What modern KPIs would you recommend to measure people and infrastructure performance in Service Desk?
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It should focus on business value indicators like resilience and user experience instead of just looking at quantitative metrics.
Management of service availability in terms of down time and the response time
Modern Service Desk Key Performance Indicators should move beyond ticket counts and focus on flow, experience, and resilience. For people, track First Contact Resolution, reopen rate, quality scores, Customer Effort Score and sentiment, skill utilization, knowledge contribution, and learning velocity to measure effectiveness and sustainability rather than speed alone. For infrastructure, focus on ticket arrival versus resolution rate, Service Level Agreement and Service Level Objective compliance, Mean Time to Restore Service, queue aging, escalation ratio, automation and self-service success, deflection rate, repeat incidents, and backlog health to understand system stability and operational flow. At an executive level, metrics such as cost per resolved ticket, business downtime avoided, and experience-to-cost ratio tell the real story, because a modern Service Desk is not about closing tickets faster, it is about restoring productivity reliably at scale.
From my experience leading a municipal Service Desk in a complex, citizen-facing environment, the most meaningful KPIs have shifted away from raw volume and SLA obsession toward indicators of flow, trust, and resilience. Metrics like First Contact Resolution validated by reopen rates, ticket aging distribution (not averages), user-perceived service availability, and repeat incident rates have proven far more predictive of real performance than traditional dashboards. On the people side, measuring workload balance (WIP per agent), time to competency for new staff, and lightweight agent pulse scores has helped us protect focus and sustainability. On the infrastructure side, incident impact minutes, endpoint health, and change success rates aligned to user impact have allowed us to invest where failures are actually felt. This combination has helped us move the Service Desk from a reactive cost center to a stabilizing force for digital services and organizational trust.
I’d look at KPI's in two parts, People performance and Infrastructure performance.
For people, I think modern service desks should go beyond just ticket counts and focus more on quality and efficiency. For infrastructure, KPI's should reflect stability, responsiveness, and impact on users.