4 metrics to monitor customer happiness

How do you measure your customer support team success? The answer that immediately comes to my mind is "customer happiness". It is an ultimate helpdesk metric: if your customers are happy, it means that you've done a great job. However, "customer happiness" has one problem (apart from it being an obvious buzz term and sounding cheesy) — it can't be measured.

Any metric that can't be measured is a bad metric — that's Analytics 101. We can't use it to evaluate our team performance, but we can break it down into smaller, more manageable metrics.

Average number of tickets created per day

This is the most basic and one of the most important helpdesk metrics. You'll know how many tickets your team can handle per day/week/month. That's probably the most useful performance indicator. You can also use it to predict when you need to hire additional customer support employees.

Average number of tickets closed per day

A great metric to use in combination with "new tickets" is "tickets closed". In a healthy helpdesk the number of closed ticket should be more or less equal to the number of new tickets. If you constantly fall behind, it's time to hire more people.

Most helpdesk apps show these two metrics together. Here is how we do it in Jitbit Helpdesk:

Response time

We talked about response speeds in the very first article in this series. If you make customers wait for hours for a reply, they won't be happy. Usually only the first reply speed is being measured, since it is the most important one. Customers want an acknowledgement that someone has taken over their request within a reasonable amount of time. Also, if you have SLAs and guaranteed response times, this is probably the most important metric for you.

Resolution time

Resolution time is the time between ticket creation and closing. Low response times does not necessarily mean that you're awesome. If your average response time is less than an hour but your total resolution time is 5 days, that's not good. Remember that we should aim to solving every ticket as quickly as possible with a minimum number of interactions with customers.

Check out How to Set Measurable Customer Support Goals That Drive Growth