Help desk metrics defined: FRT, MTTR, backlog age
Most help desk metrics are simple ratios or time spans, and the same name can mean different things in different tools. Write down each metric’s start, stop and exclusions, and apply them the same way every time.
Definitions
- First response time (FRT)
- Time from ticket creation to the first reply from a person. Decide if automatic acknowledgements and internal notes count. Most teams exclude both. See the glossary.
- Resolution time
- Time from creation to the moment the ticket is resolved. Decide whether the clock stops when you resolve it or when the requester confirms, and which waits pause it.
- MTTR
- The abbreviation is used for mean time to repair, recover, resolve and respond, which are not the same. Say which one you mean. In a help desk it is usually the average resolution time. An average is pulled up by a few very long tickets, so also look at the median.
- Backlog size and backlog age
- The backlog is the set of open tickets. Size is the count. Age is how long the oldest ones have been open. Age is the better warning sign. See ticket backlog.
- Reopen rate
- The share of resolved tickets that the requester or team reopened afterwards. A high rate often means tickets are being resolved before the problem is fixed.
- First contact resolution
- The share of tickets solved in the first interaction, with no follow-up needed. Pair it with the reopen rate so it cannot be improved by closing tickets early.
- SLA attainment
- Tickets that met their target divided by tickets that had that target, over a period. Compute response and resolution separately.
Choices that change the number
- Business hours or calendar hours. The same ticket can show 3 hours or 20 hours. See business-hours SLA math.
- Pauses. Time waiting on the requester can be left in or taken out.
- Mean or median. Use the median for a typical ticket and a high percentile, such as the 90th, for the slow tail.
- The period. Measure tickets by when they were created or when they were resolved, and keep to one choice.
- Small samples. A week with ten tickets can swing widely. Look at trends over several weeks.
A small-team routine
ActiveQ’s Reports calculate these measures for you. Or, once a week, count tickets created and resolved, note the age of the oldest open ticket, and look at the slowest few. The metrics without a reporting suite guide shows how to do this from a queue view and a spreadsheet.