Monitoring your help desk and the help desk software to understand the effectiveness of the services provided is called performance measurement. Performance measurement is done using metrics which are quantitative measures of performance that are gathered from customer satisfaction surveys, problem management tracking systems, automated call distribution systems, and call monitoring.

Common Help Desk Metrics include such things as the number of calls received and accepted during a particular amount of time, the amount of time a client holds, answer times of the calls, the amount of time taken to resolve the issue, and the percent of clients who hang up before being served. Other metrics can include the time an agent spends logged into the support system, the time spent in tasks, and the number of calls taken and resolved by a representative.

Your help desk software can help with measuring the following:

- Wait time in queue – Some helpdesk doftware will inform the caller of estimated wait time.

- Average handling time – This is both how long the agent and client talked and how long the agent took to finish resolving and reporting the issue.

- Service level – This is a percentage of calls answered within a specific amount of time.

- Calls per hour – The number of calls an agent takes in a hour.

- Calls abandoned – Calls are most frequently abandoned by clients when the wait time is long or the call center is experiencing a high volume of calls.