Report these three
First response time. The number customers actually feel. Report the median and the 90th percentile, never the mean — one ticket answered after nine days destroys the average and hides everything else.
SLA compliance. The percentage answered within target. It converts “we are quite quick” into something you can put in a contract.
Reopen rate. How often a resolved ticket comes back. Without it, closing tickets fast looks identical to solving problems.
Be careful with these two
Tickets closed per agent. Rewards cherry-picking easy tickets and closing hard ones prematurely. If you must use it, pair it with reopen rate and QA score.
Average resolution time. Meaningless across mixed categories. A password reset and a hardware replacement have nothing in common, and averaging them produces a number that describes neither.
The distribution matters more than the average
Support performance is not normally distributed. A small tail of very slow tickets does most of the reputational damage and is invisible in every mean. Report percentiles, and manage the tail.
Measuring quality, not just speed
Sample a fixed number of tickets per agent per month against a rubric agreed with the team — accuracy, tone, completeness, process. An hour a week produces better coaching than any dashboard.
What to do with the numbers
Nothing, unless one person owns each metric and reviews it on a schedule. Reports that are produced and not discussed change no behaviour at all.