As a Customer Service Manager, your goal is to increase client satisfaction, but it can be difficult, impossible even, to improve your client's happiness without utilizing data. One of the toughest parts of using data, is knowing what data to use in the first place!
If you’re measuring the wrong metrics on your customer service dashboard, you may be tricking yourself into thinking that your team is working efficiently, your clients are satisfied and your goals met.
That’s why it’s so important to be tracking the correct metrics. By using one of our best practice templates when setting up your dashboard, you can ensure that you have all of the gauges that are necessary for service success. Let’s take a closer look:
1. Tickets Opened Today
By monitoring the number of tickets opened today, you can know within seconds how big of a workload your team has. This data allows you to ensure you have enough staff to handle the incoming tickets and can help you identify and react when something happens that causes the number of support tickets to spike.
2. Tickets Closed Today
This metric gives you an idea of how efficiently your team is performing. If the number of tickets closed today isn’t consistently keeping up with the number of tickets opened, you may need to consider hiring more staff or changing some workplace practices to increase team performance.
3. New Tickets
Important for tracking SLAs, the number of new tickets allows you to see how many tickets are waiting to be assigned. These are tickets that haven’t even been looked at by a technician, and if you’re following best practices this number should aim to be 0 at all times. If you notice that this number isn’t at zero your average time to response is increasing and you need to address it!
4. Assigned Tickets
Assigned tickets are the tickets that have been responded to and are already assigned to a technician. These tickets are sitting in the person’s queue and serve as another indication of how you are doing in terms of your SLAs. If the number of assigned tickets is too high, then your average time to resolution plan is increasing.
5. In Progress Tickets
If you monitor the number of tickets that are currently in progress, you’re actually checking the performance in relation to another key metric: average time to resolution. The number of tickets in progress also gives a good indication of how well your team is performing.
6. Resolved Tickets
Resolved Tickets is the last metric that contributes to your SLAs. In most cases, this is the best of the SLA metrics for measuring performance. This indicates the number of tickets your team has resolved today.
7. Unassigned Tickets
With unassigned tickets you start measuring the metrics that will allow you to manage by exception. Ideally, this number is always at 0. If there are unassigned tickets, you’ve got a problem because if a customer responds, no one will see the ticket and it will go unresolved. This allows you to quickly identify one of these situations before it occurs!
8. Customer Responded Tickets
This is another metric you’ll always want to be at 0, because if not, it means the customer has sent a response, but your team has not yet seen the reply. Ideally you’ll always send the last word as it contributes to a pleasant customer experience. Tracking this number allows you to see when that’s not happening, giving you the power to look into why your team isn’t responding to your clients.
9. Waiting on Customer Tickets
By tracking tickets that are waiting on a customer response, you are able to follow up with what could be a potential issue. Typically, tickets fall into this category when a customer hasn’t responded in over 3 days. It could be a sign that they didn’t receive the response or maybe they are on vacation and you need to reach out a second time. Either way, this allows you to know when it’s time to follow up on tickets.
10. Tickets Past Due
Tickets that are past due typically have a certain time and date assigned to them, and for whatever reason they were not resolved during that window of time. This could be a result of a ticket that has been resolved but isn’t marked properly, or it could be a true case where the work hasn’t been performed on time. Either way a great indicator of tickets that need immediate attention and may require resetting expectations with the client.
11. Currently Open Tickets by Type
Usually presented in the form of a pie chart, currently open tickets by type will show you areas where your team may be struggling and will need to focus on. It also allows you to identify trends that contribute towards the number of tickets being submitted, allowing you to create a strategy to cut down on the number of tickets you are receiving.
12. Stale Tickets
Stale tickets are tickets that haven’t been updated in 7 days. This metric is both a manage by exception metric and a compliance metric. This number should be at 0 at all times. Best practices say that a ticket should be updated within 7 days at the latest, so if you’ve got stale tickets you need to find out why and how you can stop them.
13. Average Time to Respond - Last 14 Days
Average time to respond is the amount of time it takes to go from new to assigned. The lower the better - if you’ve got a high number here, finding out why should be a priority.
14. Average Time to Resolution Plan
Your average time to resolution plan is the amount of time it takes for your team to start working on the ticket (In Progress status). If this number is high, it’s possible that your technicians have too many tickets in their backlog and they need an extra hand. Typical best in class companies aim to keep this number under 4 Hours.
15. Average Time to Resolution
Average time to resolution shows how long it takes for a ticket to get resolved. This provides insight into how quickly your team is solving problems. Typical best in class companies aim to keep this number under 8 hours indicating that on average all issues will be resolved “same day”.
16. Tickets Opened and Closed - Last 14 Days
An overview of your tickets opened and closed in the last 14 days allows you to quickly see whether you’re ahead or behind. It also allows you to check for trends such as days where your team is not as efficient, or days when abnormally large amounts of tickets are submitted.
What’s Next?
Now that you know 16 metrics for your Service Management dashboard, keep the momentum going with Dashboard Best Practices: a webinar recording of the fundamentals that we see our most successful customers using to drive efficiency with data!
You’ll learn:
- Top 5 rules for designing dashboards
- Most popular dashboards for Service, Sales, Management, and Finance
- Building the right client dashboard
- Driving competition the right way
- Management by exception
- Increasing transparency & efficiency
- About dashboard features: rotation, filtering, etc.
- and much more!
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