In today’s always-on world, tech incidents can be devastating for businesses. Not only are they expensive to resolve, but they also can cost customers their business.
Managing incident response involves many decisions, from who needs to be engaged to how much time it takes to get things back up and running. Keeping track of key metrics will help teams make these critical decisions more effectively and ensure maximum uptime for their organization.
Incident Count
Incident management is detecting, analyzing, and responding to technical problems. These incidents can range from a customer who can’t access the company’s website to a software error that causes a network outage.
These issues can cause a great deal of trouble for businesses. They can cost them money and time, resulting in lost revenue, customer satisfaction, and significant maintenance charges.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) help teams track and improve incident management processes. These metrics allow teams to diagnose issues, set benchmarks, and make reasonable goals for the future.
Resolution Time
One of the most crucial incident management KPIs is resolution time. It’s critical to the customer experience and can affect CSAT scores.
It’s also vital to the efficiency of your team and their productivity. Tracking this metric allows you to pinpoint any underperforming employees and set their goals to improve their performance.
However, this metric is only as accurate as the context in which it is calculated. For example, if your support agents take long to resolve an issue, you may need to look at the underlying problems causing the delay.
Often, this is a sign that your support team needs additional training or help with complex queries. You may also need to ensure that your support team works with other departments, such as fulfillment or engineering. Getting these teams on board and creating transparent escalation workflows is an excellent way to speed up resolution times.
Mean Time to Remediate
MTTR is an important KPI that measures how long your team takes to find, respond and remediate a security incident. It is a good indicator of how efficiently your team works and helps you determine what is slowing down your response times.
Cyber-resilient organizations have low MTTR because they follow a proactive strategy to identify and remediate environmental vulnerabilities. It enables them to quickly fix critical vulnerabilities before they become assets attackers can exploit.
However, if your MTTR is consistently high and you need to know why then it’s time to take a deeper look at how your team manages the detection process. You could need more alerts, or your staff could respond more effectively to incidents.
Escalation Rate
The escalation rate is the proportion of customer service inquiries sent to higher support levels. It can be a simple transfer of an issue to a supervisor or an escalation in the scope of a customer’s request with additional personnel called on for assistance or consultation – possibly even to someone with expert understanding in a separate team.
Escalation rates can be a helpful indicator of how well your organization is handling issues. Moreover, it can help you pinpoint areas where your team needs training or support.
In addition to escalation rates, you can track other KPIs related to your incident management process. For example, you may track how many tickets must be escalated to a higher level of support and how long it takes to resolve them.
MTBF
MTBF, or Mean Time Between Failures, is one of the most critical KPIs in incident management. It indicates how long a piece of equipment is operational before it breaks down or stops operating, helping businesses handle unplanned downtime and improving overall reliability.
Typically, businesses track MTBF using data from their repairable equipment to assess the reliability of the asset. However, the maintenance team determines what a failure is and how long it takes for a machine to break down, and it varies from company to company.
The most effective way to improve MTBF is preventive maintenance regardless of the type of equipment being measured. Identifying issues that cause equipment to fail and resolving them before they happen increases the value of your equipment and decreases downtime.
Instant Resolution Rate
The instant resolution rate shows how many tickets agents resolve in a single interaction (email response, phone call, chat session) with the customer. It’s a key metric to track and can be used to gauge efficiency, customer satisfaction, and how your CS team responds to customer requests.
It can vary widely depending on the type of business and the types of tickets they receive. Still, it’s a critical metric, as customers prefer to avoid being bounced around from agent to agent.
Measuring first contact resolution on a live support dashboard keeps you focused on improving the support experience, not just operational efficiency. Set your own goals for how many issues should be fixed at first contact and monitor them regularly to spot ticket patterns and make adjustments to improve customer experience.