Measure what customers feel
A support dashboard can show dozens of numbers. Most teams only need a few, chosen because each one matches something a customer notices: how long they waited, whether the problem was solved, and whether they had to ask twice.
The seven KPIs
Track these weekly, in business hours, and look at the median as well as the average.
- First response time: how long a customer waits for the first real reply from a person.
- Resolution time: how long from the first email until the ticket is resolved.
- Open backlog and its age: how many tickets are still waiting, and how old the oldest are.
- Tickets per agent: how many open tickets each agent holds, to spot overload early.
- Reopen rate: the share of resolved tickets the customer replies to because the problem was not fixed.
- Replies per ticket: how many exchanges it takes to solve an issue; a rising number often means unclear answers.
- Customer satisfaction: a one-question survey after resolution, read for the comments as much as the score.
Watch the backlog live, review the rest weekly
Backlog and workload change by the hour, so they belong on a screen the team can see during the day. A team leader who can see that one agent holds 20 tickets while another holds 4 can fix it before customers feel it.
Response time, resolution time and reopen rate move more slowly. Review them once a week, compare with the previous four weeks, and look at a few individual tickets behind every change.
Avoid the common traps
Numbers change behaviour, so choose them carefully.
- Do not count automatic acknowledgements as first responses.
- Do not reward agents for closing tickets quickly without also watching the reopen rate.
- Do not compare agents on ticket count alone; some handle harder work than others.
- Do not let tickets left over weekends hide in an average; report the oldest waiting tickets by name.