KPIs Every Service Desk Should Monitor to Boost Support Performance

Management guru Peter Drucker said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. But what exactly should you measure to manage the effectiveness of your service desk?

Paying attention to the right service desk KPIs makes it easy to map a direction from point A, your current performance level, to point B, the performance level that:

• Guarantees customer satisfaction
• Fine-tunes your processes for maximum productivity, and
• Improves service delivery that ensures business continuity

In this post, we’ll show you 3 of the most important metrics to measure and monitor to boost business performance in record time.

5 Service Desk KPIs that Point Towards Better Performance

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There are a good deal of metrics for monitoring the performance of service desks and Network Operations Centers (NOCs). But you need a laser target on the few that matter to succeed.

At MSP Assist, we work with over 500 Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to implement automation and integration. So, while riding shotgun with successful MSPs, we learned they focus on these 5 KPIs:

1. Time to Close P1

This is possibly the most essential measure for any helpdesk whose prime job it is to keep everyone working.

The faster a P1 ticket (which is a critical outage affecting multiple workers) is closed, the better it is for the continuity of critical operations. This keeps service availability high and the impact of lost business hours at a minimum.

2. First Call Resolution

When a helpdesk is efficient and effective, most needs are met on the first call. This happens more often when the staff is empowered through training and documentation.

If they have to escalate the support request to a senior engineer or a specific application team, that’ll mean more cost and slower response for your clients.

3. Tickets By Issue Type

When you understand what generates tickets and sort that by volume, you can plan your training, recruitment, and standard operating procedures accordingly.

With the right resources allocated to the most common issues, most issues will get resolved quickly, ensuring maximum satisfaction and better service delivery at the lowest cost.

4. Time By Issue Type

Time by issue type will point to skill gaps within your team. If your time per issue type (as a percentage) differs significantly from your tickets percent by issue type, this could mean a training or skills gap. And it reveals a quick-win opportunity for training or hiring.

5. Endpoints Per Engineer

For the best MSPs, this constant should consistently increase over time. Successful MSPs don’t add costs every time they add clients, instead they onboard without adding resources. The new recurring revenue will mean a 100% gross margin.

Key Takeaway

The KPIs that matter for a service desk manager who wants to improve service for their clients and profitability for their organization include: time to close P1, first-time resolution, tickets by issue type, time by issue type, and endpoints per engineer.

These are actual growth levers that present the straightest path to a more efficiently run helpdesk.