How to calculate Support Agents KPIs

Calculating KPIs for Support Agents is a complicated task. Many of them carry a different weight and importance, based on your department and your company's goals and requirements.

In this article, I will cover my suggestion for implementing a formula to calculate and properly track your Support Agents' KPIs, understand your top and lower performers, and automate everything so it will be super easy to use on a monthly basis. I will share in another article my recommendation on how to do it for Team Leaders.

#1 - Per team, decide which KPIs we are measuring

Each team has different KPIs based on the roles and responsibilities of the team. For example, in Tier 1 Support ("Fast & Furious" Teams) it's more important to focus on Handled Tickets, FRT, FCR, and CSAT. Other important KPIs might be Escalated Rate, Done Rate, TTR, and more. For Tier 2 Teams I would focus more on CSAT, TTR, and Done Rate.

Since things might change from month to month, I also like to measure percentages, which should be the same all the time, rather than complete numbers. For example, I don't measure "100 escalations", I measure it as "40% escalations out of the total handled tickets".

Personally, I also like to add another Team Leader Feedback section, where each Team Leader can fill out a 10 questions monthly form to rank their agents' performance, on things that are beyond just the numbers - "Is the agent fully utilizing our procedures?", "Is the agent tagging and categorizing the tickets properly?", "Is the agent learning from their mistakes?", And more. In the end, a score between 0-100 will be created, which can be used later on.

In addition to that, each agent that has an AoR (Area of Responsibility) has dedicated KPIs, based on the requirements of their role (number of tasks completed, how much effort has been put into them, what is the quality of the work).

#2 - Split it into four

After you have selected the relevant KPIs for your team, split them into four categories - Poor (1 Point), Fair (2 Points), Good (3 Points), and Excellent (4 Points). Each one should be a range of your expectations, where The Minimum End of Fair = The Minimum KPI the agent should meet.

So, if for example, the minimum expectation of FRT is 5 Minutes, the ranges would look like this: Poor > 5 Minutes, Fair <= 5 Minutes, Good <= 3 Minutes, Excellent <= 2 Minutes. To make it easier to grasp:

If an agent reached an avg of 4 Minutes FRT during the month, he got Fair. If an agent reached an avg of 2.5 Minutes FRT during the month, he got Good.

#3 - Decide the priority of each KPI

Once we have established which KPIs we are measuring, we need to decide which are more critical than others and carry more weight than the rest. For example, you can decide that Customer Satisfaction and Handled Tickets are more important for the Tier 1 team, so they can get 20% each.

Per KPI, decide on its importance using percentages, for a total of 100%.

#4 - How to calculate?

Simply calculate the KPI Score * Percentage, and summarize all of the KPIs.

So for example, if I got a Good (3 Points) of FRT, and the Percentage is 20%, I will calculate 3 * 20% = 0.6. Do the same for all different KPIs and percentages, You should have a score between 1-4. That score is the result of the agent.

#5 - QAing the Data

As you can see from the example above, the Overall Score is not automatically the result of the Agent. This is to avoid agents trying to just meet 2-3 top KPIs and neglecting the rest. We should strive to have a Bell Curve of agents - where 10% are Poor, 40% are Fair, 30% are Good, and 20% are Excellent.

• If your company provides Quarterly MBOs, I would also highly recommend that it will be a bit more difficult for the agents to reach the "Good/Excellent" criteria, so you (or your TLs) can give an option for a "Manager Upgrade" from one scoring category to another. It's better to upgrade rather than having to "Manager Downgrade" an agent that actually reached the expected KPIs.

It's crucial to also check that the KPIs actually work and meet the expectations on a monthly/quarterly basis and to adjust them according to your department and company goals and needs.

#6 - Automation

Don't you just love automating things?! In order to do so, first, we create a sheet with all the raw data which later will be used in order to calculate the scores.

Then, we will create another sheet of the actual scores (the 1-4 scoring), and using Excel formulas we will take the information from the Raw Data and use it to calculate the score.

For each KPI, you can use a formula similar to this to transition the Raw Data into Actual Scores:

=if(Isblank('Raw Data '!B95),"NoData",(IFs('Raw Data '!B95>40,4,'Raw Data '!B95>=35,3,'Raw Data '!B95>=30,2,'Raw Data '!B95<30,1)))        

In case you are using MBOs, you can also automate the calculation of the average score month-over-month to calculate the quarterly MBO each employee is entitled to.

Summary

That's it! Feel free to DM me if you wish to get more information about this formula, and here are some additional reading materials about how to have the best support department in the world: