should send them. Some even have an option to allow customers to sort their tickets based on need. You can ask them how urgent their conversation is as they fill out your contact form.

Manage Performance

Help desks have built-in analytics that can help you detect trends in performance. You'll have access to several metrics that you might only have with a dedicated tool. For instance:

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Time to response

Time to resolution

Number of responses to resolution

Busiest time of the day and week

Number of responses per team member

Trends in reporting over time

Most frequently used saved replies

Most commonly sent knowledge base articles

Handle time

You can also correlate different metrics to see how one impacts the other. For instance, you might notice customer satisfaction increasing as your handle time decreases. These metrics would only be available with a dedicated help desk.

What Makes an Excellent Help Desk?

Even though all help desks are a step up from a non-dedicated shared inbox, some features set apart great help desks from good ones. You should look for a few things when evaluating a new help desk.

1. Integrated Functionality

Ideally, all the functionality you want should be directly available within the help desk. While you can buy piecemeal add-ons, it's much easier if everything is already attached and works together. Here are a few things you may want to consider:

Knowledge base capabilities

Chat

Social media monitoring

Contact forms

Reporting

With direct integrations of all of your features, you minimize the context-switching your team needs. Beyond that, your analytics and reporting are even more in-depth when everything is under one roof.

2. Great Self-Service Functionality

Self-service is essential for most customers and can be a great way to empower your support team to focus on higher-impact inquiries rather than answering low-hanging fruit inquiries. For a help desk, seek software that facilitates help desk processes around building documentation and self-service.

These features may include things like:

A documentation builder

Built-in search functionality for documentation

Chatbot support

Automated documentation suggestion in your contact form

WYSIWYG knowledge base builder

Building great self-service options for your users is at the top of the list for ticket-handling best practices.

3. Ability To Automate

Automation often takes over tedious work your team can skip. It can be anything from sending out a survey after an interaction to automatically routing a conversation based on its content.

For instance, if one of your team members is typically responsible for going into the queue and assigning conversations all day, imagine what they could do if you gave them that time back.

4. Easy-To-Use Interface

No matter how many great product features, none will be used if the interface is hard to work with. As you pick your help desk, bring your team members into the evaluation. It's vital that anyone who will be working at the help desk every day feels excited about it. If there's anything in the user interface that your team doesn't like or doesn't feel intuitive, it could cause issues with your help desk procedures.

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21 Important Helpdesk Best Practices for Enhanced Customer Support

1. Choose the Right Helpdesk Software

Help desk software is the foundation of any customer service operation. The right platform should be robust yet user-friendly, offering features that streamline workflows, automate tasks, and empower agents to excel. Look for a help desk solution that aligns with your specific needs and budget while offering features like:

Ticketing System: A central hub for managing all customer interactions, ensuring efficient issue tracking and resolution.

Automation Capabilities: Automate repetitive tasks like ticket routing and follow-up emails, freeing up valuable agent time.

Omnichannel Support: To meet customer expectations, provide seamless support across multiple channels such as:

Email
Phone
Chat
Social media

Knowledge Base Management: Empower customers to find solutions independently with a comprehensive and easily accessible knowledge base.

Meaningful Metrics: Robust reporting tools can provide valuable insights into customer behavior, agent performance, and overall help desk effectiveness.

2. Ensure a Single, Seamless Customer Journey

Customers expect to connect with support on their terms. They might start a conversation via email, switch to chat for a quick clarification, and then prefer a phone call for a complex issue. Omnichannel support ensures a consistent and seamless customer journey across all touchpoints.

Here’s how to prioritize omnichannel support and keep customer frustrations in check:

Offer Support Across Multiple Channels: Make it easy for customers to reach you through their preferred channel, email, phone, chat, social media, or a self-service portal.

Maintain Consistent Messaging: Keep brand voice and messaging consistent across all support channels, regardless of the agent or channel used.

Provide a Unified Customer View: Use your help desk software to create a unified customer profile that tracks all past interactions, regardless of channel, empowering agents to provide personalized support.

3. Create Help Desk Groups

Your help desk agents are subject matter experts, capable of confidently tackling even the most complex inquiries. Creating dedicated help desk groups brings that specialization to the surface and allows support teams to benefit from:

Deeper Expertise: By focusing on a specific area, agents can better understand customer needs and product functionalities, leading to faster and more accurate resolutions.

Improved Efficiency: Matching customer inquiries with specialized agents streamlines the workflow, reducing resolution times and boosting overall efficiency.

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Customers are more likely to feel heard and understood when interacting with agents who possess in-depth knowledge of their specific needs.

4. Leverage Helpdesk Automation

CX professionals' time is often consumed by repetitive tasks such as ticket routing, sending follow-up emails, and resetting passwords. Help desk automation empowers you to automate repetitive tasks, freeing up valuable agent time for higher-value interactions with the help of:

Automated Ticket Routing: Automatically route incoming tickets to the most qualified agent based on predefined criteria, ensuring swift and efficient issue resolution.

Auto-responder Emails: Set up automated responses to acknowledge incoming tickets and provide basic troubleshooting steps, reducing the burden on agents for routine inquiries.

Self-service Portal Automation: Automate knowledge base suggestions and FAQs within your self-service portal to empower customers to find solutions independently.

5. Incorporate Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) establish formal agreements between your help desk and your customers, outlining the timeframe for resolving various support requests. Not only do they outline metrics like first response time and resolution time, but SLAs help CX support:

Set Clear Expectations: SLAs set clear benchmarks for response and resolution times, ensuring customers understand the level of service to expect.

Improve Accountability: SLAs hold your team accountable for meeting defined performance standards, fostering a culture of efficiency and continuous improvement.

Boost Customer Satisfaction: Meeting or exceeding SLA expectations builds trust and increases the likelihood that your customers leave happy.

6. Build an Extensive Knowledge Base and FAQs

Customers who can find answers to their questions independently help free up your agents to focus on more complex issues. This empowered state is achievable by building an extensive knowledge base and FAQs, a cornerstone of many help desk best practices. A well-maintained knowledge base is a central repository of self-service resources, including:

Articles: Detailed guides and troubleshooting steps empower customers to address their own common questions.

FAQs: Answers to frequently asked questions presented in a clear and concise format step in as a resource that can reduce agent load.

Videos: Visual tutorials and demonstrations for a more engaging learning experience lead to faster resolutions and a more positive customer experience.

7. Create Canned Responses and Templates

Need a way to deliver consistent, high-quality responses that save your agents time? Canned responses are pre-written text snippets that agents can insert into tickets to address common inquiries or provide standard information. Templates, another help desk best practice, are pre-formatted email structures that agents can personalize for specific situations by:

Maintaining Consistent Messaging: Canned responses guarantee consistent brand voice and messaging across all customer interactions.

Saving Time for Agents: Pre-written content allows agents to respond quickly to common inquiries, freeing time for more complex issues.

Improving Overall Experience: Faster response times and consistent communication contribute to a more positive customer experience.

8. Use Real-Time Reporting

Real-time reporting gives you valuable insights into your help desk performance and makes data-driven decisions, providing a live snapshot of metrics like agent performance, customer satisfaction scores, and even ticket volume (trends). By leveraging real-time reporting, you can:

Identify Bottlenecks: Pinpoint areas where your help desk operation is slow or inefficient, allowing for targeted improvements.

Optimize Workflows: Use data to streamline workflows and allocate resources effectively.

Proactively Address Issues: Identify potential problems based on real-time trends and take preventative measures.

9. Enable Third-Party Integrations

The modern help desk ecosystem is built on collaboration. Third-party integrations, a key help desk best practice, empower you to connect your help desk software with a variety of other business applications, breaking down data silos and streamlining workflows.

Some valuable third-party integrations to keep in mind:

CRM (Customer Relationship Management): Integrating your help desk with your CRM system will give you a holistic view of the customer journey.

Communication Tools: Integrate with tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams to facilitate seamless internal communication among support agents.

Productivity Tools: Connect your help desk with project management tools or document-sharing platforms to streamline workflows and improve agent productivity.

10. Train Your Helpdesk Team

By prioritizing ongoing customer service training for your help desk team, you'll cultivate a culture of continuous learning, improve agent performance, and ultimately elevate the customer experience. Investing in constant learning and skill development elevates your help desk agents:

Expand Knowledge and Expertise: Regular training ensures agents stay up-to-date on product knowledge, industry best practices, and new technologies, empowering them to tackle complex issues with confidence.

Sharpen Communication Skills: Effective communication is key to building rapport with customers. Training programs can help agents hone their active listening, empathy, and clear communication skills.

Increase Their Confidence: Training empowers agents with the knowledge and tools they need to excel, increasing agent confidence and job satisfaction.

11. Hire the Right People

Hiring the right people involves finding candidates with the right blend of technical skills and soft qualities. Look for these key qualities when assembling your help desk team:

Technical Skills: Depending on your specific needs, look for candidates with expertise in relevant software, troubleshooting skills, and a basic understanding of your industry.

Problem-Solving Skills: Any help desk agent must be able to analyze issues, identify root causes, and develop effective solutions.

Excellent Communication Skills: Strong written and verbal communication are crucial for building customer rapport, clearly explaining solutions, and actively listening to their concerns.

Customer Focus: Hire individuals with a genuine passion for helping others and a commitment to exceptional customer service.

12. Conduct Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys, a key help desk best practice, provide valuable insights into customer sentiment and help you identify areas for improvement. Here’s how incorporating customer satisfaction surveys benefits your help desk operation:

Gather Valuable Feedback: Surveys allow you to collect direct customer feedback about their experience with your help desk, pinpointing areas of strength and weakness.

Highlight Areas That Could Work Better: Analyzing survey data can help you identify areas where your help desk operation can be optimized to better meet customer needs.

Prove Your Customer-Focused Approach: Soliciting feedback demonstrates your commitment to continuous improvement and customer satisfaction.

13. Aim for First Contact Issue Resolution

First-contact resolution is a vital help desk best practice that minimizes any back-and-forth communication between agent and customer. Prioritizing first-contact resolution, with a robust knowledge base and well-defined processes can:

Impact Customer Satisfaction: Swift issue resolution reduces customer frustration and fosters a sense of accomplishment for the agent and the customer.

Improve Efficiency: Resolving issues on the first contact frees agents to focus on more complex inquiries, boosting overall efficiency.

Reduce Costs: Minimizing back-and-forth communication reduces operational costs associated with handling repeat inquiries.

14. Continuously Analyze Helpdesk Data

By continuously analyzing your help desk data, you'll gain a deeper understanding of your customer base. Regular data checks have the power to help you:

Uncover Hidden Trends: Identify emerging customer issues, product usage patterns, and areas where your help desk processes can be optimized.

Make Data-Driven Decisions: Make informed decisions about resource allocation, training needs, and future investments in your help desk operation.

Predict and Prevent Issues: Anticipate potential problems and take preventative measures before they escalate into major customer service issues.

15. Gather Feedback From Customers and Team Members

Fifty-two percent of customers believe companies need to act on their feedback. Gathering feedback from both customers and team members, a crucial help desk best practice, provides valuable insights from diverse perspectives and fuels ongoing optimization.

Embracing a feedback-driven approach means your help desk aligns with everyone’s needs:

Customer Feedback: Regularly solicit customer feedback through surveys, reviews, and direct conversations to identify areas for improvement from the customer’s perspective.

Agent Feedback: Empower your agents to provide feedback on processes, tools, and training programs to identify areas where the help desk can better support them in delivering exceptional service.

Continuous Improvement: By dedicating yourself to open communication and feedback collection, you can continuously identify areas for improvement and refine your help desk operation over time.

16. Use Analytics to Power Data-Driven Decisions

Help desks can provide a goldmine of insights into measuring and improving the employee experience, from identifying areas of development for your team to understanding how employees interact with you. With real-time and historical analytics built inside your help desk solution, help desk teams can take action on what’s happening and understand past trends.

Predictive analytics can also help you forecast what your employees will likely do based on historical data. This can help your support team anticipate employee needs and identify patterns, delivering a better experience.

17. Deploy a Chatbot to Help You Scale

Chatbots can be a great partner to a help desk team. They can recommend help center articles to empower employees to self-serve one-to-one, saving agents time from answering repetitive requests. Bots are also “always on,” so customers get answers 24/7. This enables a help desk team to scale by reducing wait times and answering more tickets.

18. Implement Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is continually assessing and improving processes to ensure that ticketing systems remain efficient and effective. It involves regularly reviewing performance metrics, identifying improvement areas, and continuously implementing changes to enhance your customer support experience.

By embracing continuous improvement practices, you can proactively improve the quality of service provided, optimize efficiency, and consistently deliver a superior customer support experience.

19. Ensure Data Security and Compliance

With the growing importance of data privacy and security, ensuring customer data protection and compliance is essential through measures such as:

Encryption to safeguard data in transit and storage

Access controls to restrict data access to authorized personnel

Data backups to secure and restore data in case of loss or breach

20. Offer Multi-Channel Support

Deploying a help desk that offers multichannel support is important for many reasons. For one, it allows customers to reach out to your business via their preferred channels, increasing convenience and accessibility. Multichannel support also ensures customers can seek assistance at any time.

For instance, your customer service communication should be such that email and self-service portals are available 24/7, while phone support may have limited hours.

Tips to Offer Multichannel Support

Customer Preferences: Understand your customers’ preferred communication channels. Analyze customer data to identify which channels are most commonly used and ensure you have a presence on those channels.

Channel Consistency: Maintain a consistent level of service quality across all support channels. Customers should receive similar responsiveness, professionalism, and assistance regardless of their chosen channel.

Resource Allocation: Allocate resources based on channel demand. If specific channels are more heavily used, ensure you have adequate support agents trained to handle inquiries that arrive on those channels.

Unified Dashboard: Ensure your help desk has a unified dashboard consolidating inquiries from all channels into one view. This enables efficient ticket management and consistent customer interactions.

Response Time: Define and adhere to response time standards for each channel. Customers expect timely responses, so ensure that inquiries are addressed promptly across all channels.

Cross-Channel Support: Train support agents to offer cross-channel assistance when necessary. For example, if a customer starts a conversation on social media but needs a more in-depth discussion, agents should be able to transition to email or phone support.

21. Ensure Clear and Concise Communication

Clear and concise communication is essential because it directly impacts the efficiency of issue resolution and customer satisfaction. When support agents communicate clearly and concisely, it becomes easier for the customer to implement the proposed solution. This reduces the resolution time and minimizes the risk of misunderstandings or frustration on the customer’s part.

Clear communication enhances professionalism, saves time and resources, and contributes to a positive experience, essential for maintaining customer loyalty and a positive brand image.

Tips to Ensure Clear Communication:

Active Listening: Start by actively listening to the customer’s issue. Let them explain their problem fully without interruption, and ask clarifying questions if needed. Understanding the issue thoroughly is the first step to providing a clear response.

Use Simple Language: Avoid technical jargon and use plain, everyday language that the customer can easily understand. If you must use technical terms, explain them in the simplest way possible.

Use Visual Aids: If applicable, illustrate your points with screenshots, diagrams, or other visual aids. Visuals can convey information more clearly than plain text.

Stay Calm and Patient: If the customer is frustrated or upset, maintain a calm and patient demeanor. Clear communication is essential to reassuring customers and effectively addressing their concerns.

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15 Must-Track Help Desk Metrics for Monitoring IT Support

Help desk metrics measure your customer support team's performance and ability to resolve arising issues. Tracking goal-specific KPIs tells you how well you're meeting expectations, where problems may slip through the cracks, and what areas you can improve. The specific help desk metrics you should track will depend on the type of service you're providing.

Support desks that solve customer IT issues will require different metrics than help desks for internal IT problems. While every organization will need contextual metrics to monitor and improve their services, here are 15 standard IT support metrics every enterprise should track to start benchmarking and improving their help desk experience.

1. First Response Time

First response time is the time between submitting a support ticket and receiving an agent's first response.

Why You Should Track It

After a support ticket submission, the first response lets the customer or employee know it’s been received and handled. A short first response time shows your customers and employees you care about getting them the help they need and indicates a prompt and productive support team.

How to Measure It

Track the time difference between when a support ticket is submitted and when an agent first reaches out.

2. Resolution Time

Time-to-resolution is how long your support team takes to resolve an issue.

Why You Should Track It

Issues should be resolved quickly; tracking resolution time lets you know whether your team meets those expectations. Knowing average resolution times can also help identify outliers or major issues. If a ticket takes longer than normal to resolve, it could indicate a different problem.

How to Measure It

Measure the time between submitting a support ticket and having an agent mark it resolved.

3. Ticket Volume

Average ticket volume is the number of tickets submitted during a specific period.

Why You Should Track It

Ticket volume tells you how frequently your customers or employees encounter issues. Not only does this let you know that you might need to ramp up my self-service support options, such as a knowledge base or help center, but it can also help you predict the size of my support staff. Tracking your average ticket volume makes it easy to identify trends and forecast periods where ticket volume may increase.

How to Measure It

Measure the total number of support tickets submitted during a day, week, month, quarter, or year — or even above.

4. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a scale-based measurement of customer satisfaction with your service.

Why You Should Track It

Resolving tickets quickly doesn’t matter if customers aren’t satisfied. Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) are a simple way to determine whether you meet your customers’ expectations.

How to Measure It

Ask customers to rate their level of satisfaction on a 1 to 5 scale from highly unsatisfied to extremely satisfied. Total your number of satisfied customers (those who responded with 4s and 5s) and divide it by the total survey responses.

5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A Net promoter score (NPS) is a scale-based measurement of how likely customers are to recommend your business (i.e., “promoters”).

Why You Should Track It

While CSAT measures customer satisfaction after a particular interaction or event, such as:

Getting support on a ticket

NPS has a more long-term perspective

This shows satisfaction ratings that consider the entire customer lifecycle.

How to Measure It

Prompt customers to rank their likelihood to recommend your business on a scale from 0-10. Total your number of “detractors” (respondents who said 0 to 6) and subtract it from my total number of “promoters” (respondents who said 9 or 10).

With Whatfix, product teams can create in-app NPS prompts and other targeted in-app user survey prompts with no development support to collect real-time feedback.

6. First Contact Resolution Rate

First contact resolution rate is the number of support tickets resolved during the first contact.

Why You Should Track It

Identifying the number of support requests that can be resolved quickly gives you an idea of how productive my team is. Problems resolved with minimal back and forth can also point to opportunities to create new self-service support options that eliminate the need for help desk intervention.

How to Measure It

Measure the number of issues solved during the first contact and divide it by your total number of support tickets.

7. Agent Utilization Rate

Agent utilization rate is the percentage of time an agent spends responding to tickets, chatting with customers, or performing other work-related tasks.

Why You Should Track It

Agent utilization rate is a productivity metric that helps you see if your team is overwhelmed or overstaffed. On average, a “good” utilization rate is around 50%. This means an agent spends half their workday responding to calls and other customer-related support tasks. Keeping an eye on this number helps you identify if you need to increase (or decrease) your team of agents.

How to Measure It

Measure the time an agent spends on designated tasks and divide it by the total time spent on their shift. Multiply by 100 to find your percentage.

8. Average Handle Time (AHT)

Average handle time (AHT) is spent on customer calls or interactions.

Why You Should Track It

Average handle time (AHT) is another metric that tells you how efficient your support team is. It includes the time the customer waits for an agent and the time spent resolving the issue. While longer AHTs aren’t necessarily a sign of an unproductive or inefficient team, it could lead to frustrated or impatient customers.

How to Measure It

Total the time spent on each call or interaction, including talking, on hold, or following up. Divide this number by the total number of calls.

9. Ticket Backlog

Ticket backlog is the total number of unresolved customer support tickets submitted during a specific period.

Why You Should Track It

My ticket backlog would be non-existent in an ideal world, but in the real world, tickets can accumulate faster than my team can resolve. Tracking my ticket backlog helps prevent agents from being overwhelmed and promptly resolves my customers’ issues.

How to Measure It

Total the number of unresolved tickets (including tickets agents have responded to but haven’t closed) accumulated during a designated period.

10. Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer effort score (CES) is a scale-based metric that measures how much effort a customer has to exert to get support.

Why You Should Track It

As we said before, getting help should be easy. My customer effort score (CES) tells you if my support process is a breeze or a massive headache. A high CES score tells you I’m meeting customer expectations, while a low score lets you know I need to make changes.

How to Measure It

Ask customers to rate the ease of resolving their issues, then see where my average score falls.

11. Predicted Backlogs

Predicted backlog is a forecasting metric that uses past data to predict future ticket spikes and growing backlogs, helping service desk teams better manage support ticket queues.

Why You Should Track It

Anticipating a growing ticket backlog can help my team plan accordingly and allocate additional resources to prevent my backlog from getting out of control.

How to Measure It

Use past ticket backlog numbers to identify trends in ticket upticks and estimate future backlog changes.

12. Support Tickets Opened vs. Solved

Support tickets opened vs. solved is a comparison metric that measures the total number of tickets opened versus the total number of tickets solved.

Why You Should Track It

Every ticket should be solved, but that doesn’t mean they are. Knowing the number of tickets opened compared to the number of tickets solved gives me a clear idea of how many unresolved tickets I still need to respond to.

How to Measure It

Compare the total number of tickets opened in a specific period and the total number of tickets solved in that period.

13. Transfer Rate

Ticket transfer rate is the total number of calls or support inquiries that must be transferred to another department or support team.

Why You Should Track It

Getting the right person to respond to a support request is key to quickly resolving issues. Tracking my transfer rate shows how many customer support tickets needed to be sent to another agent (i.e., the number of calls initially sent to the wrong team).

How to Measure It

Compare my total number of calls transferred to my total number of calls.

14. Service-Level Agreement (SLA) Compliance

Service-level agreement (SLA) compliance is the percentage of cases resolved that meet my service-level agreement (SLA) standards.

Why You Should Track It

My SLA should be upheld whenever possible, but some instances require stepping outside the box. Tracking SLA compliance rates helps me ensure I’m always meeting the expectations or will point to a major issue to resolve.

How to Measure It

Track the total number of resolved SLA-compliant tickets and divide them by the total number.

15. Escalation Rate

Escalation rate is the percentage of calls transferred to a superior due to complications, customer frustrations, or issue complexity.

Why You Should Track It

Escalating a call is a sign that something isn’t right and that someone with more experience or power needs to step in. Knowing the percentage of calls that need to be escalated can help me identify the more significant problems to fix them and help create an efficient support ticket priority level system that escalates the most critical, time-sensitive help desk tickets and issues.

How to Measure It

Measure the number of calls escalated compared to the number of calls.

Use ChatBees’ AI Customer Support Software to 10x Customer Support Operations

Help desk tickets often come with a lot of unstructured data. A customer may open a ticket to discuss a particular issue with your product. Nevertheless, they may mention another product in their description, share a link to an online forum, and include a screenshot of an error message.

Automating Support Ticket Management with AI

This information can help support teams quickly solve the customer's issue, but only if they can extract and make sense of it. ChatBees uses AI to automate this process and help teams manage incoming tickets and resolve customer issues faster. It can intelligently categorize and tag support tickets to help teams quickly identify and solve problems. It can use machine learning to detect patterns within historical data to help surface relevant information and suggest potential solutions to customers and support agents.

The help desk can analyze customer and support agent interactions over time to identify areas for improvement and enhance overall performance.