“In 2017, 89% of businesses will compete mainly on customer experience.”
– Gartner

With pricing no longer the distinguisher it used to be, customer service has become the key differentiator that can set your business apart. Evidently, good customer service is paramount.

Software solutions like Zoho Desk help you deliver top quality customer service. But, deploying a help desk solution takes you only halfway through. Analyzing your customer service data, tracking the right metrics and managing them proactively is just as important as providing great customer service. Ignoring the insights that these data points offer, could cost you a fortune.

In this post, let’s take a look at how Zoho Reports can help you measure your support team’s performance and improve the quality of your customer service.

Ticket inflow by channel
Ticket inflow is the first and foremost metric a support manager would want to check. The ‘Ticket inflow by channel’ report tells you the number of tickets received along with their submission channels. This will give you an idea of which channel your customers prefer the most. Analyzing this pattern can help you plan your resources during a launch, a seasonal sale, or a holiday well in advance.

First Reply, Resolution and Wait Times
Speed is not an option, it’s a necessity. The speed of your support team is measured based on three metrics:

• Average First Reply Time: The average time taken by your agent(s) to make the first reply
• Average Wait Time: The average of the sum total of time frames between each request and reply
• Average Resolution Time: The average time taken to resolve a ticket

This report shows you the average first reply time, wait time and the resolution time, all under one roof. All three metrics have a direct impact on customer satisfaction and retention.

As a support manager, you see a sudden spike in one of these metrics and decide to examine. With Zoho Reports, you can view the underlying data and drill down to a specific data point. Slice and dice your Zoho Desk data the way you like it. With the right figures in hand, you can find out the root cause. This will help you hire new agents, plan a suitable staffing pattern, train your agents better, and speed up the whole process.

Resolved tickets by agents
The Resolved Tickets by Agents Report will let you set a performance benchmark for your team. Knowing the number of resolved tickets across different priority/severity levels will help you set realistic goals when it comes to SLA.

Escalated tickets
Too many escalations are an indication that you are slowly building an unhappy customer base. By finding out how many tickets are escalated in a given period of time, you can measure how good your agents are, and decide if they need more training. This metric is also useful for finding out which tickets are causing the most chaos.

Backlog trend
Backlog volume is an important metric that a support manager monitors on a regular basis. Some of the factors that contribute to high backlog volume include growing business size, agent’s availability/performance, ticket inflow, lack of resources, and inefficient workload distribution.

In this report, the red line indicates backlog. Upward backlog trend is an alarming sign you should not ignore.

Deadline compliance
Maintaining your deadline compliance rate speaks volumes about your support team’s performance. A rate decrease is a clear warning that you have set unrealistic goals that your team is not able to keep up with.

Customer satisfaction
A short first reply time translates to higher customer satisfaction rates. By ensuring your customers’ needs are met quickly, you are building a loyal customer base.

Information to insights

Legendary entrepreneur John Rohn once said, “One customer, well taken care of, can be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising.”

This holds true when it comes to your help desk. Help desk metrics are not just fancy figures, they are a real marker of how customers perceive your brand, how happy your customers are and where you stand in the market. Constantly analyzing such metrics and monitoring the health of your help desk is a necessity to succeed.

Zoho Reports also provides seamless integrations that will let you track and analyze these metrics for your Zendesk data and other similar help desk data. This is a just a small glimpse of what Zoho Reports is capable of. Keep an eye on this space. We will be back with lots more soon.

Set up Zoho Desk Advanced Analytics now!