Almost every disagreement about support performance turns out to be a disagreement about definitions. This handbook fixes that by giving each of 24 metrics one precise definition, an explicit formula, the decision it is meant to support, and the way it is most commonly distorted.
How it is organised
- Responsiveness: first response time, time to first useful response, customer-perceived waiting time, coverage within customer business hours.
- Effectiveness: resolution rate, first contact resolution, repeat contact rate, reopen rate, escalation density.
- Experience: satisfaction, customer effort, sentiment trend, hand-off satisfaction.
- Automation: contained and resolved, contained and abandoned, automation coverage by intent, unedited send rate.
- Capacity and cost: occupancy, concurrency, cost per resolution, cost of repeat contacts.
The part most readers use first
Each metric has a short "how this gets gamed" section. Auto-acknowledgements deflating first response time, optimistic closures inflating first contact resolution, survey timing inflating satisfaction, naming these patterns explicitly is usually what stops them, because they are rarely deliberate.
Choosing an executive set
The final chapter proposes a five-metric executive dashboard and, more importantly, argues for what to leave off. The recommended set pairs one responsiveness measure at the 90th percentile, repeat contact rate, hand-off satisfaction, cost per resolution and a sentiment trend by account tier.
Who it is for
Support and operations leaders building or rebuilding reporting, and analysts who inherit a dashboard nobody can explain. It assumes no statistical background beyond percentiles.