Measuring the success of a Zendesk Administrator is just as important as measuring the success of the agents using Zendesk. 

In many cases, your Zendesk instance is the source-of-truth and a high priority system-of-record for the work your support team does. That’s why it’s critical that the configuration does what the business needs and interruptions are kept at a minimum. 

It’s also often the case as you scale your support team that administration of your tech stack reports to a different department (such as IT) than to the stakeholders that use the tool for customer-facing activities. This can create friction, so it’s important that the two teams are aligned on expectations. To keep your Zendesk administrators accountable, they need their own set of performance metrics. 

Knowledge and Skill Development Metrics

To start, there are some metrics you should check to ensure your administrators have the right skills and system knowledge for the complexity of your business. 

Zendesk is an ever-evolving platform, including regular product releases and acquisitions. Are your Zendesk admins knowledgeable enough about Zendesk’s current state to act like consultants and provide advice? 

For example, maybe you could save money or achieve more by moving more functionality to Zendesk — would your Zendesk admin notice and share that opportunity?

The proficiency of your admin team can significantly impact the effectiveness of your Zendesk instance. Metrics to consider in this area include:

1: Training Hours per Admin

Track the number of hours each admin spends on training and skill development. Continuous learning is essential for keeping up with Zendesk updates and best practices, so this could be a good quarterly goal (e.g. X hours of training per quarter). 

2: Certifications and Certification Rate

Measure the number and percentage of admin team members who have completed relevant Zendesk certifications (or certifications for tools you’ve integrated with Zendesk). This metric ensures that your team has the necessary skills and knowledge to manage the platform effectively.

3: Internal Knowledge Base Contributions‍

Track the number of articles or resources the admin team contributes to the internal knowledge base. Zendesk is not always intuitive. Having reliable documentation on workflows, definitions, and expectations, can help with onboarding new hires and in high-pressure situations. This metric demonstrates their commitment to sharing knowledge and supporting the broader team.

Change Request Response Metrics

Timely responses to change requests are crucial for maintaining a smooth and efficient Zendesk operation. Delays can impact agent productivity, customer satisfaction, and overall business operations. 

Your Zendesk admin team needs to be able to respond to the needs of the business quickly — especially if the change request is to fix something customer-facing.

‍4: First response time‍

Measure the time it takes for an admin to provide an initial response to a change request. Set targets on what response levels are expected given the priority of the change. This metric will help to understand if your administrators are watching for new changes and are appropriately prioritizing fixes.

‍5: Work order backlog

Track the number of outstanding work orders. Ideally this should be kept to a minimum, but there are long-standing changes that may require more time and testing. This metric will help you visualize if there is outstanding work or if some initiatives are being ignored. Depending on the size of your backlog, it might also be helpful to track the average or median amount of time items have lived in the backlog.

Zendesk Admin Efficiency KPIs

Efficient change request closure indicates effective problem-solving and issue resolution. These are usually specific to priorities and should be compared with expectations between the stakeholders and the Zendesk admin team. 

Both of the below metrics are critical to making sure that the right fixes are being completed in the right time frame. Benchmarks might be something like:

• Critical (Outage or Production Impact): Resolution < 1 hour, 95% of the time
• High: Resolution: < 8 hours, 90% of the time
• Medium: Resolution < 3 days, 75% of the time
• Low: Resolution < 14 days, 50% of the time
  

6: Time to resolution

Track the time from when a request is submitted to when it's fully resolved and implemented.

‍7: Resolution rate‍

Measure the percentage of requests resolved within the agreed upon timeframe.

Zendesk Disruption Time

A high uptime ensures that agents can access and use Zendesk effectively, minimizing disruptions to customer service. In this context, uptime isn't just the amount of time Zendesk itself is available. Your admins will have very little impact on that. 

Instead, uptime should include integrations breaking or changes that disrupt a workflow or take down parts of your customer-facing services. For example, triggers that fail, chat or forms widgets not working, or a key integration failing for a period of time. These things should be tracked to ensure that your administrators are using proper impact analysis processes to limit disruption.

One excellent way to limit disruption is to use a Business Systems Management tool like Salto. Salto makes it easy to test changes in your Zendesk Sandbox and deploy them to production, to quickly identify errors, and to easily restore the system and reduce the impact of disruptions

8: Monthly uptime percentage

Calculate the percentage of time the Zendesk instance and its integrations were available during a given month. 

9: Mean time between failures (MTBF)‍

Determine the average time between system failures.This metric gives you a good sense of how your changes are deployed. If you are seeing failures each time a change is made, then there is a process problem that needs to be addressed.

10: Mean time to repair (MTTR)

Measure the average time it takes to restore the system to full functionality after a failure. This metric is the best indicator of your admin team’s ability to recognize the problem, analyze the root cause, and get the system back to fully functional.

Specific Project Goals

There are different types of change requests that a Zendesk administrator should be in charge of. 

For example, simple additions of field values or a defect will almost certainly be easier than building a new dashboard or investigating and implementing the best way to solve a complex business problem. Given this, you should also implement project-specific metrics and KPIs. 

11. Project metrics

‍These metrics should be set for larger or longer term change requests — such as a complete overhaul of your ticket forms, which might take weeks or months. What are the goals of the project you’ve asked for? For example, if the goal is to decrease ticket handle time through some automation, you want to set that expectation so the administrator knows where to focus attention. If the goal is to increase self-service, the administrator can find the best solution to make that happen.

Measuring the performance of Zendesk Administrators

Customer-centric businesses must be sure that the tools that support their operations are functioning as efficiently and consistently as possible. The best way to do this is to ensure that there is complete alignment between the people implementing and maintaining those tools and the people requiring those tools throughout the day.

The metrics above are a great way to ensure that Zendesk administrators are accountable, not just for their own roles, but to the benefit of your customers and your support team. They’re responsible for the tools and Integrations that run your business. It’s a mission-critical role. 

Creating clear expectations for your Zendesk administrators and actively monitoring important KPIs is a must-have process for a growing customer service organization.