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IT Help Desk KPIs & Best Practices For Quality Assurance

By Hugh Fort in Business News, posted August 5, 2022

You use IT help desks to help your customers. So, there is no point in providing help desks if you do not ensure they are providing customers with a quality service. Therefore, it is crucial that you test for quality assurance.

Here are some of the best key performance indicators and best practices to engage with to make certain your help desks are running as smoothly as possible and your customers are happy with the service.

First Response Time

You only need to know a few QA metrics to improve software testing with the end goal of enhancing your system and customer satisfaction.

One key metric for help desks that you need to know about is the first response time. That refers to the time it takes to respond to a customer request. It is not the time that it takes to resolve the issue. It simply refers to responding to a request.

The response time should be as close to zero as possible.

Thankfully, you have direct control over response times. For instance, you can send automatic and instantaneous email replies to tell your customers that you will get back to them within a certain timeframe or communicate which steps need to be taken to resolve the issues.

Make sure you always test your help desk’s first response time to be certain that your customers are receiving immediate responses.

Average Resolution Time

Knowing how long it takes on average to resolve customer problems is also a critical part of your help desk quality assurance testing.

You need to know that you are providing the level of service that you believe you are giving your customers. By testing the average resolution time, you can also identify opportunities to deliver faster resolution in the future.

Improving the average resolution time is one of the most crucial KPIs. You can easily check the resolution time by monitoring the number of tickets that are resolved in the first instance, the number of exchanges on a ticket, and the number of tickets that are reopened.

You can then find ways of improving your resolution time.

You may also wish to look at ways of keeping customers happy if there are delays. For example, take a leaf out of Apple’s book. Apple is now offering iPhones to customers who have to wait for lengthy repairs.

Customer Retention Rate

To gauge the success of the overall health of your business, you not only need to keep up with the latest business news. You also need to measure your customer retention rate.

Maintaining an excellent first response time and resolution time will not mean much if your customers are not satisfied with your level of service.

Of course, by increasing your customer retention rate, you can increase your revenue and you will not have to spend as much on customer acquisition. So, do not overlook how important this element of quality assurance is.

Overall Customer Satisfaction

KPIs like the number of phone calls or the number of closed tickets are certainly important quality assurance metrics that you should be monitoring.

But unless you discover whether customer problems were actually solved, how the problems were resolved, how quickly they were resolved, and how satisfied customers were with the human service, you will not be able to know how successful your help desk and customer service are.

Therefore, you should use surveys to gain customer satisfaction scores. You can then determine how customers really feel.

In turn, you can take steps to provide higher quality service, enhance customer loyalty, and achieve more sales.