But what exactly are KPIs? What can they do for you – and perhaps more importantly, what can’t they do?

What are KPIs? Good KPIs vs bad KPIs

Let’s start with what KPI stands for: Key Performance Indicator. Why is the meaning of the term KPI so important? Because it shows that not every result is a KPI, and neither is every goal you set for your teams. Only your key targets count towards your KPIs. Don’t water them down.

Where are you now?

Before you even start thinking about your actual KPIs, make sure you know how you’re performing right now. You can’t set realistic goals if you don’t even know how far away they are.

Find out how to pick relevant KPIs with a baseline measurement.

The next step is to research industry benchmarks and other data that give you an idea of how much growth or change is realistic for your organization.

Don’t just come up with numbers out of thin air. Chances are if you just start setting random goals, they’ll turn out to be either too difficult or too easy to reach. Not very motivating for your team members. Why should they go the extra mile for a goal that’s only an inch away? And why work hard for a goal they can never reach anyway?

Make sure you know what your starting point is, so it’s easier to determine where you think you can go in three months or a year.

Make your service desk KPIs SMART.

When to use KPIs

Only use KPIs for important key metrics. You don’t want to inflate your KPIs by just using them whenever. Also make sure your KPIs are aligned with your service desk goals. You don’t want your teams to work on conflicting goals.

A good rule of thumb is to set high level KPIs for your service desk as a whole, and low level KPIs for teams and individuals. Use high level KPIs for things related to how your service desk is performing as a whole. How many tickets are you processing each month? How well do you maintain your SLAs?

For your teams, opt for lower level KPIs. These KPIs apply more directly to teams and individuals, so they should relate to goals that your teams and employees can reach individually.

For instance, take a look at how many unresolved incidents each operator or operator group has and see what you can improve. Set attainable KPIs based on your findings and provide resources and training accordingly. And, of course, make sure your team members agree that their KPIs are attainable as well.

Not every result is a KPI, and neither is every goal you set for your teams. Only your key targets count towards your KPIs. Don’t water them down.

Defining your service desk KPIs

Here are four questions to ask when you start setting up your service desk KPIs:

1. What do you want to get out of your KPI?
2. Why does the outcome matter?
3. How can you influence the outcome?
4. How do you measure the outcome?

You can use the tips and questions in this blog to create clear and succinct KPIs for your department and your teams. After all, KPIs are a form of communication. And what use is any communication if the recipients can’t act upon it?

Want to explore further?

What would KPIs for your service desk look like in real life? Discover how to use specific KPIs to measure customer satisfaction. Or read our guide to better reporting to find out how you can use KPIs for incident management.

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5 key metrics to keep track of at the service desk

These simple pieces of data can help you gauge ‘the health’ of your service department.

1. Resolution times

To the customer, resolution time is key. How long do they need to wait on average for their ticket to be resolved? And does it differ for various incident priority levels?

If you experience very long resolution times on tickets, or large variation in response times to resolve the same issue, this will of course affect your reputation as a Service Desk and the services you provide. This simple report can uncover a lot of areas for improvement. Remember, though, that the customer cares about the overall resolution time. Not how long the ticket was held at different teams.

And before you dive head first into fixing the issue, make sure you know what the source of the problem is. Look to your other metrics if you can, or have a chat with the team. There could be a correlation with staff levels, insufficient training for certain issues or confusion as to who picks up what ticket.

2. The tickets’ journey(s)

You should also measure the number of tickets that are solved straight away, the first-time fix, versus the ones that need to be passed on. This can help you gauge either how difficult the incidents that are logged are, or the level of knowledge of your first line staff.

See if there are any tickets that keep being passed through that could be solved by the first line with a little bit of training. Maybe some tickets have really really quick response time and seem very repetitive? Consider turning these into knowledge items in your Self Service Portal.

3. Tickets processed/Staff available

This is important to measure your efficiency. Measure the amount of tickets processed over your number of available service agents. The number here could give you insight into two different areas of improvement– either that your team is overworked, or that you may need to hire more staff or find a way to make your processes more efficient. Maybe some information can be shifted left?

4. The Services with the most Incidents

If you want to keep track of which of your services may need more attention or find problem areas, this is where to look. What causes the most Service Desk support calls? If you find that something breaks a lot for example, then a way to free up more time for your team is to fix that issue once and for all. Or if there is something that people keep asking you about? Find a way to inform them about it in a different way.

5. Your ticketing backlog

Trend data will help you spot things that may need changing or updating. Or seasonally reoccurring events that you can plan for better if you are aware they are coming up.

This key metric can also be used retrospectively, to show your team or someone higher up that a fix you implemented to fix a problem you spotted previously indeed had an impact. And check your backlog data. If your number of tickets that are unresolved keeps growing, it may be worth looking into.

Optimizing your services

For more on optimizing your services, try our e-book on Best Practice Service Management.

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In our experience, many service desk customers complain about the slow pace at which calls are resolved. That’s why service desks want to work more efficiently, bring down the total number of calls, and adopt a more customer-oriented approach. But before you can decide on what to do to improve, you have to know where you are at currently. That is what baseline measurements are for.

What is a baseline measurement?

A baseline is kind of like a photograph; it gives you an idea of your current situation. After the project is completed, you then take another ‘photograph’ and compare that one to the one you took at the start of the project. This way, you get a clear idea of the progress you have made throughout the project.

Where does your organization stand in terms of its service delivery? Find out with the TOPdesk Maturity Model.

What is a baseline measurement good for?

These type of measurements have several advantages.

1. Gain insight into your points for improvement

A baseline will give you an idea of the things that are going well and that you want to maintain, but also reveals your opportunities for improvement. Based on this baseline measurement, you decide on your objectives and discuss which improvements would be feasible.

For example, an educational institution I’ve worked with said that one way to improve customer satisfaction is to reduce lead times. That’s why we spent a lot of time on improving knowledge management and simplifying processes during our improvement project. One improvement was to give second-level support staff the authorization to close calls themselves, instead of calls being bounced back to the service desk to be closed there.

2. Gain insight into your priorities

A baseline measurement will help you set your priorities. Say your customers are telling you that they’re dissatisfied not only because it takes a long time for them to get the help they need, but also because the solution is not always satisfying. You then know that you need to improve on both those things.

When making improvements, make sure to distinguish between quick wins and long-term improvements. You start with the quick wins, because your customers will reap the benefits thereof sooner and they will take relatively little effort on your part. Reducing response times is a good example of a quick win. For the long term, you focus on things like improving quality, since this usually takes more time.

3. Making a habit out of measuring your efforts

Baseline measurements also help you get better at performing measurements. That may sound obvious, but making a habit of measuring your efforts regularly is absolutely essential! Why stop at performing baseline measurements only?

Continue to perform measurements frequently, so you’ll know which improvements are going to yield the best results. This is essential to achieving service excellence. Metrics enable you to make tactical decisions based on more that gut feelings alone.

Pick the KPIs that are most relevant for you

It’s important to first have a good think about what you want to measure. I recently visited an institution that attaches a great deal of importance to customer satisfaction and had an average customer satisfaction score of 6.1. They wanted to improve on that, but they did not know why their scores were so mediocre. Did they take too long before helping customers? Was the service desk unfriendly to their customers? Or were the solutions they were offering not good enough? The only way to find out is by asking the right questions.

In short, first think about which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are relevant for the improvement process that you are performing this baseline measurement for.

A baseline gives you an idea of the things that are going well and that you want to maintain, but also reveals opportunities for improvement.

Which of your projects deserves a baseline measurement?

Ask yourself this question: which of your past projects would have deserved a baseline measurement? Can you think of any implementations for which you did not perform such a measurement? If so, why didn’t you? Did you base your objectives for those projects on numbers or on gut feelings?

What is stopping you from doing a baseline measurement for your next project?

Check out these often-used service desk metrics

There are many different KPIs in the field of service management. Read more on which metrics & KPIs to use.

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What is an XLA?

If your Service Desk was a fruit, what would it be? An apple? An orange maybe? Try a watermelon. It may sound ridiculous, but humor me for a second! The Watermelon Service Desk was first used by Marco Gianotten of Giarte for an SLA focused Service Desk. The dashboards are green and management is thrilled. Yet underneath simmers red warning signs of resentment and dissatisfaction.

5 minute average response time and 8 hour closure rate sounds fantastic. But SLA stats miss something: the experience of the user. Not delving beneath the shiny green exterior could be causing your business harm.

The value of XLAs to an agile way of working

XLA is a concept developed by Giarte and the X stands for eXperience. It means that performance is dictated by the one person who feels it the most: the customer. The good thing is that generally, you need less XLAs than SLAs to give an indication of performance, which makes them easier to manage.

If you are planning to adopt a more Agile way of working, then XLAs will compliment this perfectly. XLAs naturally focus on interactions and customer collaboration rather than cumbersome contractual obligations. The XLA is also very susceptible to change so as the needs and requirements of your customer changes, your XLAs adapt too.

Where do I start to measure customer experience?

There are hundreds of methodologies to measure customer experience. Start out by keeping it simple and using a single question to capture the customers experience at close of call. Star ratings are a useful one-click response that already give you insights into the services previously unseen by traditional SLAs. For some more in depth tips – here are some excellent ways to get real customer feedback.

But there is more to it than metrics. XLAs represent a change in culture by shifting the focus from performance to the experience of the customer. You have to get your operators on board through persona creation and mapping the customer journey. Over time you will notice an interesting shift; you might start missing the odd SLA target, yet your customer experience continually improves. The question is raised: what are we using all these SLAs for?

Streamlining your Services

If you have left some of your heavy SLAs behind and you find yourself with a few simple XLAs that keep your customers happy, you will find yourself less like a watermelon and more like the humble grape: small, nimble, easy to manage. And green both inside and out. How many people do you see with a whole watermelon in their lunch boxes?

Inspired?

Read more on putting your customers first in our Customer Centricity E-book.

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