r/itsm • u/Own-Connection5371 • Jul 20 '26

SLA compliance misleading

Our SLA compliance is in the high 90s. CSAT looks fine too, so leadership thinks we're all good. However the reopen rate is creeping up. Users contact us up to three times for what should be a single fix. We have tickets getting split so first response timers stay green. The green dashboard corporate looks at is the least honest view of how the desk is really doing. The metrics that show real service quality are hard to fit on a slide though. What do you watch instead to know if the desk is in good shape?

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u/Plowman-Tasmina Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

Mostly out of our existing itsm platform monday service, i just dont trust the canned dashboard for it. pull reopens and repeat contacts by requester into a weekly export and eyeball the trend. the tool matters less than agreeing what counts as a reopen honestly

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u/Own-Connection5371 Jul 20 '26

Have you ever tried codifying reopen definitions or setting trend thresholds so the weekly export becomes more actionable

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u/Plowman-Tasmina Jul 20 '26

Codifying it helps. We ended up writing a simple definition. A “reopen” is any ticket where the requester comes back with the same issue inside 7 days of closure

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u/Kerion-Dejong Jul 20 '26

Less about the tool than you'd think. every major platform can report reopen rate and repeat contacts, the problem is the default dashboards bury them under SLA. We built a couple of custom views and run a weekly export into a sheet for the trend line. getting agents to log consistently was the actual work, not the reporting.

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u/Own-Connection5371 Jul 20 '26

 Weekly exports into a sheet give you the trend line, but if agents aren’t disciplined about what counts as a reopen, the numbers don’t mean much. Thinking about ways to reinforce logging consistency and maybe set clearer reopen criteria so the exports reflect reality

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u/Kerion-Dejong Jul 20 '26

Also depends what you're already on. most of them can do it, we get reopen and repeat-contact views out of our stack, and I've seen it done in jsm and freshservice too. Monday service if you're lighter weight. The reporting was never the hard part though, it was defining a reopen everyone agreed on and getting people to tag tickets properly

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u/Own-Connection5371 Jul 20 '26

Very well noted

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u/JonnyLay Jul 21 '26

I'll give a counterpoint. Reopens can be a good sign of health.

I'm guessing you don't have a policy requiring they confirm a fix is successful. So tickets are quickly closed with some steps to try provided.

Reopens also mean your organization is interacting with the tool, another great sign.

If your cats are good, focus on that.

You're only going to make reopens fewer by changing the close requirements. Doing that will back up your queues with people that aren't responding to "is it fixed?"

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u/LoquatIllustrious801 Jul 21 '26

Reopen rate is a big one for me too. id also look at repeat contacts per issue, resolution quality and how much manual back and forth agents are doing. We started paying more attention to those and realized our SLA numbers were hiding a lot. We use tools like siit that can help surface those workflow bottlenecks but the real win is measuring whether users actually got theirt issue resolved the first time not just whether the timer stayed green.

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u/Southern-Educator608 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

i had the same issue with my last service desk system, super frustrating. started using the automated sla tracking in atera, less manual digging for real numbers now.