Top 7 IT service management metrics you need to measure

How do you measure the success of your IT service delivery if you’re not closely monitoring the numbers that dictate the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization’s service delivery?

As IT leaders, you need to measure the performance of service desk processes by tracking critical ITSM metrics to understand the impact on overall business goals.

Many IT service management (ITSM) metrics can give you a clear picture of where you stand on the IT service delivery podium. But to truly understand and quantify your efforts, IT leaders need to know what to track, measure, and benchmark against to understand their service desk efficiency and quality of service delivery.

The Freshservice Service Management Benchmark Report (FBR 2022) considers seven (7) ITSM key performance indicators (KPIs) that are widely used in the industry to measure the performance of an IT organization’s service delivery and aspire to its goals:

1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
2. Average First Response Time
3. Average Resolution Time
4. Average First Assign Time
5. First Contact Resolution
6. Resolution SLA Percent
7. First Response SLA Percent

Continue reading to find out what each ITSM metric means for your business. 

 

 

 

Seven IT service management metrics you need to measure

1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

How can you tell if your customers and employees are satisfied with the quality of service you provided? Answer – CSAT. This score is a vital ITSM metric that will assess how satisfied end-users are with the quality of IT services your organization offers. And remember, the higher your CSAT score, the more your customers like the service you provide. According to the FBR 2022, organizations in the business of hotels, tourism, and leisure have the highest customer satisfaction rating at 98.01%.

2. Average First Response Time

This metric will tell the time taken by an agent to provide an initial response after a customer reports an incident or requests a service. In case you want to know how your average first response time should like, the lower the better! Did you know that intelligent field suggestions are helping agents respond faster by almost 15%? Field suggesters powered by machine learning (ML) help auto-assign the correct parameters and field values to incoming service desk tickets. Automatic classification of incoming tickets saves agents’ time and effort, thereby helping IT teams focus on high-priority tasks and initiatives.

3. Average Resolution Time (ART)

How long does it take for your team of IT professionals to resolve an end-user’s issue? You measure the average resolution time to tell you the exact time your service desk team takes to completely resolve end-user requests and issues. Similar to the average first response time, you also want to aim for a lower ART score if you want your end-users to be delighted with your service. The FBR 2022 study tells us that construction and real estate organizations are the quickest to resolve customer queries with an average resolution time of 18.49 hours.

4. Average First Assign Time

This is also known as ‘in-queue’ time. The intent here is to find out how long it takes for incoming tickets to be assigned to an agent or a group after their initial creation. The faster a ticket gets assigned to an agent, the faster end-user issues get resolved. You can leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to automatically categorize and assign tickets to agent groups based on their availability, skills, and expertise. If you are not meeting your SLA for complete resolution time, this metric can be a diagnostic measure to understand how long the initial assignment takes.

5. First Contact Resolution (FCR)

In an ideal world, not all tickets get closed in the first interaction with the end-user. Some get escalated and take longer than a day or two to resolve. But you still want to measure this metric to give you an idea about the percentage of those incoming tickets that get resolved within the first interaction with the end-user. This will help you set realistic expectations for your CSAT and overall IT service delivery.

6. Resolution SLA Percent

Want to know if you’ve met your SLA? Track this ITSM metric to know the percentage of all tickets that have been resolved within the service level agreement. If you get a score of anything above 94% (this is the Freshservice benchmark for 2022, FYI), pat yourself on the back. You deserve it!

7. First Response SLA Percent

Finally, you also want to measure the percentage of tickets for which agents have initiated a first response within the service level agreement (SLA). You can calculate it by dividing the percentage of the number of tickets whose first responses were sent within the SLA by the total number of tickets whose first responses were sent in the selected time period.

Voila! 

That brings us to the end of the list (and the article) of seven ITSM metrics you need to measure to truly tell if your IT service delivery is as good as you think it is. If you’d like to learn more about measuring your service desk KPIs, check out the Freshservice Benchmark Report here