First-Contact Resolution rate OR First-Touch Resolution Rate
First-Touch Resolution (FTR) rate is the percentage of issues resolved during the first call itself, eliminating further calls or conversations.
High FTR means greater customer satisfaction and is a sign of incident management maturity.
FTR rate results in a happy customer. It is crucial and saves dollars because service desk resources are less costly than L2 and L3 support.
Hat Tip: This can be manipulated like MTTR, closing calls quickly, without ensuring the resolution & customer remains unhappy.
Calls reopened
The number of calls reopened because the incident closed before fully resolving it.
The target is complete customer satisfaction and resolution on an issue. Calls should be closed only after ensuring the fix.
Hat Tip: Calles reopened can quickly reduce customer happiness than a slow yet complete resolution.
Time to resolve
The mean time to resolve (MTTR) is the average time to resolve an incident once it is reported to the service desk, sorted by priority.
This metric relates to customer satisfaction: the faster you resolve issues, the faster your customer can get back to work.
However, Someone can easily manipulate this metric. If calls are closed too quickly, without confirming with the customer that resolution is complete, the MTTR may look good—but your customers will not be happy.
This phenomenon is known as watermelon metrics. Your dashboards are green, but customer satisfaction is red when you cut and open.
Hat Tip: Rewarding increasing MTTR numbers could be counterproductive
End-user knowledge article access frequency
How often your customers use the knowledge-base shows the effectiveness of the information/KB article.
If customers don’t use articles, we need to point them to the required information and educate them about self-help.
Hat Tip: This metric can be necessary for the problem management area. While customers can resolve an issue themselves, the very issue shows a loss of productivity, where problem management can intervene and fix it.
Service availability
We measure Service availability for reliability, Maintainability, Serviceability, Performance, and Security.
We measure availability as a percentage. We calculate it based on agreed service time (as defined in the SLA) and downtime.
Most SLAs will have a percentage of allowable downtime. Imagine this is three hours per month. A significant outage could quickly fill up all the downtime specified in the SLA(Understandable by Customer).
But if a critical service has momentary interruptions at regular intervals. If it is unavailable 60 times each month for 3 minutes at a time, these service interruptions cause significant disruption to productivity.
Hat Tip: Ensure that you report the total downtime for the month and the number of service disruptions.
Customer OR User satisfaction
We measure End-user satisfaction via a periodic survey or other mechanisms.
Here also, the watermelon effect plays a role. Service management KPIs(Key Process Indicators) are all looking good. The dashboards are green, but customers are still unhappy.
It shows that either you’re measuring the wrong things or analyzing with the wrong lens.
Hat Tip: The primary aim of service management is to delight customers and users, meet business expectations, and enable the IT organization to progress its vision and mission. If your customers are unhappy, then metrics don’t matter! Simple.
Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is another good way of knowing customer satisfaction and loyalty to a product, service, or company.
The usual survey question is, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”
NPS =% of high score (9-10) minus% of low scores(equal or below 6), ignoring neutral scores (7 and 8).
Hat Tip: NPS is a valuable metric for ITSM organizations. A worthy viewpoint on how to best analyze NPS and see comments too: Net Promoter Score: A Constructive Critique